Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1003 - Sean Carroll
Uploaded: 2017-08-25T00:29:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1003 - Sean Carroll' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-08-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1003 - Sean Carroll' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-08-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1003 - Sean Carroll

and five four three two yes how are you sir good thanks for having me up thanks
for being here man
um i wanted to ask you this because i was reading this today and i started to
freak out
uh nasa is planning on drilling into yellowstone okay to save the world i didn't
know about this
you know about this relieving pressure what are they doing yes yeah there's
been thousands
chiropractic yeah we were talking about chiropractors for the starter folks uh
i think
they they plan on like uh you know how like if you have like a giant cyst and
you you sort of make a
slice in it you can kind of squeeze everything out of there let's ever see a
doctor do that i've seen
doctors do that i've never seen nasa do this i have no idea nasa wants to send
nasa wants to spend three
billion dollars drilling into a volcano to save the united states and a
presumably a large chunk of the
world too right because there would be some sort of a nuclear winter type
scenario
where the skies would be covered with this is not your area of expertise i'm
sorry to throw this on
i wonder about the provenance of this but you know uh these are things that it's
some people's areas of
expertise but no one has figured everything out right like we don't know all
the forces that are pushing
around the earth to make volcanoes and earthquakes stuff like that go back to
that picture look at this
picture yeah that picture freaks me out that looks realistic yeah every six to
eight hundred thousand
years that thing blows sky high microsoft paint version of geophysics yeah it's
from like a geocity
site from 1994. yeah yeah i think well here's the thing they have to think
about right can you keep
this up close to you pull it sure yeah just pull it we uh there's all sorts of
disasters that could happen
to us that we don't really plan for because human lifetime is a hundred years
technology is a few
hundred years but maybe there are disasters that happen every thousand or ten
thousand years right
and they could be very bad i think solar flares are the ones to really worry
about to be honest is that
what you you're concerned with it's not my professional concern but i was once
sitting next to a
hot shot lawyer who had just been finished uh visiting washington dc to
campaign for we got to start
hardening up the electrical grid because one kind of solar flare that he says
happens every thousand
years could wipe out electricity in the united states or the world for weeks or
months millions of people
would die right so a few billion dollars and we can harden it and fix things
but who's going to spend a
few billion dollars for something that happens once every thousand years isn't
that the issue it's like
like even with preventing asteroids or doing something to avoid collisions it's
right now we don't have an
issue so we go ah we have other things to worry about we have a terrible
president we have uh you know
global warming we have this we have that there's always something that keeps us
from being rational about
the future yeah that's right and with the good news with asteroids is that
there's other good reasons to
look at the sky and map things right so the what astronomers are doing are
piggybacking
asteroid uh mapping strategies off of things they can actually get money for
right because yeah no one
is going to pony up that much money to look at the asteroid yeah well i would
think that that would be
like a really good use of money like let's let's keep an eye on the rocks that
might kill everything you
would think that everyone would save for their retirement and so forth right
but this ability to plan for
the future not what we evolved for well that's a big ability i mean that's a
big plan for the future
though i mean literally you're talking about like wasn't there one that just whizzed
by that was three
miles wide yeah but whizzed by means it was something like eight times as far
away as the moon oh is that
what it was yeah this is not there's the chances of an asteroid even though it'd
be very bad the chances
of a bad one are much smaller than some of these other things you don't comfort
me all right i'm not here for
comfort i'm here for the truth take the comfort as you will but isn't there
like there's a lot of
areas that can come from like behind the sun where the the gravity of the sun
sort of distorts the the
view not really how does that work they gotta orbit right they can't stay
behind the sun they sorry they
can there are there's what's called a lagrange point there's a place exactly
the opposite where
the earth is where you'd have to hang out if you were to be hidden from us for
a long time and you
can hang out there but you would never leave there so there probably are some
asteroids right opposite
the earth just like most planets have them so they're just sort of orbiting is
that what you're
saying yeah they're orbiting once a year uh 180 degrees away from the earth and
that's what they will be
doing until they're possible that one can come up and hit us from the bottom
when we're not looking no
that's not possible no way how's that how's that not possible no the danger is
something from far
outside uh the distant solar system that we just haven't this too far away too
dim and it wouldn't
come from like in hit where the south pole is very roughly speaking we're
looking at the whole sky
not just uh you know you can see below the south pole if you're in chile for
example where there's lots
and lots of telescopes that's where they have that what is the the giant one
they put in chile recently
that's not totally operational uh yeah there's a whole generation of telescopes
i forget which one
it is that's there yeah but one of them is it the giant magellan telescope
maybe it's in chile i don't
