StarTalk Podcast_ Neil deGrasse Tyson on Avengers_ Endgame

0:00 This is Star Talk. We are going to talk about the science that exists or the absence of science that doesn't exist.

0:13 Yeah, probably the latter more so than the former.

0:15 In the Marvel Universe, specifically, an entire show of spoilers on.

0:24 Marvel Endgame.

0:26 Endgame. Endgame. So if you haven't seen Endgame yet, just shut off the program now.

0:30 Yeah, don't.

0:30 Now.

0:31 You should not be watching.

0:32 Now. Or listening. Now, who's left? We got to just. Yeah.

0:36 Now that those people are gone.

0:39 Now that they're gone. Now that they're gone. All right. So let's just talk about it, Chuck.

0:43 Yeah. So first of all.

0:44 Don't get me started. Hold me back.

0:46 That should be the name of this. Don't get me started.

0:49 Hold me back.

0:50 I saw the movie, of course.

0:52 Yeah.

0:52 And. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it in IMAX. Did you actually go and see it in IMAX? Yeah, I saw it in IMAX three days before it opened. Right, exactly.

1:00 And I tweeted. Do you remember my tweet?

1:02 I saw your tweet where you said, I didn't know there were so many Marvel characters.

1:05 I didn't know there were so many Avengers.

1:06 Yes.

1:07 Maybe they're not all Avengers. That's a weird question. There were just so many.

1:12 No, because the Guardians of the Galaxies are not, well, no.

1:15 Yes, they're Avengers.

1:15 They're Avengers.

1:16 There are blue ones and red ones and silver ones and green ones. And three of them were named Chris, you know? That's funny.

1:24 What's up with that?

1:27 So let me just say something nice about the Marvel Universe before we get all up in it. Okay. Okay. Of all the communities of superheroes that exist. Okay. The Marvel superheroes, more than not, derive from some kind of science or scientific principle, if not the people themselves, themselves scientifically literate. So you look at Spider-Man, and he's really Spider-Boy.

1:58 Spider-Boy.

1:59 Spider-Boy.

1:59 Spider-Kid.

2:00 Spider-Kid. Right. He was in his science class, and he gets bitten by a radioactive spider. So it's not that he was sitting with Miss Muffet, sitting on her tuffet. He's in science class when this happens.

2:12 Dr.

2:13 Banner is a medical doctor. He becomes the Hulk. Iron Man is Iron Man. He's a total genius. Unlike Batman, not to pit DC against Marvel, but Batman is smart, But he's not the one inventing the stuff that makes him powerful. Exactly.

2:29 He's got his company. He's got his whole company.

2:33 Right. That is producing all this stuff. A military contracting company. Right. With engineers in the silo doing their work. Right. So Iron Man is doing all his own work. So I applaud Marvel. I don't know where the science is in Hawkeye. Okay. He's got no powers. And I love watching... Black Widow, who doesn't love some good martial arts. But we don't have to talk about the science of that.

3:01 And they don't have powers.

3:02 They don't have powers.

3:03 They're just very good shots. Both of them. They'd be great for maybe the biathlon. America once again brings home Olympic gold thanks to Hawkeye and Black Widow.

3:19 But yeah. The ninja biathlon. The ninja biathlon. So, all right. Oh, you have notes on this. No, I have questions. Questions.

3:30 Actually, so what we did was. So this is kind of like a Cosmic Queries. It is kind of like a Cosmic Queries because we went online and we solicited questions.

3:36 You didn't tell me that. From people who, well, you know. All right, all right, all right.

3:39 But people who wanted to know. Some of the science and your thoughts on it, they got to us.

3:45 Now, I didn't read the comic books, you know. Well, you don't have to. It's not really about the comic books. No, but they go to see these movies and they complain that something was in the comic. It's like the people who read the novels before it becomes the movies. They're the ones who really should never not be allowed in the theater. Because whatever I say about a movie is not as obnoxious as a person who read the novel first.

4:06 I got to tell you, you're right. So one of the things that people don't know about this is in the movie, in the comic books, Hulk becomes Worldbreaker Hulk. And so in the movie Ragnarok, where Hulk gets sent away to another planet. This is Thor Ragnarok. This is Thor Ragnarok. That's actually a storyline where Hulk becomes this Worldbreaker Hulk and he becomes this kind of like gladiator, right?

4:38 But then after that, he learns how to.

4:42 Separate Bruce Banner from the Hulk while they emerged as one. And then he becomes... kind of Bruce the Broke. He's Bruce and Hulk at the same time. And that's what you see in this movie.

4:58 Yes, in Endgame.

5:01 In Endgame, thank you. So that kind of stuff you do see happening in the movie, which I think is kind of cool.

5:07 Well, this is connective tissue between storylines. Between all the storylines, and that's what they did really well. So Marvel has upheld the storytelling.

5:15 End of this.

5:16 Yeah, and I think they did a great job with the storytelling, and I think Marvel stories are better than DC stories, period. I don't know if they just hire better writers.

5:22 Blood drawn.

5:23 I'm sorry. I mean, if you're a DC person, good for you. But I think all their storylines in Marvel are just so much more captivating and compelling. The DC storylines tend to kind of have like a more magical, mystical kind of crap stuff attached to it. I don't know. That's my opinion. That means nothing. That's how I feel. Wait, wait, wait.

5:47 Excuse me. You tell me the powers that Wonder Woman... wields are not differently mysterious and magical from those of Captain Marvel?

