Neil deGrasse Tyson on Understanding Our Current Reality (XPRIZE Visioneering) | EP #140
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Our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it's causing us a great deal of strife. This linear thinking prevents you from realizing a possible future that awaits you. This is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it's really not a matter of a budget. It's a matter of what is motivating us. 1908, the quote, "Man will never fly from New York to Paris."

1908, you know who said that? Orville Wright! That's my favorite request on stage. Can you give us a prediction for 2050? We will have designer drugs. They'll analyze your genome, find drugs that will have no side effects for you. All cars on the road will be self-driving electric. The entire solar system becomes our backyard. And the only thing we know about these predictions are? They're gonna be wrong. Yes.

Before we get started, I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and longevity front.

These technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live, how long we're healthy. The truth is a lot of the approaches are in fact cheap or even free. And I want to share this with you. I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook that outlines what I've been doing to reverse my biological age, what I've been doing to increase my health, my strength, my energy. And I want to make this available to my community at cost. So longevityguidebook.com, you can get information or check out the link below.

All right, let's jump into this episode. This is going to be a joint StarTalk and Moonshots here at XPRIZE Visioneering. And I need to do an introduction, if you don't mind. I just, you know, I know everybody knows you. I mean, who doesn't? But it's, do they know enough about you? So...

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an esteemed astrophysicist, celebrated science communicator, passionate educator with a mission to ignite curiosity in minds worldwide. A graduate of Harvard University in physics, Dr. Tyson earned his master's at Princeton, his PhD in astrophysics from Columbia, and now serves as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

Through his wildly popular show, StarTalk, which reaches over a million listeners per episode, his reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series reached over 135 million viewers in 180 countries. I don't know which countries we're not watching, but they should have been.

Neil has published over 15 books, including the New York Times bestselling book, which I love the title, Astrophysicists for People in a Hurry, or Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which alone sold over a million copies. Today, we are honored to have Dr. Tyson here to talk about humanity's future and innovation and discovery. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

There was only some exaggeration in that intro, just what I want to say. It was by the numbers. But am I the only one wearing a tie in this room? Yes. Okay. Apologies. I just thought, Van Gogh's Starry Night, that...

Thought I'd get away with that. Is that all right? Okay, we good. We're good You know, you and I have met a couple of times and I want to go back to our XPRIZE history But first I know you are a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh

One graduate over there, maybe. Actually, our vice chairman, Robert K. Weiss, who's watching on our live stream, was also a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. And I was born in the Bronx at Misericordia Hospital. Born in the Bronx. The Bronx High School of Science counts eight Nobel laureates among its graduates.

Which is as many as the country of Spain, just to put some context. That's good. That's very good. Yeah. So, uh... But that's all I get. That's good. That's very good. Like, you got something better than that that you're gonna put on the list? This is excellent, but that's just very good. Eight Nobel Prizes.

Thank you, awesome. There you go. Yeah. I want to go back to our first meeting. And so we talked yesterday about the origin of the XPRIZE Foundation. And so I read this book, The Spirit of St. Louis, which Greg Marinak gives me, and come up with this crazy harebrained idea about this spaceflight competition. And of course, the very first thing that any entrepreneur has to do when you come up with your great idea is raise money.

And so I have on my bookshelves these penguin pocketbook science fiction books. And I'm reading them, and in the back there's this one-page tearout that says, "If you'd like to fly on a future flight to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, without disregard to gravitational issues or so, please fill out this form and send it in." And send it in where? Well, to the Hayden Planetarium.

And so it hits me, oh my god, Hayden Planetarium must have millions of these forms of people interested in private space flight. And so I'm going to go track them down. And so I end up on your doorstep. Just to be clear, that solicitation wasn't just a few years ago. It was many, many, many decades ago. I think it dated back to the 1950s. It did. And I'm pretty sure it was just a stunt that...

