Continued from PART ONE:
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an expert at breaking down astrophysics for the average person. As the host of National Geographic Channel’s “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” he gives viewers a vision of what our future among the stars could look like. Geoengineering Mars? Mining asteroids? What possible worlds would we be talking about in 2060? Dr. Tyson took time out to chat with curious journalists and the discussions took us on a galactic journey.
If you’re not watching “Cosmos,” here is what you’re missing.
Lauren Barack: Dr. Tyson, I wanted to ask you, you said this is in effect the third season of “Cosmos”. I’m going to ask you if, in fact, the fourth season takes another 40 years to come forward.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’ll be 100 and whatever years old.
Lauren Barack: You had suggested to the next scientist or the next storyteller. What kind of stories, 40 years from now, could you imagine would be told? What possible worlds would we be talking about in 2060?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so I’d like to think…and I’m just making this up now, but in 2060, see, we can’t just keep growing the population of the earth, without either becoming a multi-planet species or stopping…let me start that again. There’re two things going on. The population is growing, because of the babies that are being formed, but also because we’re living longer. These are two forces in the rate equations. There’s, how many new humans are arriving? How many old humans are leaving?
If we discovered the gene for aging, whatever that involves, and then we can live not only to 100 or 150 but to 200, that and with a quality of life that you’d want to have, that would be devastating to earth resources, unless we stopped having babies.
It would just be devastating if no one would die. The population would start growing more exponentially than it has already. We need solutions to that. In 40 years, if there’s the fourth one when that arrives, I’m expecting that we would become a multi-planet species. I’m expecting that to do that, we’re not living in a habitat module on Mars, no. That we have perfected geoengineering, terraformed Mars and turned Mars into Earth. There are people who want to do that as plan B. Earth 2.0, in case we trash Earth and Earth becomes unlivable, through climate change or whatever else.
My reply to that is, if we have the power of geoengineering, to turn Mars into Earth, then, of course, we have the power of geoengineering to turn Earth back into Earth. There’s not going to be, “Let’s all go to this other new haven that we just made.” No, we’ll have two havens, Earth and Mars. Then we’d have to find ways to mine asteroids for their natural resources, because the planets on which you live, will not be the only places you will need to obtain them. I have said many times, I think the first trillionaire in the world will be the first person to exploit the resources of asteroids.
I can imagine a “Cosmos” in 2060, that is all about stuff we’re doing on the planets and moons in the solar system. Then imagining travel to other star systems, possibly populating those as well, with real thoughts about turning the galaxy into a backyard for humans. That’s what I can imagine.
By the way, there’ll be advances in engineering, biology, chemistry, physics that we can reach towards, to solve emergent problems. I foresee that. I foresee virus-resistant variants on what we are as humans. Just complete virus…virally resistant. Why not? I can see…what else? I’m not a sci-fi guy. I mean, I love sci-fi, but I don’t have that creativity.
Just imagine problems that confront us today. For example, go back 100 years ago, I did this on Colbert. Colbert asked me, what problems do I foresee in the next century? My answer to him was, “The biggest problems I foresee are the ones we don’t even know yet are problems. That’s what I foresee.” Why do I say that? The problems we list today were undreamt of 100 years ago. You go back to the year 1900, what’s everybody worried about? “Oh, we’ll run out of food for the growing population.” Not knowing that science will multiply the productivity of farming by factors of 10.
No one saw that coming, and nor is it talked about much, because people don’t want to hear the word science attached to their food supplies. That’s why we’re feeding 7 billion people today. Anyone starving is not starving because there is a shortage of food.
They’re starving because politics prevents the distribution of food and whatever cultural inequities prevent that. It’s not because the world doesn’t have enough food. What else was happening 100 years ago? People were afraid of tuberculosis. Oh my gosh, and other things, polio.
That’s what people were preoccupied with. Now, those are solved problems. Going forward, I wonder what problems we have yet to discover, that create existential risks for us. That’s what that “Cosmos” will be about.
Sajida Ayyup: Yeah, so my question is, did you make any suggestions for the show and did any of them get incorporated? I know you’re very humorous, and there must have something happened on the set which just blew your mind and you thought, “That should be in the show.” Did you have any behind the scenes?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, any suggestions I had, happened before I’m on set. They happen at the point where I’m reviewing the scripts, and there is an interesting scene that had to be completely changed, because I found an error in a calculation and an assumption that was made for that scene. There were others as well, but this one is particularly interesting, that I’ll share with you.
In fact, it was episode one actually, which has already aired here in the United States last week. The Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, has a liquid ocean beneath an icy surface. Energy is pumped into Enceladus, from the gravitational stresses of its orbit around Saturn. That’s why it’s a liquid ocean. Otherwise, it’s so far away from the sun.
The whole moon would be completely frozen, were it not for this source of energy. Well, there’re cracks in the surface of Enceladus, and there’re pressures that build up from that heat. The water can spew forth. The best example we have for this are geysers. It spews forth. It spews forth in an atomized way, in much what happens on a ski slope where they’re artificially generating snow. Once it springs forth, the water droplets crystallize and make snowflakes. Then they fall back down.