know what one is i think they're just still working on it now and chile is
because it's uh is it because
it's a high altitude and the environment is very it's high flat and dry yeah so
um hawaii is another good
place to put telescopes but that's gotten in trouble with local resistance and
astronomers just not even
trying to take that into consideration and therefore getting themselves in
trouble canary islands are
okay but uh yeah chile is one of the best places chile and antarctica actually
i've been to the keck
observatory a couple times um i've been three times and every time i go like
the first time i nailed it
and every time i've been since then i just i haven't gotten like one time we
went and i didn't plan for the
moon and i was like oh there's too much moon out and it was it just wasn't it
was just too bright the
sky was too bright and then the next time unfortunately we got it when it was
rainy and
kind of cloudy and we didn't get a good vision but the first time the first
time changed my life
i mean i really felt like i was on a spaceship looking through a window you
know what they were
observing i don't know but we were actually just at the visitor center okay
just looking at the
visitor center the sky is so magnificent at night you know there's no light
pollution they use
diffused lighting on the island you know the whole deal and um the the image
that you got from just
looking up i mean just with the naked eye it's just spectacular it's an amazing
view of the milky way
the telescopes are there right yeah but it gives you a perspective that i think
i think we're missing
with our cities and i think we've done something amazing by creating these
cities where wow you know
you just walk down the street and get some food delivered you know you can go
get a car you can you
know go buy a tv there's all this stuff in these congested areas but in putting
all this artificial
light we've removed our connection with the view of the cosmos it's absolutely
true and i'm i'm the
biggest booster of cities i love cities i love living in them i think that they're
good for the planet
etc but uh yeah it does exactly like you said it sort of makes our environment
so artificial that we forget
uh i remember a great story a friend of mine told me she worked for
an organization called project exploration which is based in chicago they're
devoted to bringing
the wonders of science to kids and minorities and so forth and they do these uh
trips from chicago on
the train out to like montana to dig up dinosaur bones right and so they're out
there they get to go
on a ranch they get to dig up real fossils bring them back and she said the
thing that got them the
most that was most affecting to them was they saw stars for the first time in
their lives right they'd
grown up in chicago they'd never seen a star in the sky and i think that's a
shame yeah you see like
these faint little flickering things you don't see like a full the view of like
the milky way where
you actually look up and you see that white sort of stripe across the sky and
you realize oh my god
that's stars those are all stars the milky way is the best i get dizzy looking
at it right knowing that
we're at the edge of this spinning disc whirling around and if you don't get
vertigo you're not doing it
right yeah as a person who studies space do you ever take time to like go out
into the desert and just
just stare at the space with nothing out there no light pollution not that much
you know honestly the
thing that i study are equations and and formulas and theories and i use space
my friends who are
observers go out there and collect the data and uh figure out what ideas we
have are right and which
ones are wrong uh and i love it when i get the chance but i don't go out of my
way anymore than anybody
else does um you were saying that people were asking about general relativity
was that the uh
the quantum quantum mechanics okay people on twitter said all right i hope to
figure out quantum
mechanics for the first time here so they look up to you for this yes well the
problem is not
impossible well i don't think i'm just joking but what i'm very touchy but it's
one of those things
where everyone is hoping that someone is going to be able to boil it down right
and simple and neil
degrasse tyson does a very good job of doing that with the cosmos he's been
able to boil down quite
a few things on this show where a lot of people went thanks man finally i kind
of get it sorta yeah
he's fantastic he has an amazing ability especially off the cuff well it seems
like off the cuff i i have
this vision that he goes home every night and plans out answers to every
possible question because they're
so slick when he delivers them he does a little because i've heard him give the
exact same semi off the cuff
but they're great so it's not like it's like a stand-up comedian delivering a
line it's new to you
yeah exactly yeah so what is it about it that they don't understand you think
quantum mechanics uh i
think that's the subject of the next book that i'm writing the book i'm working
on right now so i'm just
starting thinking about it but it's not just the people on the street it's my
professional colleagues
with phds in physics who don't understand quantum mechanics and rather than
being embarrassed by that
you know rather than thinking wow this is you know a terrible thing that we
should devote all our
resources to understanding they flip it they it's like uh aesop's fox and the
grapes you know the
parable where the fox is trying to get the grapes and he realizes he can't
reach it reach them so he
says i never wanted them anyway they're probably sour right right so that's
what physicists are like
with quantum mechanics like now if you try to understand it at a deep level
they disrespect you you're
like why are you wasting your time doing that when we could be calculating some
numbers right ego and
knowledge it's always a weird combination i would always always i've always
assumed when i was younger
that well when you get to the highest levels of science or you know any sort of
intellectual pursuit
that the people that are really involved there wouldn't be any ego issues it
would all you're laughing
you kn