6:01 Yes, because Diana is a god, goddess, basically.

6:06 Yes.

6:06 All right?

6:07 And what's that mean? I mean, that's such an easy thing to... You know, the only person who's like that is Thor.

6:13 Yes, okay.

6:13 Thor is a god.

6:14 Right.

6:15 Okay, we get it. So therefore he does god stuff. Yeah, he does god stuff. And when you create a god, I mean, it's like, okay, well, yeah, I can do that.

6:25 I'm a god.

6:25 And to me, it's kind of lazy.

6:27 Ooh. I'm just saying, it's a little lazy. I don't have a rebuttal to that. Yeah, it's like, okay, I'm a god. Yeah, I did that because I'm a god.

6:37 It's like, okay, so that's where all your powers come from, the fact that you are this deity. And to me, I'm like, okay, whereas although the science is not tight or there's no real fidelity to the science world, At least.

6:57 In Marvel. In Marvel. There's a premise. At least there's a premise. Yes.

7:00 Like for instance, gamma radiation creating the Hulk.

7:05 Yes.

7:06 Gamma radiation from what I have learned from you and every other scientist.

7:11 That has been on this show. It will kill the host essentially every time. Right. Yes.

7:14 Like there's no way that you could ever experience gamma radiation.

7:18 And come out walking out saying, we're just a little different today. I feel great. God, it's so refreshing.

7:26 That gamma rate. So anyway, that's the way I felt. So we got these questions, and we always start with Patreon.

7:33 Do it.

7:33 And here we go.

7:34 Do it.

7:35 Frank Kane. Which movie actually represented time travel more consistently with modern theories? Endgame or Back to the Future? Wow, they picked one of your favorites.

7:45 Yeah, I got to go with, well, maybe the stuff that happened in Endgame that I didn't fully understand. But Back to the Future, Back to the Future... try to be as consistent as it possibly could at every turn. I'm talking about Back to the Future 1, not 2 and 3. And so... Marty, there's something wrong with your kids. Marty! What, do I become a jerk? No, it's your kids, Marty.

8:12 No, it's your kids, Marty.

8:15 So... Get me some garbage! All right, sorry.

8:17 So.

8:18 So... I think, now what was the question?

8:23 I messed you up. Which movie represents time travel better?

8:27 Time travel, right.

8:27 Endgame or Back to the Future?

8:29 Okay, so Endgame, if I'm to make that internally consistent, it requires a much more complex set of timelines branching off of one another than what happened in Back to the Future. All that happened in Back to the Future is it created a single alternative timeline. Correct. Which is kind of the timeline we wanted there to have been all along. All right, and so it had very satisfying elements to it. In Endgame, I mean just think about the multiple timelines. Forget the fact that Captain America decided to hang with his woman and not do all the saving that he did in the other movies as Captain America in present day, okay? There's still the present day element of this that now is lost to some timeline

9:17 that doesn't now exist in the timeline we are left with. He's sitting there as an old man on a bench, and we're happy for him. because he went back to the true love of his life.

9:26 Found his woman.

9:27 You can't hate on that. You can't hate on that.

9:30 It's very hard.

9:31 But how about whatever crime he stopped in the episodes he was in? What of that? Well, that's just some other universe that's unfolding that way at this point. Because you didn't change the timeline, you branched the timeline. That's the modern... concept of what happens when you change time and so plus i didn't like the fact that they interacted with each other he's admiring his own.

9:55 Ass okay i can't really blame him for that. I mean, first of all, he's got a fantastic ass.

10:03 He's admiring. By the way, when I saw that scene where he's knocked out on the ground, of course he's going to get back up, and the second version of him walks by. So, yeah, the American ass is a good ass. I looked at the ass. I said, that ass looks a little too big. for what I remembered it to look like when he's walking around. Okay?

10:20 You think they had a stunt?

10:21 Either stunt or they put butt inserts. I said, that looks a little too large. And I said, that looks suspiciously large. They're probably going to comment on it. And sure enough, he comments on it. Nice. So I saw that coming. So anyway, you can't interact with yourself because you don't know what influence you would have on the world that was going to happen that you're trying to stop.

10:46 So that's just outright dangerous.

10:49 Yeah, it doesn't make sense to do that.

10:50 And with Marty, he sees himself. Marty in Back to the Future. Let's go to the very end of the movie where he comes back. He's at the rim of the parking lot, sees the future unfold. He's not interacting with himself. No. Not technically. Yes, light beams are exchanging and molecules are there, but in any traditional storytelling sense, he's not interacting with himself. So you can get away with that. But here is Captain America walking right by himself, and more than one of those kinds of moments happened in this movie, so I didn't like that.

11:26 A lot of those moments happened, so I don't blame you. I will tell you this much, though.

11:29 What?

11:30 I did appreciate him being in the elevator and going, Hail Hydra.

11:34 That was pretty cool. Okay, whispering that. Whispering that. Okay, give me some more. All right, here we go.

11:39 Where do you believe vibranium falls on the periodic table of elements? Why would it be so strong then? So vibranium, the mythical material. These people know what we're talking about here? Oh, that's right, that's right.

11:53 Excuse me.

11:54 That's right, I forgot who was asking.

11:55 We're in the inner sanctum here.

11:56 Yeah, we don't have to worry about it.

