Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Uploaded: 2022-11-30T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

I don't want every one of my sentences to sound like Barry White.
Is that what it sounds like in your ears?
In headphones they do.
It's like, oh, hey, baby.
I just can't.
Whereas without the headphones, I'm just regular.
All right, ready?
Oh, ready.
Good to see you.
Hey.
What's happening?
Joe.
I'm excited to talk to you.
I'm excited to talk to you about a bunch of things, but I've been paying
attention to
all the Webb Telescope stuff.
Oh, my gosh.
Fascinating.
It's all that.
Could you please explain the difference in the ability of the capabilities of
this telescope
versus what we've had previously?
Yeah.
So, first of all, it's all that.
And the excitement was in part because so much could have gone wrong with this
thing.
And the fact that nothing went wrong, we were ecstatic.
Could you explain how complicated it is to get something like that?
So, one of the great challenges that we face is, how do you put a telescope in
orbit that's
bigger than the rocket that's going to launch it?
Is that even possible?
And the Hubble Telescope, do you know what set the size of that 94-inch
diameter mirror?
That's the biggest mirror you could fit in the payload of the space shuttle.
That's what set the size of that telescope.
Big as it was, we would have made it bigger if the space shuttle were bigger.
Now, I don't know if you've seen the Hubble Telescope, but there's a replica of
it at the
Air and Space Museum.
Let's take a photo of it.
And it's there hanging from the ceiling, but if you want to know how, it's
about the size
of a Greyhound bus.
So, the space shuttle deployed a Greyhound bus into orbit, which is the Hubble
Space Telescope.
And the value of the Hubble was that you could update it with servicing
missions, and it was
serviced many times.
And as a result, it lived within our culture for three decades.
There are people who came of age only ever knowing the majesty of the universe
as delivered
to you by the Hubble Telescope.
30 years worth of this.
Think about it.
Most other telescopes, they put into orbit, and they have a five-year mission,
and then
they come down.
So, they don't have a chance to get inside you, to become something that you...
Oh, you got a nice visual there.
So, that's the Hubble Telescope on the left, which every year, every year, I
post a tweet,
at the end of the Stanley Cup, and I say, the Stanley Cup and the Hubble Telescope
had
the same designer.
Really?
No, I'm just kidding.
No, just look at the thing.
It looks like the Stanley Cup.
A little bit.
A lot.
I wouldn't confuse the two if they were in a room together.
So, here's the thing.
So, notice the Hubble Telescope, its diameter is the spherical shape that fits
in the spherical
payload of the space shuttle.
So, now, we want to put a bigger telescope into orbit.
How do you do that?
And so, this is where you need engineers.
Clever engineers.
We say, here's a rocket, one of the most powerful rockets we can use, but the
fairing, that's
the place where you hold the payload, can only be so big.
And they say, all right, why don't we fold the telescope?
Now, how are you going to fold the mirror?
Oh, you turn the mirror into segments, hexagons.
Hexagons, one of only three shapes that can tile a surface, a square, a
triangle, and a
hexagon.
No other shape can do this.
So, well, you can have other irregular shapes that can match up.
You can tessellate, what it's called.
But if you have what's called a regular polygon, so here in the image there,
what you can see,
it's all of the mirror segments.
Those fold into a narrow structure, along with the unfurling solar panels, as
well as the
heat shields.
Notice how it's made at Northrop Grumman.
By the way, Grumman has a long history in helping NASA put stuff in space.
The LEM, Lunar Excursion Module, remember that?
The thing that landed on the moon?
That was designed and built in Bethpage, Long Island at Grumman Aerospace.
And so this is, and you go to Bethpage today, people still stand tall because
they had aunts
and uncles who worked on that project.
Space is a force of nature unto itself in our sense of pride, in our sense of
achievement,
in our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future, lest
we continue
to regress and move back into the cave, which we came.
There it is all folded up in the image we now see, for those who are watching
this.
And you slip that into a fairing, and then you launch it a million miles from
Earth,
opposite the sun from Earth.
And it unfurls like petals of a flower.
Is there an animation of how that goes down?
Oh yeah, they have a slow-mo animation.
Sure, he can find it.
And it's the deployment, how it deployed as it was on its way to its location,
which is one of the Lagrangian points in orbit.
For every two objects that orbit each other, there are five Lagrangian points.
So here we are unfolding.
So there we have solar panels coming out the side, and there's the
communication antenna.
And it has a unique set of baffles that shield it from sunlight,
so that the mirror and the detector can be very, very cold.
Because it's designed, it's specially tuned to observe infrared that comes to
us from space.
And infrared, as you may know, we normally associate it with heat.
Well, how am I going to detect something that's very, very cold in space
if my detector is hotter than what I'm trying to detect?
You can't, there's no way to see something that is warmer than the temperature
of your detector.
So your detector has to be very cold, extremely cold.
So these are the baffles, and there are many, many layers.
So that when sunlight hits one layer, that layer absorbs it and re-radiates it
in both directions, forward and back.
So there's less that goes to the next layer.
So then the next layer re-radiates it, and by the time it gets to the fourth
layer,
hardly anything goes towards the telescope.