The Hayden Planet was not going to launch people to Pluto. But you were right in thinking that if you were going to have a core group of people, if they're still alive, a core group of people who are thinking this way, then you want to link up with them in any way you can. So I show up. Dr. Tyson, a pleasure to meet you. My name is Peter. I've got this idea for the Space Flight Prize. And by the way, would you be willing to share the names and addresses of all the individuals who have signed up

Because I want to hit them up for money. I'm thinking, crazy man alert. Okay, let me just humor him. Maybe he'll go away. Okay. I never told you that, right? No. But I think what you do, in all fairness to those thoughts that I had, to do what you're doing requires a little bit of crazy. Yeah. You can't just be normal and do any of this. So that's a compliment. Yeah.

I resemble those remarks. So you bring out this shoebox and there are these tearouts and I'm amazed you had these shoeboxes and you then go on to explain to me that the probability these people actually still live there and are still alive is like diminishingly low. Yeah, these are addresses that predate zip codes, okay? So that's how you know.

Well, so at least... Oh, by the way, just because as an educator, who here is under 40? Okay, don't clap yet. You have no idea that the word ZIP is an acronym. I told you, see? Okay? ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan. Whoa. To help mail get to its destination faster. So now 40-year-olds and younger can feel like...

I think it was it was it had to get rolled in so it was like late 60s I think early 70 or even even early 60s because you are a hundred years old sir I was the first zip code So that began that began our friendship and relationship and I'm grateful to have you here, but let's fast forward

There is a book you wrote called Starry Messenger, a cosmic perspective on civilization. And when you and I met on one of your previous recordings of StarTalk, I mentioned to you that this is the 30th anniversary of the X Prize. And you said, wow, 30 years has a very special meaning in a recent book I wrote.

You want to sort of riff off that? Sure, sure, I can do that. So the

More precisely uttered title is "Starii Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization." Starii Messenger is the name of Galileo's first book on the universe, "Siderius Nuncius" in Latin, of course. And it's where he reported his first observations, telescope observations, of the night sky. And in there were revelations

that conflicted with what people were thinking of the day. He noticed that Venus went through phases, as the moon does. He noticed the moon is not a smooth surface. It's pitted and cratered. He noticed that the sun has spots on it. This idea of a perfect, smooth set of heavenly bodies

was shattered by that. And this is information that would ultimately show that Earth is not the center of the known universe. These are the starry messages. This is the universe talking to us, telling us that our understanding of how things are might not be correct. And if the authorities are inflexible in what is or is not correct,

it creates conflict. And in his case, he ended up under house arrest, basically died under house arrest for his views that conflicted with biblical Genesis. Because any rational read of biblical Genesis would have the earth formed before everything else, heavens and earth, the sun and moon came later. So you can't square that. And one of his great quotes, which I will mangle, is,

Why would God give us these faculties of reason and then expect us to forego their use? So, anyhow, so that's the title of it. So I wanted to... By the way, a cautionary tale for any disruptive thinkers this day. Yes, yes, watch out who's going to come after you for saying something different. And they still do.

Not without, yes, but there's an improvement on that because they don't torture you in a dungeon. That's true. So that's progress. But they may discredit you. So I thought today, there's so many things that permeate our society that could benefit from a rational analysis, scientific analysis, with a dose of a cosmic perspective.

And so all the many chapters of the book are paired words that have generally created conflict at holiday dinners. Like, um, truth and beauty, exploration and discovery, which is the subject of this conversation. Earth and moon. Meat eaters and vegetarians. Yeah, I went there. Okay? Okay. Color and race. Gender and identity. Law and order.

risk and reward each of those is a chapter and the power of scientific analysis is brought to it and when you do that you learn that you discover that their perspectives on so many things that divide us that

that sit above where you have formulated your opinions. And if it sits above it, you say, wait a minute, maybe both of us are wrong. Or there's a whole other way to look at this that diffuses the conflict that would otherwise unfold. The entire book is that on all of those subjects. And your man here, he decided to acquire that book for everyone in this room. Yes, so you have a signed copy. Thank you.