11:57 Of the Marvel Universe. You don't have to be Mr. Explanatory. a Chuck Nice, which is very pedagogical of you, but not in this moment. So, are you familiar with the periodic table of fictional elements? It's online, go check it out. Yes, it's all there. So, Finkillium is there. Finkillium, that's an element on the original I Dream of Jeannie. They needed an ingot of Finkillium. There is The stuff that was in the Absent-Minded Professor. What is the? Flubber. Flubber. Flubber's on the periodic table of fictional materials. And it's full.

12:39 They got a full periodic table. Cool. And so I love it. Oh, they also have Unobtainium from?

12:50 Avatar.

12:50 From Avatar.

12:50 That's Avatar.

12:51 So all these elements are there. So people have thought about how one might organize them. I can tell you this. One of the remarkable things about this universe and the periodic table of elements in particular is that from element to element, the properties can be so different from one another that it is not completely crazy that you just have an element that has all the properties of vibranium.

13:17 You know, you could take a cubic inch of gold and hammer it so thin that you could like, guild an entire football field with it. So gold is the most malleable element. Now I've got to double check my calculation on that. If it's not a football field, it's something nearly as big. And that's why you guild things with gold. Because you don't take much of it. It looks like you have a lot.

13:42 You can make it so thin that you can actually brush it onto surfaces and gold leafing.

13:48 Yes, you get gold leafing. So you look at the diversity of properties of elements on the periodic table, not only that, the diversity of molecules you can make with the elements. Here we have sodium, which is a metal soft enough that you can cut with a knife, okay? And it will, and it's poisonous and it'll explode if you put it in contact with water. Add chlorine to it, a deadly gas, and you have table salt.

14:22 Okay?

14:23 Okay? I have oxygen, which promotes combustion, okay? Promotes combustion. Then I have hydrogen and explosive gas, put them together, you make water that puts out fire. So this diversity of properties tells you that vibranium is one of the most inventive, realistic things you can think of on there. It's got all these properties that nothing else has. That's true with anything else that has properties that nothing else has. Good.

14:52 That is I'm Cool With Vibranium. That is a great answer.

14:56 Plus it came from the mother country. From the motherland.

15:01 Of us all. That's right. Well, this is true.

15:04 There you go. Chuck, we've got to take a break. Okay. So when we come back, more spoilers of Avengers Endgame on StarTalk. So to help us answer some of these questions, because Thanos messed with the world in a big way, I've got a friend and colleague of mine from the American Museum of Natural History, Rae Wynn-Grant. Rae, welcome to StarTalk.

15:26 Hi, thanks for having me.

15:28 I think this is your first time, right?

15:30 Very first time, not the last.

15:32 So this is, you are a large carnivore ecologist.

15:35 Yes.

15:38 I don't even know what that is.

15:40 Wow. I kind of dig that, though. I'm not sure what it is either, but I like it.

15:47 But more broadly, you care about the environment and the intersection of life and food chain and this sort of thing. And so we've got some questions. And by the way, everyone is assumed to have seen the movie here, so don't worry about spoiling anything. This is advertised as spoiler alert for Avengers Endgame. And that's where these questions are coming from.

16:06 But I hope I don't get kicked off because I haven't seen it.

16:10 Haven't seen it yet. Oh. Calling the authorities. That's going to make this so much better. Okay.

16:18 Am I a bad scientist?

16:19 Does this take my credentials? No, not at all. We'll carry you on this. Okay, go. What do you have?

16:23 So guess what? You'll probably be able to answer these questions anyway just from your professional point of view.

16:29 Yes.

16:29 All right. Billy Games from Instagram wants to know this, Ray. I think you're going to need more than one episode for this topic, is what he says. And more specialists in different fields, LOL. What the hell was that?

16:44 Wait, so where's the question? He didn't finish it. Wait, so what's the question? There is no question. It just goes off. That's it, okay. So see how easy that was, right?

16:55 I'm the best guest you've ever had.

16:59 All right, here we go. Ian Abbey from Facebook says, so what would happen to the ecosystem if half of all life would suddenly disappear?

17:10 Because the bad guy on the Avengers Endgame, well, in the previous movie, he snaps his fingers and half of all life goes away, and in his warped sense of justice, he's trying to help the other half survive so that there's sufficient resources for them. Now, they didn't make it clear whether they killed half of all plant life as well.

17:33 Because plant life is also alive. Then is he killing half of all worms?

17:38 I was gonna say, if his reasoning is that he wants to increase resources, then you wouldn't want to kill half of our plant life because that's a resource.

17:47 Right, for the animals.

17:49 For the animals.

17:50 But he's also killing half the animals. They didn't make that clear, and I don't know what they did in the comic book, but let me just ask you, if you take half of any animal species that's in equilibrium with its environment, let's start with an equilibrium case.

18:05 It's in equilibrium.

18:06 You take away half of them, what happens?

18:08 That's a good question. Yeah, just like that. Yeah, we're in perfect balance, and then you just cut that balance in half.

18:13 Right, what happens? What happens?

18:15 Sure, a lot of things happen. And I just want to be clear, this is just the animal species, right? Not plants.

18:21 Let's assume they didn't cut the plants enough. Let's leave the plants alone.

18:24 Makes a big difference.

18:27 So it's actually.

18:31 A phenomenon that might be potentially very helpful to the planet. That's what Thanos said.

18:36 That's what he said. That's what Thanos said.

