Tar talk on television. Neil we think it is the First Time Ever of there being a science talk show on television. We didnt do it for that purpose, but it turned out that way. Charlie what i like in reading about it is that they came to you wanting to do a television show. And you said why dont you just bring in your cameras into my radio show . Neil i said, keep it simple, i dont want to do anymore. But there was budgeting to address. Part of it is that we filmed in the hall of the universe. Charlie cant get as better face cant get a better space than that. Charlie i got to announce that. [deep bravado voice] from the hall of the universe. Charlie you have come to the deep halls. [laughter] neil but it is still structured the same. We have a comedian. I have a guest. Charlie that would be you. [laughter] neil i have been to think the universe is completely hilarious, but we have someone who thinks that way professionally. There is a main guest who is quickly coming from pop culture. That is the real difference. Many of the guests are the same ones you would see on the late talk show circuits. Im asking them different questions. Im asking them about their nerd hood and their science teachers that they liked or hated. I found out how science and technology has impacted their livelihood. Charlie you are not looking for from pop culture who like science, but just people who simply neil it matters that you have heard of them. Then you take an interest in them from the beginning. Then you learn these extra things about them. Like i said, do they have a nerd underbelly . That might not reveal itself on anybody elses forum charlie how do you find a nerd underbelly . Neil if they want to break into a fight about which captain they prefer in star trek. [laughter] or did han solo shoot first . There are these nerd questions from from the nerdiverse. I think there are many people with hidden interests or maybe there is an ember that needs to be fanned and ignite. And then you will see and feel and hear all of the interest they express in the sciences. Charlie is it the fact that people are simply curious about things they do not know about and curious about the future . Neil every one of us is a person was deeply curious about our environment as children. Scientists tend to not ever lose that. They stay curious their whole lives. I think other people get it beaten out of them, one out of them, so i am in search of that soul of curiosity that continues to lurk in all adults. Charlie what happened . Do we tamp it down . Neil what happens if you are in a class and you say, what is that . Let me go to the window [stern teacher voice] sit down. Do your lesson. Charlie to me talk rather than engage. Neil exactly. Our School System tends to be reward people who obey and do what they are told. People who hand things in on time. Those are the the honors students. The best students, as we have come to define them. The student that is distracted by the butterfly that could be the next great naturalist but doesnt get rewarded in school because you should be studying for this curriculum that we have established for you. I think we should do it all, but dont suppress. Yes, you need a curriculum yes, you need exams. But if you see energy in a student being expressed by questioning their environment, that should be nurtured and not somehow declared as out of line. Charlie was that you as a kid . Neil yes. [laughter] no, i think teachers had energy in the classroom. It was a 6th grade teacher noticed that i had all this social energy bordering on disruptive. I have an interest the universe. All of my reports were on what the moon was like and the Space Program. Charlie even then. Neil starting at age nine, but it did not really gel until age around the sixth grade. The teacher noted for me that the local planetarium, hayden planetarium, had lessons on the universe. I started taking these classes after hours. That can get you tired. Going to school after another thing, it has to down. But now i had a whole new uris to devote my energies to. Charlie when did you know that what you wanted to be an astrophysicist . Neil when i was nine years old, the vista to the hayden planetarium. That put something in my veins. I still think it was the universe who called me and not i who called it. And of course, growing up in the bronx, there arent many stars visible anywhere in new york, especially in the bronx at the time. The sky in the planetarium was magical to me. I did not even think it was real. I thought it was a hoax. I have seen the sky from the bronx. And this is not it, therefore it must a hoax, not of course knowing that he was portraying the real sky. By age 11, i had the real answer. I had the answer to that annoying question adults asked children what do you want to be when you grow up . Charlie injuries or was . And your answer was . Neil astrophysicist. That ended conversations pretty quickly. But i was on a mission ever sent. Charlie you have said before when we go outside, we dont look up too many of us dont do that. Neil i did that even back when it was dangerous to do that. Prepooper scooper laws, you had to look down every few seconds. [laughter] i would risk the incident just for looking up. Any time especially at night , but also in the daytime. I will look up and want to know what the moon is doing. Charlie can we see it . Neil oh yeah. It is harder to see it. The sun is just so dominant that the moon does not call as much attention to itself as it does during the night. I check for when the plaintiffs are coming up. The planets are coming up. The most beautiful time of the night photographically speaking is the curtain of twilight colors. The moon becomes more apparent. The first stars you see are generally not stars, they are planets because they are brighter. When you make a wish on a star, star light, star bright, first star i see tonight, your wishes do not come true because you are wishing on a planet. [laughter] charlie you were off course from the beginning. Neil right now from the season diniz is quite striking venus is quite striking over the skies. When viewed from new york city it is kind of over new jersey. You would confuse it with planes coming in and out of newark airport. If your western horizon is near an airport, you have surely seen venus and thought