Okay. You have a signed copy by Neil for all of you here. It's personally signed with my overpriced fountain pen. Okay? Just so you have that. But getting back to your 30 years. Yes. So... And I want to hit one subject before then, if we could. But we're going to talk about the fact that XPRIZE being 30 years old this year happens to map against some interesting...

thinking and logic constructs that Neil discusses in chapter two. But before we get there, I want to talk about something that's important as a precinct to that, which is the fact that our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it's causing us a great deal of strife. Yeah, it's understandable that we have linear brains. Why would it be anything other than that?

Think of, you know, we evolve on the Serengeti or wherever and you just don't want to be eaten by the lion. That's not exponential thinking, that's very linear thinking. Can I get to the tree before the lion gets to me? That's linear. That's a linear exercise. The speed of the lion is not increasing. Yeah. All right? Luckily. We'd have to have a different brain to understand that. So I don't want to fault us for

for thinking that way, but to have self-awareness can bring you great benefits if you know in advance you have linear thinking. And probably the cleanest example of the failure of our brain to understand exponentials is the one that involves a lake and there's algae growing on a lake. And you see it there and you see that the area of the lake covered by algae

It's like doubling every day. Like it starts out in a little patch, and you come back the next day, it's like twice as big. Next day, it's twice as big. So that's kind of scary. That's classic exponential growth, the simple doubling. Doubling, doubling, correct, correct. So now, so the question is, you're there and you go away for a month, and you come back and the lake is half covered,

With algae. Your favorite lake, it's awful. It's half covered. So the question is, how much more time do you have to wait for the entire lake to be covered? At most, okay, you all are smart in here, that's what I'm saying. Most people say another month. That's linear thinking. No, the entire lake will be covered in one more day with the doubling per day.

And that's perhaps the simplest example of this. Another one is, there's an old story in ancient China where there's a chess board with 64 squares and someone, I'm going to get the details wrong here, but there's someone who did something in favor for the king or the emperor, and the emperor wanted to return a favor in advance. And

offered him, and the person said, "I want one grain of rice for every square on the board, but doubled for every square." And they said, "Well, don't you want these riches?" And I'm like, "No, I want rice for every..."

The king didn't know exponentials. And so by the time you can't reach 64, there's not enough rice in China. It's like a mound as big as Mount Everest. Yeah, yeah. It's two to the 64th power. Yeah. And so... Well, my favorite is with my kids. I did this with them, my two boys. I said, I'll give you, you know, do you want... But are they okay now? They're fine. Okay.

They're fine. You perform experiments on your children. Okay, go. Would you rather have a million dollars now or a penny doubled every day for 30 days? And they actually got it correct. Nice. Yeah. Nice, yeah. After 30 days is more than $5 million. Yeah. It's definitely, you want to. Although, you might not have the $5 million by the end of the month, and you take the million now and run. You see? So...

Oh, and by the way, the $5 million is what your payout is on the 30th day. Yes. If you accumulate it all, you're up around $10 million. Okay, so you're out $10 million. Well, it stays in the family, though. So this linear thinking, you said it gets us into trouble. No, it just prevents you from realizing a possible future that awaits you.

My best example of this is in the year 1900, New Year's Eve, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then a newspaper, well read. Brooklyn was its own town. Brooklyn is the origin of the Dodgers. Okay? Just putting it out there. So, it's 1900 and...

They did what anybody does at the beginning of a century. They want to imagine what the next century will bring. Yes. Okay. And there's a whole pull-out section where economists, politicians, scientists, engineers, they all lay down their predictions for the future. Here's the most interesting prediction there. It is by the head of the New York Central Railroad. Okay? So he's in the transportation business.

At the time, think back 1900, sir, you were around in 1900, yes, okay? Don't be bragging about the zip code and not just accept this. So, in 1900, there were steamships crossing the Atlantic.

In record time. There were, you know, the railroads crossing the country. You can get to California faster than you ever could before. There were airships. There was, the bicycle was perfected. Early combustion engine. So he was riding high. Transportation was moving. I see what you did there. Thank you, thank you.

I know you're capable of better than that. Exponentially better than that. Okay, good. So here's what he said, and I quote, we can scarcely imagine that advances in transportation of the 20th century will be as great as were those in the 19th century.

