Welcome To The Universe - Neil deGrasse Tyson - #468

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Bonjour, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's an astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author and a science communicator. Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I found out about a 300 million light year across super void out in space within the same week. Thankfully, Neil is here to help me work out what's going on in this version of the simulation. Expect to learn whether focusing on Mars as a backup planet is a smart idea, how big the universe outside of the observable universe might be, how we could restart the sun when it begins to die, when time will end, the politics of who gets to claim different asteroids, Neil's favorite solution to the Fermi paradox, and much more. The guy's a legend, right? Neil deGrasse Tyson is a lot of people's gateway drugs into astrophysics, into space, into thinking about the universe and big picture planetary stuff. I very, very much appreciate his work. And today's fun. Also, he's got a new book coming out later this year. So expect another appearance from Mr. Tyson later in 2022 Also, don't forget that the Modern Wisdom reading list is now available for free and you can get your copy by going to chriswillx.com/books. It's a list of 100 books that you should read before you die. If you're looking for some new reading material, just go there, right? There's a hundred books that you can get stuck into, fiction and nonfiction chriswillx.com/books for your free reading list. But now, please welcome Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the show.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:52)
God, thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
Elon's bought Twitter, Neil. Should he be spending his time and money taking people to Mars? What's going on?

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:00)
Yeah, I've stopped passing judgment on what billionaires do with their money. I mean, think about it. He could just be having a yacht contest for who has the biggest yacht. You know, billionaires have whatever are their habits, and I don't know that any of us would behave any differently if we had billions of dollars. So, I've just stopped commenting on what billionaires do or should do with their money. What I can say is if a billionaire is going to do something, it's kind of interesting that he single-handedly brought electric cars back into…
He created a new expectation for the automotive industry basically single-handedly, and he reinvented commercial rocket launch. So, he was doing that with his billions and he has 44 billion left over, and he wants to own Twitter, which he likes, all right. I don't see anything wrong with that. By the way, most things out there have CEOs who you don't know, and you don't even ask. We just happen to know who the new CEO of Twitter is about to be. And so now this becomes a point of conversation. Why isn't anybody talking about the head of any other organization or company or strategic platforms of communication? So I think the level of scrutiny is unjustified, given how much scrutiny we could be giving to so many other things. But that being said, if he does what everyone fears, especially on the left, that he reopens the floodgates, gives Trump or an account again, I think we need to perhaps look at it a different way. Free speech is a, what you want is to not suppress the speech that you don't like, but amplify the speech that you do. And let that be the arena of contest of ideas. Because if you suppress ideas, those ideas will still always be there, and they'll run around saying, I have this idea, but these folks don't want to hear it. That's very different from you losing the idea game in an open contest. And then you say, well, how comes nobody's listening to you? Yeah, because they turned me off. Because they shut off the channels where I was communicating, because they don't want to hear anything that I have to say, or because everything I said is wrong. All right? These are two different ways emerging truths can win. But you want it to be the second way, because then no one has a platform left. If it's a platform that is either regressive, puts us all at an existential risk or whatever, let it lose on its own terms.

**Chris Williamson** (5:01)
Speaking of existential risks, how good do you think Mars is as a backup to humanity? One of the problems...

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (5:07)
What is it you want to back up?

**Chris Williamson** (5:08)
Well, the fact that we only have one cradle at the moment, right? If something goes wrong here, if we're all being slowly turned into paper clips or grey goo, or there's a bio weapon that gets released or whatever, we don't have some air gapped backup.