18:39 Well, the movie is fairly accurate in terms of how it's portrayed from what I've heard. And what would happen is that everything would be cut in half. So we'd see a tremendous loss. You know, people would be traumatized. There would be a lot of other kind of large brained animals that would be traumatized, right? Like the whales and the elephants and the gorillas that we've noticed can exhibit emotions similar to people.

19:04 And also grieve. They grieve death as elephants grieve death. So do gorillas and other apes.

19:10 But go ahead. Right, right.

19:11 We've even seen them shed tears and cry in sad situations. So there would be trauma, right? And so for some species, that might actually impact what happens next in terms of the future of the species, right? But in general, what's going to happen is a whole lot of reproduction. And remembering that reproduction is different for different types of species.

19:32 So something like a whale might reproduce only a couple of times in its life. But something like a bacteria, which is arguably one of these small living organisms, will reproduce like that. And especially with extra space, which means less competition for resources, we might actually see a huge spike in some populations of animal species.

19:57 So if you think about if you have.

19:58 A small population of deer or some kind of herbivore and a huge meadow full of food, full of plant food for them to graze in, they're going to get bigger and fatter. And in the ecological world, that means more fit. And so when they're more fit, they're better able to give birth probably younger, probably more often in their lifetime and put more genes into the gene pool.

20:21 So we'll see a huge spike in populations. maybe even beyond what ecologists call a carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is a term that we hear right now a lot when we talk about the human population of the world and whether we reach carrying capacity or surpassed carrying capacity. The number of people or the number of.

20:41 This would be the maximum number of people you would say. That's what you're saying.

20:44 Maximum number for the resource load, for the availability of resources, the maximum number to stay in that equilibrium. So what often happens is we'll see a population actually spike and overshoot carrying capacity, and then we'll see another kind of mass death event, and it'll get back into equilibrium. So it would actually technically be kind of an ecologist's dream to see this happen, especially in theory, because we'd be able to test out a lot of our theories.

21:10 So it would overshoot?

21:13 It would overshoot, yeah. My prediction is that Depending, you know, different species and different populations of organisms would overshoot at different times. So like I'm saying, like a deer population, herbivores would probably get there quicker than like, whales or elephants or people even.

21:29 And rabbits would get there first. Exactly. You can bet on that, yeah.

21:36 But wouldn't you see, so I guess that means that you would not see the same resulting population explosion or at least a different mix of animals. Right, because for instance, if you see a proliferation of rabbits or small rodents, right, then wouldn't you see a proliferation of owls or coyotes or their natural predators as well? Because these guys are now going to be well fed, too.

22:07 Absolutely. The animal community all depends on resources. And when I mean resources, I mean food and shelter. Seems like shelter isn't going to be cut in half.

22:16 Right.

22:17 All of those abiotic resources, water, you know, ground rocks, that kind of thing. that's all going to still be there. So there's going to be plenty of shelter for everyone, all the owls, all the fox, all them, but a lot more food, especially in the terms of plants for the herbivores and then more herbivores for the carnivores. So I think that life will go on just fine and it'll be really interesting to watch.

22:43 There was a part of the movie you may remember where they said, well, how has the earth been since this is it? They said, well, the water is cleaner. The air is cleaner. They went down the list of all the, the bad things we humans have done to the earth, and it all got cleaned up.

22:56 Yeah, just by us not being here. We didn't even have to do anything. Just not be here. Just the absence. Exactly. It's like an asshole at a party.

23:04 You know what I mean?

23:05 Once he's leave, wow, the party's great. Who knew that this guy was ruining the party?

23:12 All right, another question.

23:14 This is 33 Kyleford from Instagram says, if Thanos... had used the stones to shrink all living creatures to half the size, would that theoretically have had the same positive effect on the allocation of resources?

23:28 Yeah, ecologically. Right. So little people don't use as much stuff. Half as much resources. So do you think that would have the same effect?

23:38 It would have a pretty profound effect. And again, it all depends on if we're including plants as these resources, right?

23:45 Let's just do animals, just animals for now.

23:48 That makes me concerned because big plants like trees and such and little tiny animals might have a pretty significant mismatch for a lot of the needs of those animals. I'm kind of putting humans aside because I think little humans would probably be fine. We'd figure it out. But if little humans are eating gigantic carrots and stuff like that, I think that might actually be good for us, right?

24:09 Like more food to go around. But a lot of animals depend on the right size and ratio of So if you think of, like, insects, right, I guess they're technically animals. And so if we have these teeny tiny little bees but giant flowers, it might actually disrupt a lot of important pollination that we as people depend on.

24:30 So there is something very important about maintaining size ratios.

24:34 Ecologists think this is the kind of stuff you guys think about, like, professionally.

24:38 I mean, you know, if you're going to subject me to a fantasy movie like this, I'm really going to pull it apart, yeah. It's my job.

24:44 It's my job.

24:47 All right, Ray, thanks for being on StarTalk. Ray, it's great to have you at arm's reach here, even though you're on Skype. You're in Washington right now, but next time you're in town, we'll get you live on the show and talk more about this stuff.

24:59 Thank you again.

25:00 Excellent.

25:01 Take care.

25:01 Bye.

25:02 Bye.

25:02 So she's in Washington because she's a fellow with the National Geographic Society.

25:05 Very cool.

25:06 As well as being a visiting scientist here.

25:08 Nice.

25:09 Yeah. Very nice. Got more for me, Chuck. Yes, we do.

25:11 Wellesley Tang says, hi, Dr. Tyson and Mr. Nice.

25:17 Really?

