StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Eva would egg hatched you into this world where were you before you well I was born in South Africa wouldn't South Africa and you come to America and make a billion dollars yeah I mean I didn't expect it would make a billion dollars I suppose I grew up in South Africa honestly seeing a lot of the same TV and movies and reading comic books and and it really didn't feel all that different from say Southern California honestly so you had a kind of baptism into American pop culture at the time yeah yeah you know a lot of have ogres and when steakhouses and read like every comic book you know so my father brought me on a trip to the United States when I was about 10 I remember it was really awesome experience because the hotels all had arcades so my number

one thing was when we went to new hotel the motel or whatever it is go to the arcades and so that they have got any other services for that whether they had bedbugs you're looking for arcade games yeah what did video games do for you and that they're incredibly engaging and they maybe want to learn how to program computers cuz then I thought well I could make my own games and then I could also I want to see how the games work like how did you create a video game that's what led me to learn how to program computers to be a programmer yeah so I had one of the first video game consoles didn't have any have cartridges you had like four games that you could play and you could like pick one one of the four games you could play that was it and then it went from

there to the original Atari and then in television and then I was in a store and saw at the Commodore vic-20 and I was like holy crow you can actually have a computer and make your own games I thought this was just one of the most incredible things possible took all of my saved allowance and and then hounded my father until we got the Commodore vic-20 and there came with this manual on how to program in basic search I spent all night over days in a row just observing that and on your own no one forced you know this is self-motivated I got to know this this is good for me I'm spend like nine nine or ten or something so your performance in basic at age nine or ten yeah I kind of went got OCD on the thing maybe so technically OCD is but still II get obsessive

let me put that at least the o clock so programming anything else you get to control something construct a little universe and when you first do it you're like this is incredible you can actually make things happen like you type these commands and then something happens on the screen that's pretty amazing when I was in college I saw one of the things that are most going to affect the future of humanity and the electric cars solar power essentially sustainable most people thinking I just want a job when I get out and you're trying to reshape humanity as an undergraduate I mean it's pretty in America it's pretty easy to keep yourself a lot so I mean my threshold for existing is pretty low I mean I figured I could like be in some dingy apartment with my

computer and be okay and not stalled mm-hmm in fact when I first came to North America I was in Canada when I seventeen and just to sort of see what it takes to live I'd try to live on one dollar a day which was it do you still just buy food in bulk at this yeah rice and beans and yeah I would go for the hot dogs okay my dogs and oranges you get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after a while and we closely like you know pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce and that can go pretty far too so it's like okay you know if I can live for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint well it's pretty easy to earn like thirty dollars in a month you know yeah thing so probably be okay okay so that allowed you to not have to worry about

money because you did the experiment did the experiment exactly so this was an important psychological philosophical anchor for you let me put words in your mouth but that's a starting point to launch anywhere you want to go yeah absolutely and so so now you've got a baseline a life baseline from which to go new places intellectually psychologically financially so what came first thoughts of an electric car or thoughts of space hmm you know when you're starting out in college like can you push men sophomore year like you've these sort of sophomoric philosophical wanderings and I try to think of okay what are the things that it will seem to me would most affect the future of humanity there were really five things three of which I thought would be interesting

to be involved in the three that I thought were were definitely positive would be the Internet sustainable energy both production and consumption and space exploration more specifically the extension of life beyond Earth on a permanent basis and then although I never thought I'd actually be involved in that that's that was way something I thought that was important in the abstract but not something I thought I would ever have an opportunity to be involved in and then the fourth one was artificial intelligence and the first one was rewriting human genetics these were just the five things that I thought would most effective future of humanity when I started out my goal was to do a phone traffic mission with the intent of increasing NASA's budget that was

my goal I was confused as to why I would not yet sent a person to Mars it seemed like this was obviously the goal after the moon and we'd not made progress on that and when it began clearly that paper was gonna get sold after I might ask me what I'm gonna do next and I said well I mean I don't know what we do next but I'm always curious about what's going on with space and why every made progress I just wonder when we're gonna send a person to Mars so I wouldn't go in on the NASA website and I couldn't find a date I was like well maybe it's here somewhere and I just can't find it the date that NASA wants to land on Mars yeah this is gonna be like some schedule or something and we're looking over the game plan or it's the state even if it's far in the

future and there was not to be found anywhere and anyways I started learning about that back history and I thought well okay maybe there's something that I can do to send a small mission to the surface of Mars that would get the public excited and as a result of that public excitement NASA's budget will be increased and we could resume process of sending people to Mars essentially so you thought you can do that with your lousy billion dollars no I didn't have a billion dollars at that time I had about a 180 million slot and and I figured well you know maybe I could spend half of that on a mission to Mars so it's been ever try investigating the space industry and provincially decided on this idea of sending a small greenhouse surface of Mars we were called

the Mars Oasis mission and so you have seeds in dehydrated jello would land your hydrate jump on landing and you have this great shot of green plant so on a red background and the public responds to questions and supporters so this would be the first life on another planet furthest that life's ever traveled George we know and that's how you get a headline yes exactly it's very something new or something superlative mmm-hmm and I thought well and that would maybe reinvigorate excitement and the result would be NASA's budget gets increased so the whole goal in the beginning was just how do we get more money for NASA but after staying up every time on this I came in conclusion that I was actually incorrect my initial assumption is wrong because I thought

