Are entangled particles connected by wormholes? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice answer a grab bag of questions about the Fermi Paradox, Dinosaurs v. Aliens, our cosmological horizon, and more!

You just fall in, okay, because it's gravity

But because it has more gravity than Earth does, if you let it go, it and Earth would fall towards each other and Earth would lose.

It would eat the entire Earth systematically.

It'll break apart Earth and just chew it and burp it.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition Grab Bag.

All kinds of good stuff all up in the grab bag people just reach for whatever they want

You put your hand and you don't know what you're gonna pull out.

and it's all patreon members $5 a month get you access all right that's do it

here we go let's start off with waste no time no time we're jumping right into it Kate Warsaw Poland here lately I've been wondering about the Fermi paradox.

Do you think it could be possible we have found no advanced civilizations or have not been found because of the speed of light?

Or could it be that they have done to their planets what we are currently doing to ours and they're just all dead

okay all right so let me remind people about the Fermi paradox Enrico Fermi he was an Italian-American physicist in 20th century physicist a brilliant guy and he did an actual calculation on the back of an envelope, as we call it.

So, it wasn't some grand chalkboard calculation, just he made some estimates and he said, all right, I know the speed of light is fast, but let's say they have a civilization that can go maybe 1 fifth the speed of light, some fraction of this 10% the speed of light.

Alright, but let's say 10% the speed of light.

How long would it take you to cross the galaxy?

The galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across.

So if you go 10% the speed of light, it'll take you 10 times that.

All right, that sounds long, but hang on a minute.

That's not where you're first going to go.

You're going to go from our star system to the nearby star system.

And then you're going to pitch tent, grow civilization, and now you're gonna launch again.

And then, but now you're not just gonna go to 1 more, you're gonna go to 2 more.

And then each of those 2 will go to 2 more each.

And so your civilization spreads out rapidly, exponentially, all right, and you'll get to nearby stars in 10, 20, 30, 50 years, all right, and you just have a new civilization there and they send out 2 more, 2 more probes.

What he concluded was, if any sensible assumptions you make, the whole galaxy and all available planets can be colonized within a few million years.

That is short compared with the lifetime of the galaxy.

Suppose you had an advanced civilization that started 5000000000 years ago at the birth of the Sun, a whole other star that's been around, all right, then they could be all over the galaxy and we don't see them, where are they?

Okay, so then everyone is saying well how come we don't see them?

Yes, 1 of the reasons are they could be just like us and destroy their own planet, okay, they're so smart they figured out how to destroy themselves.

Another 1 is space travel is just too hard.

God, We keep trying to go to space, and we can't.

So, all right, So that's 1 of the reasons.

Another 1, this is my favorite of them, is that whatever genetic profile, whether or not they use genes, whatever is in you that wants you to colonize planets, if that's driving your entire civilization, and you go this way, and you get 2 planets, and you get 2 planets, there'll come a time where we both want the same planet.

Why do they have, why is their planet so much nicer than our planet?

You know we should do, you know, I'm just saying guys, what we should do?

We should go over there and take that planet.

Just because- That's colonization in a nutshell.

Now, now, listen, just because we're on planet Caucasoid and they're on planet Negro doesn't mean that we're doing it just because of that.

So if that's the case, then the whole system will implode, which kind of happened with European colonists.

England had colonies, France had colonies, Spain had colonies, Portugal had colonies, Dutch had colonies, and you reach a point where there's not enough land to go around and they fight each other for control of that land.

So we saw that play out on Earth's surface, if you have this expansionist mentality.

So it could be that whatever is the urge that would want to make that happen in the first place has the seeds of its own unraveling.

Wow, so the curiosity that brings you to want to branch out And the drive, more importantly, is the thing that is your undoing, because that same drive caused you to lust for the very things that you want to achieve in others.

Like I'm the only person that can have this, cause I want to do this.

And I wouldn't call it curiosity so much as hegemony.

But there's a third category or fourth, I lost track.

They have come to Earth and they tried to visit and they saw all of the space debris orbiting Earth and they said, uh-uh.

Look at all that junk in their front yard.

They have visited, but they accidentally landed during Comic-Con.

They're like, listen, we kept saying, take me to your leader.

People would laugh at us and go, good 1, good 1.

Yeah, so I think that 1, that's the most fun 1 for me to think about.

Or they rather than destroy us, which is every movie wants them to do, They phoned home and said, on earth, they're just like us.

So those are the prevailing, there might be others, those are the ones I carry with me.

All right, let's go to Omar Marcelino and Omar says Hello, dr.

Tyson and Chuck Omar here originally from the boogie down Bronx

living in Texas now my son Roman who was 7 wants to know this from you.

Dr Tyson If you had a chance to see only 1, would you rather see dinosaurs live and roaming the planet or aliens?

I got, you know, we see them in the movies and they're pretty good.

We have good bones and good archeological.

So I'm gonna have to pick aliens only because even though I'd love me some dinosaurs, we already have pretty good representations of them in movies.

And if it asked me to take it to our leader, I ain't taking it to the White House.

I might go to Washington, where the National Academy of Sciences meets.

I got the guy's name finally right, and then I messed up the state.

I am interested in knowing what your favorite astronomical discovery of all time is.

And Lord Nice, what is your favorite thing that you've learned on StarTalk?

So my favorite is the fact that the discovery that we, all life on earth and earth itself owes its chemical origins to stars that have exploded after having manufactured them in its core that exploded scattering that enrichment across the galaxy reaching pristine gas clouds that would form a next generation of stars and planets, 1 of which was ours.

That discovery was in 1957 in a research paper by 4 authors.

1 of them is a couple that were married, Burbage Burbage, Fowler and Hoyle.

And that is basically the origin of the element.

It's a spiritual gift of modern astrophysics to civilization for us to now be able to tell you we are not just figuratively so we are literally stardust Wow and not only that as we are alive in this universe, because we contain stardust, the universe is alive within us.

That is my favorite astronomical discovery.

Chuck, what's your favorite thing you've learned?

Well, I just learned right there No, everything is my favorite thing that I've learned on this really Oh God, yes, I tell people all the time that my job is to take a master class in astrophysics with the world's foremost science communicator.

And like, who could have a better job than that?

Okay, so you want a diploma or something?

You're bucking for a certificate of commission.

You know, it'd be kind of cool if I could get a little certificate, just, Chuck is not as stupid as you think.

Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Wait, wait, keep the ball of wax rolling?

It's just something that comedians used to say when they were MC shows, all right guys, let's keep this ball of wax rolling.

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Cosmic Queries – Mirror, Mirror