Why the Universe Should Make You Feel Bigger, Not Smaller | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. It is so easy to get so caught up in the details and frustrations and resentments of daily life that you miss the big picture. In fact, maybe you miss your whole life. What I love or one of the things I love about my guest today is that he is relentlessly focused on the big picture, the galactic picture and beyond. My guest is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist and the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He's also the host of his own podcast, which is called Star Talk. He's also the author of many, many books. His latest book is called Lost in Space, 5,000 Facts to Navigate the Universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. Why is this only 10% happier? Why not 20%? We're going to haggle over math. Yes, if you're going to metricize something in the title of your podcast, I'm just thinking, why stop at 10? You want to know the story? Please. Okay. When I first got interested in mental health and things like that, I took a brief but disturbing detour into the self-help world, which is filled with people who will tell you that they can solve all of your problems through many modalities, including things like manifestation and the power of positive thinking. So I wrote a book and then used that title on this podcast with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek goal of counter-programming against reckless over-promise. Got it. So you're under-promising and over-delivering. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I can't guarantee the over-delivering. It's kind of on you today, though. Well, I count myself among the ranks of happy people in the world. So how are you defining happy? Things that bring me joy and comfort and delight. Things that I want to happen again. Generally, if you like something, you want to do it more than once. And there are a few things you can like and only do once, like bungee jumping. There might be some things that are singularly dangerous, but thrilling. You can say, okay, I don't need to do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. I think people's lives should have some of that in it as well. But I would just say overall, I'm a pretty happy person. Do you think that is connected to your work? It's almost too easy to say yes to that, but I guess I'm going to say yes. It's, here's how I've thought about it. Here's how I've unpacked that. I've known what I wanted to do as a grownup since I was nine. And what that meant was my whole life, I was able to align decisions, actions, places to visit, people to meet, greet. Also, of course, with the help of my parents that aligned with that goal of being an astrophysicist. So when I was nine, I didn't know you could be an astrophysicist. I just knew I felt good looking up in the universe, getting lost in its immensity. And by the time I was 11, I had the answer to that annoying question that adults always ask kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? And when I got to college and realized that half of everyone in college didn't know what they wanted to be when they grew up, I said, wow, maybe what happened to me was unusual. And I knew how much joy and happiness just sitting in front of a telescope brought me, and I concluded from this, that if everyone did what they loved, the world would be such a happier place. And, or did what they were best at and were paid for that. Imagine. And so when tasks come my way of any kind, opportunities, let's call them that. And if I know someone else can do it, there's no reason for me to do it. I would rather do something that I know my combination of talents and interest would contribute uniquely to it. So then the next level is everyone's doing what they love. Now everyone is doing what no one else can do in this world. Oh my gosh. Civilization will be transformed overnight. Do you think there is something happiness producing about doing what you love in your case? Or do you, I mean, this, I don't want to create a false choice here, but Oh, I won't let you create a false choice. You're, you're already policing my percentages. So I'm prepared to be commenting on your percentages. All right. Well, this is, this was my question. Is it that you're doing what you love, which I don't have any doubt is a source of happiness. But is there also something specifically happiness inducing about what it is you love to do? You said right at the jump. Uh, there's something about gazing up into the, uh, being lost in the immensity of space. Yes. And one thing that's a bit of a loss, you didn't ask this, but I'm old enough to have been of a generation where you took trains, planes, and automobiles to get to the tops of mountains to where the telescopes are. Then you would spend a day acclimating to living nocturnally. Then you'd start your observing run. And you were there with a telescope. It has a interesting echo inside the dome when the telescope moves, you know, you hear it, the gear is going and it's a little echo and then the echo subsides. And it's so quiet outside. There's not, you can hear the crunch of the, the gravel, but he's your feet. You can almost hear your heartbeat. You gaze up and it's just you, your telescope and the universe. That's a certain, dare I call it a romance that one has with the sky. There's a certain fulfillment to that, especially coming after the long trip to get there, like a pilgrimage. You know, it made the destination all the more pleasing, all the more rewarding. So nowadays you just assign a technician at the telescope to point the telescope, provide the observation, and then they just send it back to you over the internet. And I was, I'm old enough to remember the transition where the internet was only just a baby. It would take a week to move the data over the bandwidth of the internet. So we would compare the bandwidth of the internet versus the bandwidth of FedEx. You just put the tape in a FedEx box, ship that, that's a higher bandwidth than waiting for the thing to, it was a fun transition over that time. Point is nowadays there's none of that. You just, you'd never leave your office. You don't even live nocturnally. Just wake up in the morning and the data are sitting in your inbox. So that's a loss, I think. Yeah. Um, I'm glad that I had a piece of the romance of the night sky. This is a common critique of modern life, which is that we're lacking friction. Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it. It's of course, correct. I have no hesitation to agree with that statement. I used to wrestle in high school and college, and there's some friction for you, you want something, you want an opposing force operating on you. And the only way to get better is to lose. So, uh, friction, I would generalize the word friction there to just opposing forces that you must navigate either through strength of will, uh, physical strength, emotional strength, intellectual strength, and if it doesn't kill you to repeat an old phrase, it makes you stronger. So, yeah, I try to have some force operator in my life every day, every day. What does that look like? I try to make sure every day I'm alive, I learn something new and learning something new, I forgot who said this brilliant quote, it was, there's no greater pain of the human mind than the prospect of having to learn something. We're so comfortable in what we already know, or at least what we already think is true, that to take on a new idea can be challenging for some people because it brings a level of discomfort. And I happen to embrace discomfort because I come out a different person on the other side. And I think there's not enough, like I'm echoing you, there's not enough of that in people's lives. Otherwise we'd all be growing every single day and we're not, we're ossifying. One of the most potent and persistent sources of suffering in my life is this constant or seemingly constant toppling forward into the next moment. Nothing that's happening right now quite does it for me. And so I'm just kind of reaching for that next thing over and over as my longtime meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, likes to ask people, how many slices of pizza have you eaten? How many parties have you attended? How many promotions have you received? And are you done? Of course not. We are insatiable. And in this way, the pursuit of happiness can become the source of our unhappiness. The good news is that another of my favorite meditation teachers, Vinnie Ferraro, a fan favorite in the 10% Happier Cinematic Universe, has just created a whole new batch of guided meditations to help you deal with this sense of insufficiency and get to what he calls enoughness. And these meditations are available over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. Vinnie will be dropping them throughout the month of November and on Tuesdays throughout the month of November, Vinnie will be meditating with subscribers live and taking your questions. It's a Vinnie Ferraro festival the month of November over on 10% with Dan Harris. Just to recap here, Vinnie's new meditations drop every week in the month of November, and you can join him live only in the 10% with Dan Harris app. We all, of course, want to stay healthy for as long as possible. With Aura, getting started is effortless. Aura Ring measures more than 50 health metrics, including your sleep, movement, stress, and heart health, all from your finger, the Aura app. Shows how it's all connected and what to do next. The more you can understand your body, the better you can live in it. Wear your best life with Aura. That ossification actually has, in my view, and I'd be curious to see if you agree, has not only social and cultural effects, but also political effects. I think it's part of why we have this polarized debate. Nobody wants to learn about the POV, or very few of us want to learn about the POV of the opposing tribe. Right. And I don't care what your opinion is, but as an educator, I care that you've based it on what is objectively true in the world, lest you're just thinking things are true that aren't, and you can't build a democracy on that. It's a house of cards at that level. So I don't argue with people's opinions. On the internet, I don't even post opinions. People think they're opinions, but they're not. That's what's intriguing because at my level of following on the internet, typically people with that level of following are handing you your opinion that day, all right, you need to do this, join this movement, these people are a-holes, these people are that, join me because the internet is an outrage engine, we all know, right? And so I learned that if you put an opinion on the internet, the people who don't agree with it will fight you for having an opinion different from theirs. And that's an extraordinary fact because what it means is that person, I don't think this is an unrealistic extrapolation, that person will only be happy if everyone in the world agreed with them, and we have a word for that. It's a dictatorship, it's not a democracy. Democracy celebrates that we all have different opinions. And you express an opinion, say, oh, that's different from mine, tell me more about yours, let's compare. Maybe we'll each learn something that doesn't happen anymore. One other problem with democracy, and again, this is my opinion, you can tell me if you agree or not, is the level of distrust is so high that expertise has been devalued, and I wonder if you, again, I wonder if you agree with that and do you see it as you look out at the world too? Yeah, it's a susceptibility. Again, I come to it as an educator, so I ask myself, where did the educational system go awry in the hearts and minds of those who are behaving this way? And do people understand statistics? And we are putty in the hands of people who would manipulate our emotions and our feelings. We know this from advertisers, we know this from algorithms in social media. We just go where they want us to go because we can't help ourselves. It's almost not even our fault. And I'll give an example. We are highly susceptible to someone on the internet who shows they have some pedigree and they say, it all is actually this way, but no one else knows it yet. Or if they did know it, they would suppress it because the mainstream doesn't want you to do, you're going to click on it in a minute, like that. Because you have access to some information here. Now, of course, the mainstream doesn't have a face. You, the opponent to mainstream do, and you're a platform. How's mainstream at a bar chart going to convince you over someone who speaks passionately on the internet? We are susceptible to that. We're susceptible to someone saying, big pharma is all bad and they don't want, they're not interested in your health, but I'm interested in your health. Here, there's these herbs, and here's the QR code. Not only that, speaking, I wrote about this separately in another book. Will you grant me one conspiracy theory? Will you? I'll grant you as many as you want. You're Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can have as many as you want. No, just one. Do you know where most State lottery monies go that are collected by the state