that where there's a will there's a way and that we just sort of lost our will that was that's false but there's plenty of will people needed to believe that there was a way in a way that would not bankrupt the country or mean that they'd have to sacrifice something of critical importance like health care so it became clear that the space transport problem had to be solved unless there was dramatic improvement in the cost of space transport then none of it would matter so in your first successful launch what was the cost per pound to orbit about 6,000 dollars 6,000 yeah not $100 a panel no she gets $100 pound you need a big rocket that's fully reusable are you there yet no we're making progress though spend 12 years so far we've not recovered a stage

but I think we'll recover a stage within the next year and be able to refight is there a date on your website the where someone can say oh he's gonna land vishay a good point it's not like an oh well I mean I've said it publicly many times although maybe we should put something on the website which is that I think we've got a decent shot of being able to send a person to Mars in about 11 or 12 years from a terrestrial standpoint the biggest problem we need to solve it at the century is sustainable production and consumption of energy this really is quite a serious problem people really should take this quite seriously even if you put the environmental consequences of dramatically changing the chemical composition of the oceans and atmosphere aside we

will eventually run out of oil only that's not well if we don't find a solution to burning oil or transport and we then run out of oil the economy will collapse and civilizations will come tune it over as we know it with or without global one yeah we still that work exactly I mean and so if we know that we have to ultimately get off oil no matter what we know that that is an inescapable outcome it's simply a question of when not if then why would you run this crazy experiment of changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere oceans by adding enormous amounts of co2 that have been buried since the Precambrian era that's crazy that is the dumbest experiment in history by far but I promise it's not even I think of a dumber experiment I honestly cannot

what good could possibly come of it so therefore we need another solution here but of course electric cars still uses coal that's why you need sustainable power production like solar and wind which can still charge your your car yes of course what we all really want are flying cars do you yeah actually let me ask so are you sure you want applying car no but it was a wall this look cool I mean you know whenever you see sort of cities in like some futuristic concept those throughout the flying car in there and you can't tell me you never thought of it no I put a lot about yeah yeah okay and there's some people I know that are working on flying cars or flying coastal transport devices if you hover boards don't have a voice but I mean I sort of wonder to

the interview you can show me your hover board room okay I won't tell anybody the microphone is on mute now okay you can just between and just with me knows I'm debating like should every fly cars for shooting to be flying cause I'm of two minds on that you know because if there are flying cars then well obviously you have added this additional dimension our car could potentially fall in your head and will be susceptible to weather and of course you'd have to have flying car where it would be like an autopilot because I mean otherwise forget it you want people navigating yes that's why it's got to go to pilot mm-hmm but even in order paths marry this and even if you've got redundant murders and blades you're still gone from near zero chance of something

falling on your head to something greater than that and there's also a noise challenge so I see we don't know how to fly quietly right ok so I'll wait it out someone something that I do think would definitely help a lot in cities is more tunnels essentially with flying cars from that going 3d and there's a fundamental flaw with cities where you've got dense office buildings and apartment buildings and duplexes and they were operating on three dimensions but then you go to the street and suddenly you're two dimensional because it's a flight as a surface yeah this is how the New York City solve this with the subway go right underneath multiple layers of subway right so we are actually traveling in three dimensions but below the ground rather than in the

air but I think if you were to extrapolate that to cars and have more car tunnels then you would alleviate congestion completely and you wouldn't need the flying car you would not need a flying car in that case and it would always work even if the weather's bad and would never ice up and we're never ice up and we're no fall on your head so we're gonna get started on that right away I mean I'm quite worried about artificial superintelligence these days I think and I've said this publicly I think it's maybe something more dangerous than nuclear weapons so we should be really careful about that if there was a very deep super digital super intelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non logarithmic way then you know

that was its software yes so like it just could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers well then that's all she wrote that's all she wrote I mean we won't be like you're Pat Labrador if you're lucky I'll elaborate over I knew their pets it's like the friendliest creature no no they'll domesticate us yeah we will be exactly lap pets to them yes I mean or something strange is gonna happen they'll keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones and they read the docile humans yeah I mean the utility function of the digital super intelligence is of stupendous important this what does it try to optimize and we need to be really careful with saying oh oh how about human happiness because

it you know made conclude that all unhappy humans should be terminated and you know that we should always just be captured and with dopamine and serotonin directly injected into our brains to maximize happiness happiness because it's concluded that dopamine and serotonin are what cause happiness therefore therefore maximize them I'm just saying I'm saying we should exercise caution I'm quite optimistic about the future I mean I don't think we're about to enter a dark age it could happen but it's not I think not likely anytime soon enough where you get to Mars hopefully not before gets Mars but bear in mind that part of the act of trying to get to Mars is a force to keep us out of the dark ages I mean this always a chance that something calamitous could

happen to us either natural man-made catastrophe suddenly we see that in the fossil record and we've invented all sorts of ways of doing ourselves in that the dinosaurs didn't have and we haven't managed to stall off the asteroid problem so therefore our risk is higher okay sure people realize this if you haven't solved the problems that of course the prior extinctions and you've added new ones you've not improved the situation and that's sort of where we are right now and any other people better some really smart people that are a lot more pessimistic than I am like you know the Stephen Hawking's of the world and Martin Rees the Royal astronomer they're all quite pessimistic I'm a naturally optimistic person but I do think that there's value in establishing

life insurance which if life as we know does on more than one planet then the light of consciousness as we know it is likely preserved into the future for much longer