it was an airplane. Charlie have you ever wanted to write a Science Fiction novel . Neil yes, however but i dont have the talent at writing. I wish that i did. Charlie would you have a story . Neil i got a story. [laughter] its ready to go. I could advise on such a good story. In terms of Character Development and emotions, i dont have the experience. Certainly not writing it. Charlie but you know a story that would be compelling. Neil i have one in mind right now. Im happy to tell it. Charlie ok, tell me. Neil world is at war, ok . Charlie the world that we know. Neil yes, and in some very disruptive way. Not with art weapons, but with regional battles everywhere, and people are choosing sides. And then an asteroid is discovered. Charlie tell us what an asteroid is. Neil a chunk of rock that varies in sizes. There are tens of thousands of them, probably hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them are located mars and jupiter. Some of them cross the orbit of the earth. Thousands of them. You do the math. You learn that earth and these asteroids will collide with one another guaranteed eventually. So what we want to do is keep track of all of the earth crossing objects and monitor them. Ideally, you want to put a low jack on something, it is 10 00 p. M. , do you know where your killer asteroid is . We learn there is an asteroid that could render us extinct. At that moment, everyone comes together and sees that asteroid as the common enemy. The technology that has been developed all around the world it is the future developing countries are now technology enabled. They have been developing their technology to fight wars. They had to assemble pieces of all of these technologies. Charlie they develop a common front. Neil not only a common front, but we need different pieces of technology for the deflection device to be put together. Then we all sing kumbaya. [laughter] charlie you could make this so real. Neil oh yeah, the heads of state come into play. The conflicts not only within countries, but looking what between countries. Run with that. Charlie go back to the sides. This is real. You could make this as a real possibility. Charlie theneil science would be in identifying it, the tools you would use to engage the flexion if something doesnt exist, you , could invent something that would work. You find out that i have a piece of this, but i have to go to my enemy who invented some other piece to make the whole thing work. It could be quite dramatic. Maybe we have a piece of asteroid that hits the earth. You have to flood a city or something otherwise hollywood doesnt like it. You have to destroy something. [laughter] i remember armageddon. They managed to hit the earth, and some its your. Some bids hit the. But it had good aim. They were aiming. It will most likely hit the ocean. Like i said, you can still get to destroy a city with a tsunami. Charlie a big one came to earth . Neil two years ago in russia. There was one the size of this studio traveling 40,000 Miles Per Hour that collided with earths atmosphere. They landed in the ural mountains. Charlie what wouldve happened if it hit the center of Manhattan Island . Neil that happened to explode about 20 miles up. 2025 miles up. That is high enough so that energy gets deposited into the atmosphere and dilutes before it reaches earths surface. But even so that was enough of a , shockwave to shatter every single window in the city. While people were looking out of the window you wonder what the light was that they had seen. Light travels faster than sound. They see this bright light from the explosion, looking out the window, then the stock comes stock wave comes. Lacerated hands and skin. 1600 people were injured. That was a shot against our about. A shot against our bow. The universe telling us, asking us [laughter] if that happened over manhattan, manhattan would have a different problem. Shattered Windows Windows would fall. They become these sharp sabres descending to the student, possibly hurting or killing pedestrian. Descending to the street. Charlie do you think the United States has done a lot with the lessons that happened there . Neil that asteroid we did not realize he was coming until it was too late. You may have certain evacuation times, but that one is not large enough to catch it. Charlie and if it is far enough away, we shoot it down . Neil no, that is the macho man. Shoot blow the sucker out of the sky i think there was a movie about that. The kinder, gentler ways to reflect it nothing has been built or funded to make this happen. One way to do it is to take your spaceship. If i can borrow your outliner. Bring your spaceship nearby. Just park it there. They will see one another, and wants to drift towards one another because of their mutual gravity. But you dont let that happen. You fire retro rockets and the act of doing so slowly tugs the asteroid out of harms way. You dont have to destroy it. Just make sure that on its route, it will not hit anyone. If you get good at this it is like shooting pool cues. Just knock them out of the way. Charlie that is one of the theories. Neil that is one way to do it. You could monitor your progress. If you just go and blow the thing out of the sky. In america, we are good at blowing stuff up and less good of knowing of where the pieces will go when we are done. It is very messy to try to explode the asteroid. What you dont know will it break into two pieces . Now you have to evacuate both coasts . It is a challenge. By the way, works on paper. Engineers have worked this out. But there is no plan in place, there is no International Collaboration in place to fund this. Suppose it is heading for the indian ocean. Do you tell all of the indian ocean countries, you have to defend themselves . We have the most advanced Space Program at the time, so should we pay for it . Tax everyone . The way the membership at the u. N. Is taxed . Do you handle that money to the most evil country that can deflected . The most able country that can deflect it . Lets say it is heading for the u. S. And we deflect it and the deflection fails and now it will hit europe. Now what do you do . All of these problems. Charlie we could put this in the movie, too. Neil yeah, exactly. [laughter] youre still thinking hollywood. Charlie what are the most important