Whoa, that has got to be the most boneheaded statement ever made by anyone ever Especially someone who's in the business of transportation He could not imagine the airplane which was three years later He was this was not in his head that the over flying supersonic or going to the moon Okay, and so and by the way

He's saying that in 1900, and by 1930, we had already crossed the Atlantic in an airplane that would be invented three years later. I think it's 1927. Lindbergh, thank you. And we have Eric Lindbergh someplace here in the audience. Eric, where are you? I know Eric. We've met. He's an artist, Lindbergh. Is that the one I remember? Yes, yes. I have one of your pieces on my desk. Oh, my God.

It's one of those beautiful sort of retro-style rockets coming off of a... From our rocket race. There you go. Okay. Pleased to see you. I haven't seen you in 25 years. Good to see you again. See you another 25. So you go from 1900 to 1930. That's a 30-year period. Yes. And life in 1930...

would be wholly unrecognizable to anyone from the 1900. And this 30-year increment, I got to thinking about 30 years. Yes. I was sitting in the library at Princeton. I didn't get my master's there, but I postdoc there. You postdoc there, okay. So I'm sitting in the library, the astrophysics library,

Which is like dying and going to heaven. Because here's your favorite subject in this entire library just for that subject. Okay. They decided to put our feature journal, the Astrophysical Journal, which was birthed in 1895, on one wall. Okay? Rather than on multiple shelves. So there they were in 1895. And when I did this experiment, it might have been 1994, something like that, 1995. And that was down over here.

And I asked him, it's one wall, all the journals of the Astrophysical Journal. And I thought to myself, I wonder what year the midpoint of this wall is. That would be the doubling time. That's a great question. The doubling time of published research.

Simple question. Easy to answer. So I'm doing this exercise in 1994. That's how old I am. So when I was in graduate school, so coming out of, I was in postdoc in there. So I found the middle of the wall. It was 1965, 30 years. I said, oh, that's interesting. What's the middle of the, the, the, the. Of that point. Before that. Yeah. What's the middle? It was 1930. Okay. Yeah.

And the middle, so this goes, and I thought to myself, wait a minute, it's doubling every 30 years. Now, of course, you can argue whether every published paper is a, you know, is it exploratory? Is it a real discovery? That's a detail here. The fact is, we were doubling our output in astrophysics every 30 years. And that got me thinking, how can we measure the

Society that way. Yeah, and how would you even go about doing that? You can go to patent records I look that up. Yes, I report on it in the book patents. They have a doubling time It might have been 20 years, but it's it's not a hundred years. It's not five years It's some low number of decade, but what's incredible was the consistency of it the consistency of the doubling Yeah, the exponential. Yes. Okay now

At the risk of stating the obvious to this crowd even though half you didn't know what the zip code was Just a quick again, I'm an educator so I got to say this is doing The word acronym is actually modern it had only been created

Not much longer before the zip code was introduced. Just the word acronyms. An acronym is a series of letters that spell something you can pronounce. Okay, so IBM is an abbreviation, not an acronym. CIA is an abbreviation, not an acronym. SCUBA is an acronym. Self-contained unordered brain, you all know that. Okay, NASA is an acronym because you can say it. All right, so I looked this up and then

I keep historical dictionaries, and I found a dictionary from 1947. The word wasn't there! And it was like, whoa! How could that not? And so that was my exact reaction. And then I learned there were so many abbreviations that came out of the Second World War that all of those that spelled words, we invented a word for those that spell a word, and that was ACRONYM.

So, look in old dictionaries, it's not there. I love words that come in and out of favor and their stock value. And I don't mean to brag, but I have a word that was lifted into the Oxford English Dictionary. What might that be? But I was kind of bragging there, wasn't I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I named the phenomenon where the sun sets exactly on the grid of Manhattan.

because Manhattan streets and avenues are on a grid, and that happens twice a year, and it's beautiful, because it's aligned exactly, and the buildings frame it, and I call it Manhattan Henge, as a throwback to Stonehenge. But you're better than that.