Ann was intrigued by the fact that Enceladus, which has very low gravity, it’s just a moon, that you might have these snowflakes just descending really slowly. That would make an interesting visual effect. There is an entire section of that episode that is sort of basking in the other worldliness of this phenomenon.
This is where I come in as sort of the last gate. I looked at the script, I looked at the scene descriptions. I looked at what the visual effects people were going to be handed, and I said, “This doesn’t sound right.” I ran some calculations, and so here was the problem. The problem is, snowflakes on earth fall slowly.
They’re not meteors coming down, they fall slowly because they’re moving through the air. The air creates this huge resistance. If you calculate how fast snowflakes would be falling on Enceladus, that you just dropped, they wouldn’t be falling much slower than the snowflakes on earth.
You can’t just create this whole phenomenon, and then declare that it’s going to feel otherworldly compared to earth. Worse than that, it turns out, because there’s no air, I don’t know how much physics you remember from high school or from college if you ever took physics…
Sajida Ayyup: Yeah, I’m an engineer.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Okay, if there is no air resistance, then the snowflake will hit the ground at the same speed that the water spewed upwards, that came out of the geyser, so that in fact if it comes out of the geyser at 100 miles an hour, the snowflake is going to fall past you at 100 miles an hour coming down. It’s just a projectile that’s symmetric with what went up.
That’s yet another layer of calculation, to show that you can’t show the scene in the way that had been imagined. A whole visual effects’ scene got removed. Or rather it hadn’t been made yet, but the instructions were there to create the scene and it got recast. Just to talk about these jets going up and down, without basking in what would have been a really beautiful otherworldly scene. The physics wouldn’t allow the scene, as it was originally conceived. That’s an example of something that happened very late.
That happened like a day, two days before we were going to film and utter the words of the slow-moving snowflakes. Now, just so you know all the elements of this, there are scenes that we would film and would later dig up more results, or find out that the science had shifted since the scene was filmed.
The way you fix that, you don’t rehire everybody and go into set, no. You do a handoff from what I said to the camera, to what I would then say in narration. Then you change the scene that I narrate, and graft that onto the parts that were done to the camera that remains intact. That happened seamlessly. You would never know how often that happened, watching the final product.
Sajida Ayyup: Nice.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That’s the aspects of this and how that unfolds. Another thing is, I had shared with Ann the fact that I… because I’m old enough to have done this and remember it, I attended the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Sajida Ayyup: Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I was a young kid, but I remember it. I remember it. Carl Sagan was about the same age as I was when he visited the 1939 World’s Fair. This is information handed to Ann, who then says, “Let’s ride this World’s Fair theme.” The entire 13th episode, which is my personal favorite, is an imagined World’s Fair from the year 2039. Capturing the mood and the future thinking, and the hopefulness that World’s Fairs tend to bring upon the world. My visit to the World’s Fair is re-told, and we have actors playing me as a six-year-old kid. Someone playing my mother and my father, and my brother and my sister in a stroller. There’s like crackly footage re-enacted of them walking through the fairgrounds of the World’s Fair.
Sonia Epstein: Yeah, I think that this is represented in the show and also in the range of answers you’ve had to the question. Which is just sort of an obvious thing that “Cosmos” is not only about space, but it’s also about the earth. I am just wondering how you…maybe less from a screenwriting or storytelling perspective, but more related to maybe the mission of the show, think about that balance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so considering that as an astrophysicist, to me, the earth is not a place where you live, where I live. Of course, it is that, but that’s not how I think about it. I think about it as a planet. One of eight…get over it, eight planets. Pluto is not coming back, just to let you know. Eight planets in the solar system. Our sun, you think of it as something that warms your day. I think of it as just 1 of 100 billion suns in the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. People who look up at the night sky, see the Milky Way streak across the dome. I look at the Milky Way as 1 of 100 billion galaxies.
Only with that outlook, do you arrive at cosmic perspectives on things. A cosmic perspective, a subset of which astronauts have called the overview effect, is something that is not unique to the astrophysical sciences. You can also get a cosmic perspective from chemistry, upon learning that the chemistry of molecules on earth repeats on other planets.
When we look at the spectrum of other places in the galaxy, or other planets in our own solar system and other star systems in the galaxy, you see the same chemical signatures that are there. It’s like, “Whoa. Whoa. What’s going on here is not unique.” Then you look at biology and you find out that we’re made of the most common elements in the universe. Whatever happened here on earth, earth managed to be rather expeditious about it. Is that the right word? What happens when you take advantage of something? What’s the word I’m looking for there? Earth was highly exploitive of the ingredients it had available to it, to go from organic molecules to self-replicating life.
Earth is there, not only to step away from it and then come back to view it in a whole other way, this is what happened when we went to the moon. We go to the moon to explore the moon, and you look back. We actually discovered earth for the first time. Then you go back to earth and you have a whole completely different outlook. I think that’s what “Cosmos” does best.
Yes, earth is front and center, but not until after we have stepped off of the earth and then come back. Now you look at it afresh, and now we can deliver the messages and the principles on which becoming a better citizen would be based.
Keep track of “Cosmos” on social media.
Dive deep into the first episode of the season with our review of “Cosmos: Possible Worlds: Ladders to the Stars.”
Written by Colleen Bement