typically? No, I don't okay. Typically people will vote to allow a lottery Okay, because it's gambling and then they give you a reason why it would be a good thing for you to vote for Because the revenue from it goes to education To fund education. Well, of course, why not? It's education, right? Okay, I Looked in all 50 states at the curriculum the math curriculum Hardly any of them offer probability statistics as a required class Some of them offer it as an elective. So what's up with that? The educational system that's being paid by a lottery is not teaching you probability and statistics because if they did You would graduate high school and never play the lottery You understand how badly the odds are against you, okay, will you grab me that conspiracy? It's fun to think So we have entire Industries that thrive on your inability to think statistically and probabilistically they're called casinos There's someone they're betting on a seven and a roulette say why do you keep betting on seven? It's do So, how do you know what to do? Well, look they show the previous roles. It hasn't come up in 20 times. It's do Then I say no, it's not do You just didn't learn probability in your life okay, and so Again, I can't blame the people Here's it a slightly long story, but keep it quick the American Physical Society Which is the the National Organization of Physicists? Meets once a year and one year is gonna be in San Diego and there's some snafu with the hotels The last minute they had to cancel last minute MGM Grand in Vegas said we'll take you We're one of the biggest hotels in the world. We have 2,000 rooms. Come on over So everyone pivoted went to Vegas At the end of seven days, there was a newspaper headline Physicists in town lowest casino take ever The APS has been told to never come back to Las Vegas Because as a physical scientist we learn probability every year in graduate school How do you know whether your results are are reliable? How do you know when they're not? None of this is is do you learn unless you choose to take it in college or unless you took the elective in high school? Or unless you took the elective in high school So we all knew not to play the machines and anything and so we just didn't and they lost money Which I thought was kind of cool. Anyhow, so when I see people Who like you said have ossified in their ways that you can't talk to them It's because they believe that what they think is, correct yes, and They think anyone else who does not agree with them is wrong. People are not equipped to Probe How to learn whether something is correct or not, but my wife has a PhD in mathematical physics We have two kids neither of them are in the sciences We have no requirement of that for them, but they're scientifically literate when my son was like 11 We had some adults around the table and one of them said oh today's not going well It must be because mercury is in retrograde and he heard this and he said Why do you think the planet mercury cares about you at all? There ways to probe it just to force people back into their own skin to think about it and Because science literacy is not a measure of how much you know is how is your brain wired for inquiry, right? If someone says I have these crystals and I rub them you'll cure your ailment if you reject it outright That is just as intellectually lazy as if you accept it outright Maybe it does. Okay Start asking questions What is the mechanism by the way, this works by the way, if you know some chemistry you get to say a Crystal is the lowest energy state of those atoms and molecules You can't get energy out of it. So what do you mean? There's crystal energy that's there Show me something that measures so and then the person walks away because there is no crystal energy But but to ask questions is and we're not trained to do that. I Can't blame people for this I'm blaming an academic system that throws a book in front of you with Bold-faced words that you memorize for the exam and then you forget them two weeks later So maybe instead of learning stuff We should have our curiosity Stimulated so that when you graduate You are so curious you want to keep learning and then you spend the rest of your life learning but for those of us You and I sitting here and I don't think anybody listen can wave a magic wand and fix the education system I'm curious your advice for us as individuals navigating an information environment Which is corrosive and warped and as you said, there's this kind of asymmetry where people with no expertise but Power of persuasion get rewarded by the Alfred, right? Right. It's it's even charisma the power of persuasion, so Yeah, I mean You have to be on guard is the person selling you something at the end Is the person saying that they're right and mainstream is wrong Okay, you know science works if you come up with a result that's not what is true Ten other people have to match your result for that to be true If you come up result and it's true for you and no one else you're wrong But if I'm a internet surfer and I come upon you and you say I got this result No one else agrees with me, but I know this is right. They're just suppressing me You better you know stay on my channel before they close it down and we'd like the underdog we like the person who's who's oppressed by the The big forces that are out there. We like the forbidden the forbidden as well So yeah, it's not as fun to go with the average Or what the mainstream is. It's not as exciting but the mainstream in Science is the origin of the truths is the mainstream is where multiple experiments verified a result and That is a statistical fact That does not have the charismatic face behind it It's just a bar chart a company advertising something for you. Let's say they do have the best product on the market They could just show a chart a graph. That's that says this is the best thing on the market here Here's the people who said yes, but they don't they get a person to say I've used this product. It was the best thing in my life. It changed me Why would you listen to one individual? Ever about anything But it works and advertisers know it. Yes what I'm taking from you as that This is a show that's preoccupied with human flourishing I think there's a lot to learn from an astrophysicist about human flourishing because there are habits of mind that you have That are learnable skills. I'm not going back to school to become an astrophysicist, but curiosity being comfortable not knowing Oh, yeah, then these are these are important skills. I think can improve our lives someone once asked me When was the last time you changed your mind, I swear to you