25:18 I'm Wellesley, hailing from New Jersey. The question for both of you, if you had the power of the Infinity Gauntlet. What would you do? Wow, so the Infinity Gauntlet gives you pretty much the power to do anything that you can conceive of in your mind.

25:31 I know, so that's dangerous power. That's dangerous power. That's too much power.

25:36 That's way too much power. It's unrestricted power.

25:38 It is.

25:39 It's beyond godlike.

25:41 Right.

25:41 Because even God has rules.

25:43 Right.

25:44 The Infinity Gauntlet basically says there are no rules. You can do whatever you want.

25:48 God created the universe with the rules that are in it. Right. This is like a Spinoza universe where- There's the laws of gravity and quantum physics.

25:55 And those are rules.

25:56 And those are rules. And if you've got all the stones lined up, then even the laws of the universe do not contain you. Right. So you could do anything that's wild. Okay, here's what I would do. You ready? I would do all I can to increase happiness.

26:19 Interesting. Now, but, now I'm going to get philosophical with you. would you increase happiness as a result of circumstance, which means that everyone finds happiness in their life on their own, or would you just make people happy? Now you're getting deep.

26:42 Exactly. I'm very yin-yang on this. I don't think you can know happiness fully without having never seen sadness. interesting, and I agree. This is why rich people can get very upset over things that poor people can't even imagine having gotten upset, getting upset about. My God, the Volvo's in the shop again. The Volvo, no, the Maybach. Right, the Maybach. I can't believe. Why do you sound like Thurston Howell? That's my favorite rich person. Love you. So, so, It would be, I don't have the recipe for how I would make that happen, but I know in my day, I try to make sure there's somebody out there that's slightly happier because I exist in this world today. Oh, that's nice. And it's just helping them across the street.

27:40 I don't know. It's anything simple. So it would be awkward. In the movie with Jim Carrey, with God, what's the name of that one?

27:51 Bruce Almighty.

27:51 Bruce Almighty in that film. Mm-hmm. Jim Carrey becomes God temporarily. Yes. And he just helps people in ways with blanket decisions and realize it has consequences. Right. And if you don't really think it through completely, the act of trying to help everybody ends up hurting everyone. Right. Right. So I'd have to really think that through. But I would want to increase the amount of total happiness in the world.

28:17 Cool.

28:17 Because misery is something that humans have lived too long with.

28:22 Yeah. Interesting. I would make the 76ers win a championship. All right, here we go.

28:28 I'd have them play the Knicks and have the Knicks win. The Knicks haven't won since I was in middle school. Okay. Okay.

28:33 All right, here we go. The one thing, this is Far Dalstrom. Far Dalstrom says, there's one thing that bugged me about the movie. Half the population has gone on Earth. We must have changed our agriculture for that. Then suddenly they come back. Wouldn't that lead to world starvation?

28:53 I think if you get rid of half the people, some of those people are going to be farmers. Yes. I mean, think of the people who are producing the products that feed the rest of us. So if you have a farm that requires 100 people to run and you kill half the people, the remaining 50 can't now run the farm at all. Because everybody has their job.

29:17 You need farms half the size. So, yeah, I think Thanos really didn't think this through. And that's what kills me about him. Thanos is an idiot. He is really just a stupid, stupid man.

29:27 He's an idiot. He's an idiot.

29:30 I think I'm really nice to people, to those that survive. Exactly. I'm helping them. I've helped you all. My destiny has been to help you all.

29:40 And it's like, no, bro, no. All right, this is Daryl Chin-Fat.

29:45 And I tweeted right when I saw the film that the amount of resources in the universe, if you are spacefaring, is essentially unlimited. So forget the fact that you're running out of resources on Earth. If you have access to space... Space? With asteroids and comets and meteors and all the.

30:04 Rest of that?

30:05 Come on now.

30:06 Yeah, and by the way, how about that? How about it's just like, I'm gonna snap my fingers and take care of everybody.

30:11 Thank you.

30:12 Why do I have to eliminate half the people?

30:14 Why don't I snap my fingers and provide for everybody?

30:16 Right, I'm gonna snap my fingers, we're gonna have quadruple the resources, which means it'll take.

30:21 Us four times as long. And then you call me when you're done and I'll snap my fingers again. Right.

30:26 Exactly.

30:26 Right. All right.

30:28 Thanos, you're a dick. Okay, so this is Daryl Chinfat. Chinfat. Yes.

30:36 Okay.

30:36 How is Captain Marvel apparently able to travel faster than light to save the day in the final battle and also have a beeper that can signal her while she's in other galaxies?

30:46 That's so weird. So it seems to me that Captain Marvel is supremely powerful on a level that should preclude the need for any other Avenger. Well, yeah. Why do I need someone who shoots bows and arrows when I have Captain Marvel? Why do I need vibranium if I have Captain Marvel? Why do I need Iron Man who can fly with jets when she can move through the vacuum of space?

31:16 Without a space suit. Without a space suit.

31:18 Yeah. Why do I need a Hulk who smashes things when Captain... Why do I need any other Avenger other than Captain Marvel? Plus, she glows.

31:27 Yes.

31:28 Yes.

31:29 What else do you need? You don't need anything. Now, here, I have issues. That's her personality, by the way. That glow. That glow, I'm just saying.

31:35 That's a glow.

31:36 That's a glow. That's her personality.

31:37 Yes, yes. Plus, if she has that much power, how is it that she couldn't move... the glove from one side of the battlefield to the minivan.