Unanswered Questions for you . Neil that is a great question and i have an unorthodox answer. It will sound like a copout, but it is not. I really feel this and think this. For me, the greatest Unanswered Questions are those questions we dont even yet know to ask. Because they only manifest upon reaching some next frontier of ignorance. I want to know what dark matter is. It is 85 of the gravity of the universe. We have no idea what is causing. We do not even have the right to call it dark matter. We are on it. We have top people working on it with top equipment. But at this moment, we do not know what it is. Charlie what is the most likely answer . Neil i dont i have a preferred answer. Particle physicists want to say it is a particle because they are particle physicists. [laughter] higgs boson is a very powerful particle. If you want to be a particle that is the one he wants to be. [laughter] there is dark energy. The universe is accelerating and expanding against the wish of gravity. We dont know what is causing that. We dont know how you went from organic molecules to animated life. That is a transition that is on the frontier. Charlie say that again . Neil how do you go from organic molecules to selfreplicating life based on those organic molecules . We are not there yet. Charlie we dont know that either. Neil no and we dont know what happened before the big bang. These are great questions. We have top people working on it. [laughter] i will put you on the speed dial if you want to know the latest. Charlie dark matter. Neil we dont know. We should call it dark gravity. Dark energy we dont know what it is. What was before the big bang . How did life get here . Charlie and the big bang . What was it . Neil the universe. Duh. [laughter] if you turn the clock back, it was smaller and hotter. For each day that you turn the clock back. Run the clock all the way back, you learned that universe was in the same place at the same time. And that extremely high temperatures. Trillion is the highest number anyone has any comfort with, but the temperature was much hotter than that. When you have these temperatures the thing is unstable and explodes. You have the birth of the universe. We dont know what was around before the. Before that. Neil i would order it that way. I am an astrophysicist i care , about the dna. I know we have life, and we havent. We have that. All of those are very real questions that exist with us today. The answers to those, you start dishing out nobel prizes. Charlie you can answer those. You are on this page you can enter those. Neil i want to know what questions we are not intellectually mature enough to ask yet. They will reveal themselves after we answer these questions. Charlie has a new question has revealed itself in the last 15 years . Neil yeah. Dark energy was discovered in 1998, 17 years ago, but still a big mystery. Charlie who discovered it . Neil two teams. They were studying a supernova. A particular species of supernova is like a standard candle. They are like a yardstick in measuring time and distance in the universe. They are very potent in your ability to measure the expansion rate of the universe and the size of the universe. Two teams, one in california, one on the east coast, where working on the same problem and arrived at the same answer and shared the nobel prize for that. Charlie this is a simple question. I assume it is the most frequently asked question are we alone . Neil the people i sit next to on an airplane, once they learned what i do, astrophysicist that is what they want to know. Charlie how do they get to the question . Neil i think some people still look up. You cannot help but wonder. All these stars. We know enough to know that there are stars just like the sun and planets orbiting the stars. If they are planets, how could you now wonder if there is life . And it there is like, is it intelligent life, are they smarter than us . If they are smarter than us should we be scared of them . Charlie what is your best guess . My best guess is the universe is teeming with life. Charlie why is that . Neil here is the argument you have the timeline of the earth. 4. 5 billion years. What this planet out there. Some planets were born yesterday. You dont know when in the timeline. Here is earth. Throw a dart at the timeline. Most of the time the dart hits earth, there is only single celled life. Charlie wow. Single celled life is like an amoeba . Charlie yeahneil yeah single self like earth for 300 billion years. That we have an explosion of life. The chemistry of the atmosphere changed. Oxygen is like rocket fuel for complex life. Now life has Carte Blanche to become complex. The system could support it. Now you have limbs and detectors like eyes and sensors. It is a stunning development. Then you have complex life. That is a smaller piece of the total timeline. Where will you find intelligent life . We only know this little bit that we define as intelligent. If earth is any measure of anything, there are planets we could land on. Who is to say we will find what we call intelligent . Maybe the planet has conditions that are specially right for complex life. If they did, they would have billions of years to develop intelligent life. If that is the case, it is quite clear to me that if they are observed us and landed here and looked, it would be clear to them that there is no sign of intelligent life on earth. [laughter] charlie they would land and look around. Neil nope. Not what were looking for. We wont mate with these people. [laughter] charlie they may be people, but they are not intelligent. [laughter] charlie what is on mars . Neil the curiosity rover is the size of an suv. Charlie is it still projecting . Neil yeah. Charlie what is up there . Water . Neil the martian surface has rampant evidence of Running Water at one time. When i mean by evidence, i mean really awesome evidence. There are riverbeds, dry, meandering river that. Riverbeds. When you look at things that floodwaters have done and longtime rivers have done and the grand canyon kinds of things, you see these features on mars. Charlie when do we see them . Neil anytime you take a photograph of a surface. Charlie we could have known that without going there . Neil no, the resolution is very hard to pick up. You want to get close. Then you could