I didn't understand the question because I change my mind all the time It's like what I I had to really think about the question maybe it was just my night social naivete that question almost has no meaning to a scientist because what we and I'll use the word believe here, but it's a little bit misapplied what we believe to be true about this world The strength with which we believe something to be true is proportional to the evidence that supports it, right? So if evidence comes up that tips it the other way I'm tipping with where the evidence goes I don't have emotions invested in the outcome of some experiment being true or not I Have Investments in the repeatability of the data Which let's call that evidence and I will follow the evidence wherever it takes me you did an experiment I said that's a pretty cool result, but I don't really believe it. Let me try I try it I get a different result But they still have something in common a third person someone in a different country Someone who has 240 volts on their machine instead of 120 Maybe that had made a difference in the outcome of your tabletop experiment. This happens and as they accumulate an emergent truth arrives an Objective truth established by the methods and tools of science and no other enterprise that's ever been put forth in civilization is as effective and as potent at Establishing what is objectively true than the methods and tools of science Here's a feeling that a lot of people who run things will recognize you've got a way of working that is yours how you bring On clients how your team hands things off how you follow up and the software you're using fits about maybe 80% of it The other 20% lives in a patchwork of workarounds today's sponsor base Base44 is built for that whole picture Base44 is an AI platform where you describe the software you need in your own words like the pages the data who uses it and What should happen next and you get a working build shaped around the way you actually work The database login backend and hosting are already handled. 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Please support our show and tell them that we sent you Let me ask you about something else that I think your job Forces you to mainline that a lot of us miss in our daily lives, which is AWE. Oh my gosh, you know The version of that would be something I'm quoted as saying and I'll say it again here If not once a day then at least once a week. You should have your mind blown learn something that blows your mind and AWE and mind-blowing knowledge go together Okay, there's a strong overlap if not identical overlap between those two Circles in the Venn diagram. I think all sciences have their bit of AWE, but am I biased if I say the universe wins I Think we win. I'm sorry Are we alone in the universe is how big is the universe was around before the universe how the universe end? How long will we last? As a species how long will the Sun last before it dies? How will it die? but if you take factual astrophysical knowledge and then package it in ways that force you to pause and reflect on our place in the universe Then that's a cosmic perspective It's it's a notch above what you may have heard that astronauts describe as the overview effect Where you're in orbit and only in a few places on earth most you don't see national borders you know, it's just land and ocean and clouds and The petty things that go on on Earth's surface lose significance rapidly When seen from afar, well, that's seen from orbit now you go deep space and all of Earth is just this floating orb in the sky. Pale blue dot. Yeah. And to quote out of that book, with no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves, it's up to us. That's important, I think. When we opened the new planetarium, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the rebuilt Hayden Planetarium, the first, the inaugural show, was a zoom out from Earth. And so you're on Earth, you're just here, and then you zoom out, Earth gets small. Then you see the orbit of the moon, and then that gets small. And then you see the orbit of Earth around the sun, the other planets, and that gets small. And then the sun just becomes one another star in the night sky, and that all shrinks down. And then our entire Milky Way galaxy shrinks down. And then all the other galaxies come in, and they're so far away, they just look like points of light, the way the stars looked like a moment ago. We zoom you out to the edge of the universe, and then zoom back. After we premiered that show, I got a letter, I still have it in my files, from a professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania. He said, I paraphrase, I'm a professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania, and my research focuses on things that make you feel small. And your space show is the greatest elicitor of feelings of smallness and insignificance I have yet encountered. With your permission, I would like to set up a survey of people before and after they experienced the show. And I read this, and I thought to myself, he's got it all wrong. When I look out at the night sky, yeah, I know I'm small in size and time and space. I know that. But I also know that I'm a participant in the great unfolding of this cosmic story. Not only that, and you'll learn this in the books, the atoms of your body and the molecules are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores. So it's not just simply that we are alive in the universe, the universe is alive within us. That is, I think, the greatest gift of 20th century astrophysics to civilization. It borders on the spiritual. The universe is alive within you. That's, I'm not even exaggerating to say that. These are molecules made within the stars. We are stardust brought to life, empowered to contemplate the very universe in which we were born. So when I look up and I have those thoughts, I feel large. I don't feel small. And I don't see how a cosmic perspective could ever depress anyone. I didn't read the letter, but I heard it a different way. I heard it as smallness, not in the pejorative, that people go in, caught up in their daily shit, and they come out seeing that their daily problems are taking place in this, in this, in maybe infinite space. I love that positive spin. It sounds to me like, well, you're pointing at the simultaneity of smallness and largeness. We are tiny, but you know what's tinier than us? Atoms and molecules and insects. Plenty of stuff is smaller than us. I'm not value judging size. I'm putting size in a context so that you can think about it and feel it on a scale that is not judging who and what and where