And so it's insulated, and it drops to deep space, cold temperatures.
And it's literally where the sun don't shine right now.
So the solar panels are getting the solar energy from the bottom.
Yeah, because that's the direction the sun is, correct.
So it radiates off the bottom, and those are the things that protect it.
And we see how all those layers fan out.
All the layers, yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah, and it's specifically tuned for the infrared part of the spectrum.
You remember the spectrum.
So you have, like, visible light, right?
Roy G. Biv, right, if you want to remember it.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Those are the parts of the spectrum we can see.
But there's light outside of this.
There's, like, beyond the violet, there's ultraviolet.
That's how you get that.
And below the red is infrared, not visible to the human eye.
By the way, insects can see ultraviolet.
We can't.
That's why bug zappers work.
You put a UV light in a bug zapper, the bugs say, oh, my gosh, I love ultraviolet.
And then they get zapped.
And we're old enough to remember before there were bug zappers, you'd had a
picnic bulb for twilight picnics.
And it's like a yellow bulb, kind of yellow, amber bulb.
It was a bug bulb.
It was sold as bug bulbs.
It's not that they repelled bugs.
It's that the bugs couldn't even see it because their whole vision is shifted
towards the ultraviolet.
And it leaves out the deep red.
Yeah.
So that's evidence we're smarter than bugs.
That's one piece.
Luckily.
That's one piece of evidence that we're smarter than bugs.
So just to bring that to a closure, the earliest forming galaxies in the
universe radiated a lot of ultraviolet.
So you might say, well, let's get an ultraviolet telescope.
No, because 14 billion years later, the expansion of the universe has red
shifted the ultraviolet into the infrared.
So if you want to see the birth of galaxies, you've got to know what they look
like in the here and the now.
And in the here and the now, it's in the infrared.
So this is a telescope specifically tuned to see galaxies born at the edge of
the universe.
And infrared also allows you to see deep into gas clouds.
Now, when they're showing you an image like this.
So right here, this is the pillars of creation, which were so named at the time
Hubble first attempted this.
We were gaga over the Hubble image of this.
And now, like the JWST, oh, my gosh.
For those who are more prone to religion, some have called this the hand of God.
Because if you look at the pillars, you can kind of picture like a, you know, a
thumb and fingers.
Yeah.
So, but regardless, this is nearby.
This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise would enshroud
what's going on.
And you get to see stars being born, planets being born.
And so what's remarkable about JWST is that to be tuned for the edge of the
universe and the birth of galaxies is the same properties you would want to see
the birth of stars.
A star is born right in front of your nose that would otherwise be cloaked by
gas.
And infrared penetrates those clouds and enables you to see it as though the
cloud isn't even there.
And you already know this because when, if you're driving through fog, okay,
you put on your fog lights.
The fog lights are not blue.
They're like reddish, amber, okay?
That improves your ability to see through the fog.
If we could see infrared, that's the kind of light you'd use, then you wouldn't
even know the fog was there.
That's why self-driving cars will be amazing.
It won't matter if it's foggy.
They'll be able to see everything.
Just give them infrared sensors.
The fog is irrelevant.
They can drive 100 miles an hour in dense fog and all the cars will see each
other.
And they want to change lanes, they tell other cars, I'm going to change lanes.
They'll part for them, open up, and we won't get 40,000 deaths a year as we
currently do from automobile accidents.
Now, how much bigger is this telescope?
So, it's about, so you want to think about collecting area.
And I forgot the exact number, something like eight times around there.
More powerful in the sense of it can see things eight times dimmer.
There you go.
So that's two, there's about two and a half squared.
It's about eight times the area.
And the technology, obviously, has improved as well.
So, like, the ability that...
Well, our detectors are better.
And let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed in,
like, the 1980s.
And it was scheduled to go up.
And then we had the Challenger accident.
And that delayed the shuttle program.
So there's Hubble sitting there in mothballs with an old Microsoft chip.
And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been.
And so the very first servicing mission swapped all that out and put in better
methods and tools for measuring what it is we always needed it to do.
So one sad part about this is that it's not serviceable.
We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon.
We haven't left low-Earth orbit since 1972.
We're not going out a million miles from Earth to fix a telescope.
So that's unfortunate.
Maybe a robotic fix?
I don't know.
To refill some of the fuel.
It needs fuel to station keep.
Didn't it get hit by a micrometeor?
Yeah.
Well, that's the brakes when you're in space.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it doesn't affect the overall performance.
That's amazing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's huge.
And micrometeors will do small damage.
But you don't want it in the middle of a meteor storm.
That would be totally bad.
Do they obviously know where some of the asteroid belts are and where some of
the nearby Earth
objects are?
Yeah.
So in this context, so first, most asteroids are in the asteroid belt.
So that's between Mars and Jupiter.
So I have an asteroid named after me.
Congratulations.
I don't mean to brag or anything.
Can't you get a star named after you online?
Not authentically.
You just get robbed.
They just pretend it's yours.
They send you a map with your name drawn in the map.
So you pay for a piece of paper.
Yeah, they claim that it gets registered with the astrophysicists, but it doesn't.
Oh.
No, the