31:50 Now, that's, that, that really pissed me off.

31:53 She can carry spaceships across the galaxy to land softly.

31:56 Yes, and to land softly.

31:58 Okay? Touch, three-point landing. Three-point touch that, soft landing. Three-point soft landing. Soft landing, a spaceship a thousand times bigger than she is. Right. She can't move a glove across a battlefield to a minivan.

32:08 I gotta say, that was really very, like, that's one of those movie mechanisms where you're like, come on.

32:14 I know, right? This is the most creative you could be. Right. That's like her running away and then tripping on a rock or something.

32:21 Yeah, I mean, it would have been far more cool if Thanos summoned a thousand of those little minions to hit her all at once.

32:28 All at once.

32:29 Or something like that. Something commensurate with her power.

32:31 With her power. Yes. Right. Not, oh, I tripped.

32:35 Like that's basically.

32:37 Oh, I tripped! Oh, the glove! Oh! I'm like, what? What the hell just happened? I could fly through space. Right. And I, you know. Yeah, yeah. So, all right. So now, if you want her to move through space, you can imagine that she quantum teleports. All right. Okay? I don't know if you knew this, but I'll explain this. Do you want the full explanation?

33:02 I want this.

33:03 You want the full explanation?

33:03 Why not?

33:04 Okay. So, if you put water in a glass, it can't get out because the glass has walls. So the walls are boundaries between the location of the water and the table. Does it make sense that if the walls were not there, the water would then settle down and spill all over the table? That's obvious. So what that means is the water has a lower energy state it could occupy, but the walls are preventing it. Because if you move the walls, the water won't stay there. It goes on its own. It's called a lower energy state.

33:41 By the way, the table is higher than the ground. If you put a crack in the table, it'll go through the table and hit the ground. It prefers to be even on the ground than it does to be on the top of the table, than it did to be in your water glass. Quantum mechanically, you can trap a particle with the walls of a glass. It's an energy well. You can trap it there. Well, sorry, let's look at just the water. Or a marble stuck in a little, in a, like a skateboard park. And the marble can roll up and down.

34:17 Back and forth.

34:18 Back and forth. There it is. It's not leaving. If you want it to leave, push it with fast enough energy so it goes over the top and then it goes down to the ground level. But you have to give it energy to get over that barrier to then escape. And now it escapes. Okay, watch. It turns out. Because particles can also be waves. The particle that's trapped in the well is also a wave that exists not only everywhere in the well, parts of that wave exist outside the well. So the particle has a chance, a small chance of existing outside of the well, a very high chance of existing in the well. So most of the times you look at the particle, it's inside the well.

35:01 Every now and then, it escapes. It's outside. Correct. to watch it escape, it escapes instantly. It breaks through the barrier, and no matter the width of that barrier, it goes from one side of the barrier to the other in zero time. So if she has control over the quantum continuum, she can then base, it's called tunneling, she could tunnel through any space barrier and be wherever she wants in the universe instantaneously.

35:34 In effect entangled with the entire universe.

35:37 Very clever, yes. That would be a way to have her move through space in the way that she does. She would be quantum entangled with every location in the universe. So that she could then materialize herself wherever she needs to be. Having tunneled there through these barriers, correct. That's pretty wild. But she still can't move a damn glove into a minivan. Oh, I tripped. I sent a tunnel.

36:06 I sent a tunnel to the van. Why didn't I tunnel to the van?

36:10 Why not tunnel to the damn van?

36:13 Tunnel to the van. Tunnel across the damn galaxy. Oh, my God. All right.

36:17 Next.

36:17 Wow, that was great.

36:18 Okay, cool. Okay, here we go. Here we go.

36:21 Ron Sparkman. He goes, at the beginning.

36:23 I'm here for you, Ron. Give it to me. Here we go.

36:25 At the beginning of the film, Tony and Nebula. are in space trying to return from a Saturnian moon. So they're in a spaceship in space.

36:33 Right.

36:34 So they're on Titan in a spaceship in space.

36:37 Moon of Saturn is Titan.

36:38 Correct. But the sky they show makes it look like they are in deep space. What should that view leaving the Saturnian system actually have looked like?

36:50 Like they're in deep space. Because if you're not on Earth, if you're not on Earth, then every place is deep space to you. There's nothing attenuating your view. There's no, well, yes, there's space gas clouds, but there's no atmosphere you're trying to look through as you have here on Earth. So once, oh, the only difference is the sun is relatively nearby. So don't look that way. That'd be too bright. That would knock out some of your view. because it would be too bright. Too much light. Too much light. You look the opposite direction, it will look as though you were anywhere else in the galaxy. Wow. It would be a space view. It's very beautiful. That's got to be amazing. Yes, and have a ring system that you're pulling away from.

37:32 Right.

37:32 Oh, it's beautiful. Oh, now I want to go to Saturn. Do you know Edgar Mitchell?

37:39 Okay.

37:40 Recently died a couple years ago. Oh, okay. Paul 14 astronaut. All right. We're losing them and they're not getting replaced because nobody's been anywhere outside of low Earth orbit since 1972. So this is the only people that have left Earth for a destination. Edgar Mitchell, on the way back, was positioned in, back from the moon, was positioned in the capsule in such a way that the rotation of the capsule always had the plane of the solar system in view.

38:12 So as he rotated, Earth would go by, and the moon, and the sun, and the planets. Three days of this. Wow. This changed him.

38:23 I'm sure it did.