and when you are, but celebrating who and what and when and where you are in the 14 billion year history of the universe. You know, I'm on your side on this. I was actually moving past the dude with the letter and more to the bordering on spiritual argument that you were making about the value of this cosmic perspective, which is, and again, I don't know if I have this right, but the kind of thinking of it, as I said before, the simultaneity of smallness and largeness as a feeling of elevation. Yeah, I'm elevated when I look up in the night sky. I don't feel, by the way, the history of religion, but certainly Christianity tapped into the Jewish traditions of the Bible. It has us at the center of the universe and the object of God's creation. So for thousands of years, people thought and felt this way about our place in the universe and astrophysical discoveries from Copernicus onward has been a systematic demotion of our perceived place in the universe. And if you only think of it, yes, it is a demotion because your ego came in high, and I got a hack at that ego. I'm sorry. If truth matters to you, let's lay out the truth. If you can't handle the truth, then go on believing that you are the singular object of God's creation created in God's image. The creator of the universe cares about you. Go ahead. We live in a country that protects those thoughts. You will not find me picketing churches where that is taught. In fact, I celebrate it. I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way. But if you rise to power and have your religious philosophy infusing laws and legislation that then have to apply to everyone, not all of whom agree with your religious philosophies, that's a recipe for disaster. This is why I personally am a fan of a secular version of Buddhism because unlike all the other religions of the Axial Age, Buddhism is about hacking at the ego. That's good. For me, I'm not any ism at all. Yeah, I try not to. Yes. Having spent my life in an ism in which contrarian ism was baked, that I'm referring now to journalism, which is my old career. I found myself... That is an ism, isn't it? It is an ism. I found myself drawn to Buddhism because baked into the Buddha's message was literally his signature phrase was, come see for yourself. Don't take anything I say at face value. Come check it out. Yeah. And what science has gone so far beyond that because here's a microbe that if it gets inside of you, it will reproduce and kill you. Come see for yourself. No, you can't. Your eyes are insufficient. And think about it. Why would God give us eyes that were the things we can't see that could harm us in the world? That's a hard one to accept. You know, the discovery of infrared light, I briefly tell you, it's a funny thing. William Herschel was a fan of Isaac Newton, wanted to play with Isaac Newton's lenses and prisms and things because Isaac Newton showed that white light passing through a prism breaks out into colors. Those colors weren't in the prism. Those colors were in the white light that came through. How do you get red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet out of white? That was freaky, okay? That's why it was like no one believed it. William Herschel was a good scientist. Good scientists ask good questions. He said, I wonder if the different colors of the spectrum have different temperatures. So he set up his room, put the prism there, has all the colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and he takes a thermometer and puts it in each one of these colors. But you need a control thermometer. You need to put a thermometer that's not in any of those colors. So he puts one over to the left of the red. It's not in the spectrum. And then he compares the readings of the control thermometer to every one of these colors. And in every measurement, the control thermometer was the hottest. Then he took the control thermometer, put it somewhere else in the room. It went back down to room temperature. Put it back right next to the red, temperature went up. He concluded that the sun was emitting light, quote, unfit for vision. My boy discovered infrared light that the human eye cannot detect. So you can come see for yourself. No, we have books called Optical Illusions where seeing for yourself just confuses you more. So I like the principle of see for yourself. But in the end of the day, bring a chart recorder with you. Bring some way to document it that bypasses your physiological senses. Fair. I mentioned at the beginning that you've got a new book. You've had many books. You've written many books, but the new one is called Lost in Space, 5,000 Facts to Navigate the Universe. I want to talk about a few of these facts. Oh, please. Yeah. And by the way, I checked it. That is every single fact that exists at all. That's what it felt like. That's what it felt like writing the book. It's like, my God, did we leave anything out? But they're all organized. I mean, it's a joint publication between my podcast, StarTalk, and National Geographic Books, and they don't know ugly. Okay? Yeah. The book is completely gorgeous. Yeah. It's like an IV drip of awe, which is the spirit... Oh, I love that. Say that again. I'll say it right to the camera. It's like an IV drip of awe. And I want to talk about it in that context, a few of these facts, because I think it's actually... This is back to the spirit of the show. It's the awe that contributes to human elevation and flourishing. Yeah. And I would say that you can obviously Google 5,000 facts, but that's not what this book is. The stock and trade of what we do on StarTalk is putting a fact in a context where it has meaning to you, such that you will never forget it. So in one example, we can say, you can Google how wide is the sun, and it'll come back 865,000 miles across. That's not the fact as I would give it to you. I would say, line up 100 Earths across, you will get the width of the sun. Now, you will never forget that. Yeah. No, I won't. Do you know the sun has acne bigger than Earth? Acne? We call it sunspots. Okay. All right. Spots on the sun. They're bigger than Earth. It's the comparison, contextualization of information that rests more deeply within us. And as an educator, I have found that facts packaged that way are vastly more potent. So you pulled some out? Yeah, I pulled some examples. I don't know, you'll elaborate on these, but here's one that just struck me, which is the moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth, which means that solar eclipses are a temporary phenomenon on a cosmic timescale. And that the very last total solar eclipse will be roughly 620 million years from now, after which the moon will be too far away to cover the sun. Yes. Yeah, the moon is spiraling away from us. I forgot the number, it's like an inch, inch and a half a year. And you might ask, how do you know that? How do you know that? Because... This is a real call and response. I like it. Because on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, other than just go around and take pictures of each other and plant a flag, they also positioned what's called a corner reflector, which is a system of mirrors, where if light comes in at any angle to those mirrors, it reflects and comes back at exactly the same angle. Okay? So it's not a flat mirror, because if it comes in at this angle, it bounces out the other way. But you can configure mirrors so that the light goes, no matter which way the light's coming in, it'll go back to where it came. They laid that down on the surface of the moon, came back to Earth, turned on telescopes, reversed them, sent a laser beam out to the moon, timed the signal back. We can get the distance of the moon within a centimeter. We suspected the moon was spiraling away for reasons of physics. Now we made the measurements to verify it. So right now we have gorgeous total solar eclipses, because the moon and the sun and the sky are about the same size. What's going on there is the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, and it's 400 times farther away. So that makes them the same size. So the moon comes in front, perfectly covers it. It's just gorgeous. You see the corona. People spend a lot of money, travel great distances to see these. They happen every couple of years, somewhere on there. But if the moon is spiraling away, there will come a day where it is too small to cover the sun. It'll still come in front of the sun, but you'll have a ring of sunlight around it. It won't be a total solar eclipse. It'll still be gorgeous, but it won't be total. I think you also talk in the book about, and you mentioned this earlier, that at some point the sun's going to die. Oh, yeah. That'll happen on October 9th. Okay. We're expecting another 5 billion years of life out of the sun. And you said on StarTalk, your podcast, you said that rather than humanity fleeing the solar system when the sun eventually dies, assuming we make it that long, it may be easier to move Earth itself or to build artificial suns? Yeah. So that far in the future, I mean, come on now, let's have fun, okay? That far in the future, the sun will lose power in its core and very catastrophic things will happen. So, oh, and by the way, the sun is slowly, like over billions of years, time scale, is slowly getting hotter. So a billion years from now, it'll be too hot for where we are in our current orbit. So what can we do? We can possibly push Earth to a farther away orbit, okay, so that we're still in the Goldilocks zone, or Mars is already far away. Let's terraform Mars and then everybody moves there. Or the sun has a lot of fuel in its outer layers that never participated in the fusion in the core. If you could take the sun and sort of stir it, bring fresh hydrogen. into the core, you can give, the sun can be reborn, basically, and live for another five billion years. Or just ship everybody to another star system. For me, if I'm a betting person, I'd say, let's stir the sun. What is your gut on whether humans are gonna stay in the game much longer? Yeah. I mean, we value our intelligence so much, but from a Darwinian point of view, if we don't properly manage our own intelligence, it's our intelligence that could be the seeds of our own extinction. And from a Darwinian point of view, that means the intelligence did not make us more fit for survival, because survival is the fittest. It made us less fit. Meanwhile, the roaches are standing around waiting for us to die. It's doing just fine. And while the roach kid doesn't have poetry or philosophy or art, well, the roaches will still be here after we're here. And so that's all that Darwin cares about. Are you fit for survival in the world in which you're placed? So the short answer to your question is, while I see myself as a realistic optimist, I think there remains a chance that we will not survive ourselves. And I think that chance is smaller than many people would otherwise say. And I give that because evolutionarily, it's expected that you would be distracted, preoccupied, thinking about that which will kill you. Of course, because you don't want to die. Why is every sci-fi movie, you go into space, and something bad happens? Why is that the plot of every single sci-fi movie? It's understandable because evolutionarily, we don't want to die. You want to pay attention to the lion in the grass, and not the bird on the branch. So I get that. So following our emotions, we will portray a bleak future, bleaker than what is likely, in my read of this. What if one of the world's greatest laboratories isn't indoors, but instead deep in the Amazon rainforest? 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Have you ever heard the theory that the reason why we haven't met aliens is that every civilization that's ever reached a certain point developed an AI that ultimately killed them? Yeah, this is very anthropic. Oh, no pun intended. Anthropomorphic, I should say, where we're thinking that other aliens have exactly the same challenges we do. Maybe all the aliens are completely peace-loving, and their intelligence is not one that puts their own lives at risk. Why assume everybody's like us? Most life on Earth is not like us, and we have DNA in common. I'm disappointed that most aliens in Hollywood are humanoid. I mean, think about it. You know, a head, two eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, neck, shoulders, arms, legs, torso, fingers, and feet, and they walk, and they breathe our air. Really? Really? Like I said, most life on Earth with whom we have DNA in common looks nothing like us. And here's an alien from another planet that doesn't have DNA in common with us or doesn't have DNA at all? And you're going to be phenotypically human? Do you realize a banana and humans have 25% identical genes? A banana and humans. So an alien that has no genes in common at all should look at least as different from humans as humans and bananas look from each other. I like the aliens in that movie Arrival. That was good. They're septuportal aliens, sort of, they had seven legs. That was trying to do something different, although it did resemble something else on Earth. No, no, no, no. An octopus. They're floating in these tanks like this, and they put squid ink or whatever their species ink on the screen. You're