38:24 He became dizzy. Okay, apart from the throwing up. He became spiritual. Okay. He was connecting to the cosmos.

38:39 Yes.

38:40 In ways no one else ever had or perhaps ever will. And he started participating in these sort of institutes where people are wondering is there some other spiritual way of knowing about the world other than just our mechanical ways at a lab table. And so my point is if you're out there and you see Saturn and its rings and deep space and the sun and the rest of the planets, your reaction does not surprise me. And you didn't even witness that. And I saw it on IMAX.

39:15 That was really good. But if you see that stuff for real life, you're a different person coming back.

39:20 I believe it. Oh, yeah. I was different when I saw Saturn from basically a backyard through a telescope. Because you can actually see the rings of Saturn. You can see the rings of Saturn and it's moons. It's an amazing thing. It's really wild.

39:33 That's why my desk lamp to this day is Saturn.

39:35 Yes, it is.

39:36 Which I made when I was in seventh grade woodshop class. Wow. You press down the ring and the light turns on. That's.

39:44 That damn thing still works, too.

39:45 That's right.

39:46 You're in the wrong business.

39:49 No, I'm in the right business, Chuck. You should have started a lamp company. Tyson Lamps. All right, cool. That's been my desk lamp since middle school, ever since I built it in seventh grade.

40:00 That's really cool, too.

40:01 All right, what else you got?

40:03 All right, here we go.

40:05 Thank you, Ron. Here we go. This is Living to Learn from Instagram.

40:11 It says, oh. This is so cool. What was the whole Mobius strip thing? So remember, Tony, he figures out the quantum key to time travel by asking Jarvis for a Mobius strip. And then he actually calculates something using the Mobius strip.

40:34 And I don't know.

40:35 From there, I'm like, OK. I don't know if there was any real science in there after that. So it's called gobbledygook. Special kind of movie science. So there is such a thing as a Mobius strip. And a Mobius strip is a fascinating thing. It's a fascinating thing. If you want to make one, cut a ribbon. So a long, thin strip.

40:55 A ribbon.

40:56 Of any length.

40:57 Doesn't matter. Make one a foot long. And maybe two inches wide. And then you could tape the ends together to make a loop. Not the sides together, that would make a long cylinder. To take the two short ends, that would make a loop. And that's nothing odd about a loop. There's an inside of the loop.

41:20 And the outside of the loop.

41:21 You can paint the inside if you wanted. You can paint the outside. Instead this time, instead of connecting them that way, give one of those edges a turn. Okay. Okay, 180-degree twist. 180-degree twist, okay. A twist. All right. Then tape them together.

41:39 So now what you have is kind of an S-shaped, like, almost like figure eight that turns in and out on itself. So it goes in and it goes out.

41:53 It is way more profound than that. Okay. Okay, you ready?

41:57 Go ahead.

41:58 That thing has only one side. You could draw a line along the length of it as you pull the ribbon through. And without ever lifting your pencil off the page, without ever crossing the edge of the page, you will land back where you started and you would have put a line on all surfaces of it. It is a ribbon that has only one side. Ooh.

42:33 I'm trying to picture this in my mind.

42:34 And if you cut along that line, if you cut it in half along the line you just drew, you make a single loop twice as big. You don't cut it into two pieces. Oh, okay. Wait, wait. So it just becomes... Wait a minute. I... You're feeling it, maybe you're feeling it. I'm pretty visual. You're a visual dude.

42:53 No, so I'm saying, because what's happening is the twist now, as you cut, as it opens up, it just becomes a circle.

43:02 A bigger circle, okay, that's what it is. It's a big circle. Okay, so now, the point is, so you throw in a Mobius strip, which is cool and has a dimensionality interest to it.

43:11 Okay.

43:11 Okay? But then, you put a time travel spin on it. Right. All right, so if your path through time is on a Mobius strip. you can come back to where you were, but you're not exactly where you were. You're on the other side of that space.

43:26 Right, but even though it only has one side. It only has one side! Ah, see, that's it.

43:31 Ah, look at that. Oh, I see what they did there.

43:34 All right.

43:36 So if you had to create mumbo jumbo gobbledygook, Mobius Strip is the way to go. Mobius Strip will get that for you. And so you come back, and you are right adjacent to that other part of the universe, except you have no access yet until you go back around. And that's how.

43:51 That's how you principle you could do it. So that's the idea. Well, I'm thinking. I'm just trying to give them some benefit of the doubt. Well, no, it makes perfect sense.

43:57 Right.

43:58 But it makes no sense in terms of time travel. It just makes philosophical sense in terms of returning to that place.

44:03 If you needed to come with some hocus pocus mumbo jumbo.

44:05 Why not?

44:06 Why not do a, by the way, there's three-dimensional Mobius strips called Klein bottles.

44:10 Yes, now I've heard of that.

44:11 You've heard of a Klein bottle?

44:12 I've heard of a Klein bottle, but I didn't know it.

44:14 Was a Mobius strip. Yeah, it's a bottle that actually has no inside. Because the inside is also the outside in four dimensions. Exactly. So the Klein bottle you build in three dimensions is what it would look like projected onto three dimensions from a four-dimensional space.

44:29 Interesting.

44:30 Wow. Chuck, we have hardly any time left. I'm doing a lightning round. Let's do it.

44:34 Okay, here we go.

44:35 All right, this is John C.

44:37 He says, what is the biggest scientific inaccuracy in the movie in your estimation?