not confusing it with Project Hail Mary, because that alien is crab-like. And that's Andy Weir, who says, I'm not going to fall for this Hollywood. By the way, he's a software engineer turned novelist. He said, I'm not going to fall for this humanoid stuff. So he created a life form that basically made a rock, and it's craboid, and it lives in high atmospheric pressure and breathes ammonia. Take that, Hollywood. Speaking of the survival of the species and Hollywood, you had Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, on the show after he put out Disclosure Day. Yes. Which I also liked it, although I realized I might be in the minority on that one. I like that movie. The movie had a point, and he made that point on the show, and I want to read it back to you and see if you agree with the point. You're quoting from my interview with him. On StarTalk. He said, the thesis of the film is empathy. And he called it, and here I'm quoting him again on your show, the foremost necessary evolutionary quality. A rejection of this understanding is leading to our extinction. You talked before about managing our intelligence as the variable that could lead to our extinction. Is that in opposition or in agreement with the idea that it's actually about empathy? I don't think empathy is a mysterious emotion. The challenge is how far from your genetic family will you extend your empathy? Right? Is it just your cousins and aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers? Is it your neighbor? Is it the people in the next town? Does that extend to plant life? I remember this Gary Larson comic where there's this huge tree that this guy just cut down, and the guy's telling his young son, look, Timmy, here, the tree survived three hurricanes, and here, tornadoes, and he's looking at the rings of the tree. All the things the tree survived after he cut it down. So I know there are people who've written extensively against empathy. There's the idea... Yes, Paul Bloom. Yeah, Paul Bloom among them. And I think that it's a provocative title, of course, but there may be cases where expressing empathy is not in the best interest of the person for whom you're expressing it because they're going through a challenge that they must overcome so that they become a better person on the other side of it. You can explore it psychologically that way. And the problem is if you say people need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, but of course, some people have no boots, right? So I'm quoting Jesse Norman. I was on the same program with her, and she commented that your own bootstraps only works when you have shoes. So I don't know that I would say that's the one thing. I mean, we have the urge to find the magic pill. This is the one thing, if everybody did this, we'd all be fine. Well, try this or eat kale, okay? Or try, you know, I think that's lazy. I think real answers are typically far more complex, take a little more effort and energy to explore, to learn and implement. So I think I value empathy, and I always want more of it within me. I carry enough to know that I have it and when I invoke it, but like I said, I think I have room for more. So yeah, do you have empathy for other creatures? If you don't have empathy for dogs or other animals on earth, how are you gonna have empathy for an alien? In fact, there are no laws against killing an alien. Think about it. It's killing a human. That's the law. Now, if the alien comes down, they're clearly more intelligent than you because they arrived in a spaceship and we haven't left low-Earth orbit in 50 years. Clearly, they're smarter than us. What do you do about that? So my philosophy there, if I call it, it's not really a philosophy, it's just every animal on earth has to kill a living thing for its own survival. Every animal. If you choose to say, I'm gonna kill plants instead of other animals, that's a choice you're making, but you're still killing a living thing. Just be honest with yourself. But here's one, you don't like killing animals and you live in a house with a basement and the mice in the basement. So you get a, what do you call it? Humane mousetrap. You capture the mouse. When you capture it, what do you then do with it? You let it go outside. Where it is guaranteed to be eaten by some woodland creature. So hawk, owl, they're the tastiest snacks in the woods. So the average life expectancy of a mouse in the wild is between six and nine months. In captivity, it can live five or six years. So you wanna be nice to the mouse, leave it in your basement. Let it run in the warmth of your basement. Meanwhile, your house is probably made of wood, the wood of 30 to 50 trees that would have lived a hundred years, but they didn't because they were cut down. Trees that housed birds and squirrels and chipmunks and fungus and all manner of life. And every day, a tree generates the weight of a mouse in oxygen for everybody else to breathe. What do you think nature cares more about, the tree or the mouse? Think about that. That's how I think about it, holistically. Just to go back to the top of the conversation, you described yourself as a pretty happy guy. I'm curious. I'm happier than most people I've met based on when I see and hear them comment on things that bring them anger, distress, or sadness. Yes. What are the biggest challenges, if any, to your happiness? Is there anything that threatens it, or what are the biggest vexations or problems in your life? Or is actually, no, it's all quite smooth? No. Okay. That would misrepresent it. I think happiness is how you navigate things that might otherwise send you down a hole. It's what do you do about it? How do you think about it? Is this something you cannot control? It's that famous semi-prayer, you know... Serenity prayer. The serenity... Thank you. I forgot that it's called. Lord, grant me the power to change the things I can to accept the things I cannot and the power to know the difference with wisdom. That's the serenity prayer, right? Yes. Okay. So if I know I don't have control of the outcome, I don't have control of the outcome. It doesn't get under my skin. If I can control the outcome, I can touch it in a way where I can maximize benefit to the many, I'm gonna do it. And by the way, these trolley questions, you ever see these? There's a train coming down the track. Do you push somebody over a trolley onto the oncoming train or something like that? It's do you... It's testing your... Yes, I think it is morality, but it's testing how you make decisions in moral situations. So you're on a train and the train splits. And if you go this way, you kill two people who are strapped to the track, okay? But they're older people. If you go this way, you kill a younger person who's strapped to the track, what do you do? Okay? I made that up, but that's very emblematic of the kinds of questions. Yeah, that sounds right. I'd invent a way to stop the train, okay? I'm not accepting your parameter. I'm cleverer than your experiment, okay? They hate it when I tell them that because they try to probe things. I'm four years older than my sister. So she entered high school, I entered college at the same time. Okay. I came back for holidays and I said, oh, let's go out for lunch. Where do you want to go? And she said, what are my choices? In that moment, I realized we've been getting multiple choice exams our entire life. So decision-making did not involve an original thought. It involved picking choices supplied by somebody else. And I said, I refuse to give you choices come up with something on your and she was like, oh my gosh What am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go? so so I think in most situations in life if you have experience life experience you have Certain talents. Let's say you're a nurse. You have certain powers that other people don't have Understanding of human physiology and you can save someone's life this sort of thing So, yeah the power to change the things you can oh so other things you said what gets in the way of My happiness. I'm an optimistic realist I'm not just all optimistic because that could Blind you to things that could have bad outcomes that you might have prevented if you look back on it I'll give a public talk and I invest a lot of like effort and energy and psycho motor Effort people two kinds of people come up to me after they say Neil you having such a good time on a stage Okay, that crap jokes and things And another person say Neil you were working hard. Mm-hmm up there To a person those are school teachers. Yeah School teachers know what I'm doing You were working hard So when people say, oh, did you have a good time? That's not how I think about it. I Asked was I effective? Because if I evaluate everything I do about whether I was having a good time that would mean sometimes I'm not having a good time and then I'm miserable It's not how I evaluate Events of my life as an educator as a scientist. I'm asked to participate at the end. Was I effective? Could I have been more effective? What can I do differently next time to improve that? That did I have a good time? Well, no, I have a good time. Ask me after I come back from the beach Do what else I like I like sitting on a big comfy couch eating popcorn with slightly too much butter Because slightly too much butter is just the right amount watching a blockbuster movie With my family on the couch with me. That's that's a happy day and you could say is are you happy? I said yes, and that's not am I effective. Okay, let me that leads to my last question. We've got this little segment. We're Doing now to close the show it's called what's good and in this segment I asked the guests like what is something good you have experienced recently like a movie And in this case probably a movie a record whatever that you would recommend to others I don't recommend things to people because that implies that I Have my likes and dislikes and I want to place the likes and dislikes on you I'm not gonna say don't see this movie at suck I'm not gonna say that because you might like the movie you are basically doing to me what you do to the trolley experiment people Yes, I know, but I can I'm gonna come around the back side here because watch this. Okay, I have a list here I'm not gonna read it all to you. So I decided This may be eight months ago to make a list of things. I like now, okay Have you ever revealed this? It's not published, but I have read bits of it. Okay But one day I'll find some way to publish it. Okay, I like old wines and new friends I like old books and new ideas. I Like simple thoughts written with fancy pens I like when people speak their thoughts, but saying their feelings I like words and language For they empower me to communicate fellow humans, I like mathematics and physics For they allow me to commune with the cosmos. I like magic tricks as Reminders that I can still be fooled. I Like both the kit and the caboodle But the caboodle is more fun This goes on and on and on but what I found I found this to be quite Cathartic is the right word. I found it to be quite I'm not coming up with these as new likes These are things I've always liked. Yeah, and now I took the occasion to write them down and this happiness that I Described to you about me. I think is sustained by my Experiencing what's in this list with some frequency each day beautiful. It's it's a it's a feeding mechanism Wow, that's cool. So such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for making time Well, thanks for the shout-out for the books. I want to shut it out again Just for everybody watching and listening. The most recent book is called lost in space 5,000 facts to navigate the universe Also Neil hosts an excellent podcast called star talk and you should if you live in New York City or happen to be visiting Go to the Hayden planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History anything I missed No, and in there you'll come out with a cosmic perspective. Yes, and you'll feel good about it Small in a good way small in a good way. Yeah. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Thanks. Mm-hmm Thank you very much for watching and or listening today really appreciate it if you want to hook me up and I know a Podcast hosts ask for this all the time But there's a reason why we asked for it because it's genuinely helpful if you want to hook me and my team up follow us and like us and Rate us and review us on whatever platform you're consuming the show right now share with your friends follow us on social media It all genuinely helps us grow now on to the credits Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show 10% happier is produced by Tara Anderson Marissa Schneiderman DJ cashmere David Hart and Hayden broom Post-production is handled by the great folks over at green horn creative and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band islands wrote our theme Thank you for listening deuces insurance is not one size fits all that's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's name your price tool for years now with the name your price tool You tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family They make it easier to see your options visit progressive.com find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law You