44:42 Inaccuracy.

44:44 So many.

44:44 It's not how, I know I'm typecast that way, but that's not how I think of movies. I think of, Were they internally consistent in the wrong science that they're invoking? Right?

44:58 And if that, then you give them a shout out for at least.

45:00 Hey, listen. Right.

45:01 We actually took the science and took it to its awful conclusion.

45:05 Right. But we stayed consistent to that awful conclusion. Okay. So here it is. On all the spaceships, they made no reference of any gravity generator. And they all should have been weightless on their spaceships. Or have met the boots. Floating through space. Yeah, but they didn't show that or give any shout-out to it. Right, nobody was weightless. Nobody was weightless at any time. Never. And the weight matters because you could be standing upside down in the ship, and if it's rotating, all of that works. They didn't give any thought to that, especially the Guardians of the Galaxy people. Okay. Or creatures. Right, yeah. All right, that's great. Okay, good.

45:36 And actually, that's a good one. Milky Blue Moon wants to know this. How is it that the Cap, as in Captain America, can throw his shield and it comes back to him like a boomerang? Because it is a Frisbee.

45:45 Let's be honest.

45:46 Wait, wait, wait.

45:47 I thought it doesn't just come back to him. It bounces off of things back to him. That's what I thought it, right? It doesn't just come back like it's on a yo-yo. No, he throws it, it hits its target, and it comes back to him. Otherwise, he'd have to run after it every time he threw it. You know what?

46:01 I don't know, but you're right. You're right. It may be hitting something. So if there's a thing facing you, there will always be an angle with which you can throw something where it bounces straight back to you.

46:11 So he's just good at pool. He's good at the cue shot.

46:15 Exactly.

46:16 The cue ball shot. He's banking stuff.

46:18 Right. I never remember seeing it just go and come back. Just play frisbee with himself or boomerang with himself.

46:24 Right.

46:24 It hits something and comes back. Okay. Okay, good. Unless I missed a movie that he was in where he did that. Okay, next.

46:30 Plus it's very boingy, right? It's very boingy.

46:34 So it'll go and then retain the energy, the coil energy and come back.

46:39 Okay, next. Ryan Lenny from Instagram wants to know this. Why didn't Ant-Man go up Thanos' butt like you said?

46:46 What do you mean like I said? What do you mean like I said? Okay.

46:52 That's pretty funny.

46:53 He'll have to wait for The director's cut. The after hours director's cut on that one. All right, last one.

46:59 Carlos Frangello from Instagram says this. Tony Stark says something like the Planck scale messes with the Deutsch proposition and creates the EPR paradox.

47:09 So what the is he talking about? Forgive me, I don't know what the Deutsch proposition is, but he did mention the EPR paradox, which is the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. That's a real thing. And Einstein is Einstein. The other two are other physicists. and they got together and explored in the discovery, in the dawn of quantum mechanics, it's like this is some weird stuff. Is it real? Can we create a thought experiment that is a paradox that will reveal either a new truth or unravel the truth that we think we've just discovered? And so I don't know if there's a Deutsch proposal. I think they just threw that in there. If there is, I don't know it.

47:47 But EPR is a very well-known paradox.

47:49 So the EPR paradox is real.

47:51 Well, no. So Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradox. This is back in the early days of quantum physics where we're really scratching our heads. I wasn't there. My people. My physics progenitors here. They're scratching their heads. What does it mean to not be able to fully know the reality of an object, of a particle? Heisenberg. you can't simultaneously know the momentum of a particle or its position precisely at the same time. So Einstein's uncertainty principle means you can't know with accuracy the position of a particle and its momentum, which means its velocity and which speed and direction it's going.

48:37 You can't know both simultaneously. The more you know of one, the less you know of the other. So if you know the velocity of something, you don't know where it is. Right. If you know where it is, then you know exactly how fast it's going, even though you don't know where it is. So this would be good, Chuck, next time you stop for a speeding ticket, and the cop says, do you realize you've been going 65 miles an hour? Yeah, but I don't know where I am. And if the cop is quantum physics literate, I bet they let you go.

49:07 Yeah, that's going to happen.

49:10 So they had thought experiments to explore the nature of that reality. And it was confronting all of the thinkers of the day to sharpen their ideas about what quantum physics is and what it could mean.

49:21 So at least they made an attempt to put some real science.

49:24 Into this movie. Yeah, it was an attempt. It was an attempt.

49:26 Okay.

49:26 Another one. Give me a third one. That's it.

49:28 We got through all the questions?

49:29 We got through them. Oh, my gosh.

49:32 Oh, wait.

49:32 There's one more.

49:33 One more. Go.

49:33 It says, Neil, I am Groot. That's the question.

49:39 That is a question.

49:40 That's a question.

49:40 Okay, so. I think most people in life never really know who they are. So that, really, at the end of the day, we should be deeply respectful of Groot, who does.

49:57 Right, because he knows I am Groot. That is a cosmic perspective.

50:05 I am Groot. This is a spoilers version. This is the first ever spoilers StarTalk. Yeah. We assume you've all seen Endgame and other Avengers movies related to it. So that's what we did. We just spoiled it for you or enlightened you, one or the other. Yep. We can't spoil it if you've already seen it. If you've already seen it, you can't be spoiled. Yeah, you've just been enlightened.

50:30 Right.

50:30 So I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm always thanking Chuck. Hey, man.

50:35 It's always good to be here.

50:35 All right. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.