Sorry, sorry buddy. Okay, I'll work harder than getting my word into the Oxford English Dictionary. Let me see what I'll work. I'll keep at it. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs,

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Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to Viome.com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at Viome.com slash Peter. Let's go back to it. Let me finish. So I said, is there a way to measure this? I don't know if there's a way.

So I just picked 30 years because it divides it cleanly into the time frames I was looking at. And I said, let me start in the year 1870. So I was going to go there. And then I researched real hard what everybody was doing in 1870. And then I just went 30 year increments to 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020. When this book was published. Yeah. The book came out in 2022. Okay. Written in 2020.

Yes, conceived throughout that, exactly. So, and I went into each time frame and lifted up what everybody was chatting about as their modern way of living. And their predictions, which they were absolutely accurate about. Not, okay. So, so this became a highly illuminating exercise. So going from 1870 to 1900. Shall we? Shall we?

Okay, so I remember... I took notes. Oh, you took notes, yeah. What did I say in 1870? Well, let's see, we got the steamships. Yeah, steamships. We got the Golden Spike. The Golden Spike? Yeah. So the railroad was first laid. People say, yes, oh my gosh, we can cross the country as a new thing to celebrate. We had the Orient Express. Orient Express across Europe. Right. 1880, Benz and the engine. Yes, the internal... So between 1870 and 1900...

The internal combustion engine. Right. Yes. And the bicycle. The bicycle, the modern bicycle as we know it, was perfected. It's got somebody's name associated with it, which we've long forgotten. So that's another means of transportation that did not exist in 1870.

It's odd, though, when you think about it. No ancient painting of anybody is riding a bicycle. That's just kind of weird, right? A fundamental discovery that's persisted ever since and has been extraordinary. One of the things you point out that I think is so important to say here is that every age we think...

Now is the most incredible time ever. Yes, like now is like one of the great delusions of it all. Yes You say oh all the great discoveries happen while I'm here and while no, no, no, so So if you plot an exponential, all right, if you plot an exponential so time is on the x-axis We have a log scale or no linear linear scale to see this effect. All right. Okay, so just checking. Oh

Good thing to check. So the x-axis is time. The y-axis is whatever is the thing you're measuring that's changing exponentially. It doesn't matter what.

If you plot it, it will look like it's mostly horizontal. And just in the last time frame, it goes up like this. And you're at the top of that because you're in modern day. You say, look at all the new advances that just happened. What a privilege it is to be alive today. We must be special. We must be special. So now what? That's the big problem of humans thinking we're always special. So now, if you truncate it anywhere...

I don't care where, truncate it to like here, where you said that's pretty flat. Now replot it, it'll look exactly the same. It's because the exponential of today tamped everything else down relative to it. You cut it off midway, that's the exponential you'll think is your special day. Except where you were is now back down here.

Right? So if like 10 years ago, you thought you were at the top, and now 10 years later, that top is now back down here and you're at the top again. Correct, because it keeps ascending. Yes. Yes. And so this is another, it's a delusion that we live in. I mean, I keep on thinking like now with Starship and with AI and with humanoid robots. You're thinking you're living in special time. It's like, my God, we must be in a simulation. Otherwise, why would we be alive right now? Right.

So, that urge is strong. It is. And I recognize it and I'm victim, I fall victim to it every now and then. But then, I look back, I have a lot of books that go back several centuries, because that's what I do. One of them is a book in 1898 written by a professor of astronomy and he's reporting on discoveries made about the sun.

And this is the second edition of his book on the sun. When was the first edition? 1895. He said, "In the last three years, we've learned so much about the sun, I have to put out a new edition."

He has no idea what he doesn't yet know. We don't know that there's thermonuclear fusion in the core. He doesn't know how the Sun is making energy. As far as he knows, there's a lump of coal cooling off over the past 10,000 years. So they were idiots. They didn't know it, but they're celebrating what they knew. So reading passages such as that keep you humble in the present moment. And that's important.

Because this everyone it's like the guy from 1900 saying we would never rival those other advance One of the points you make is we all think we're super special living right now, but none of us say oh my god We're such we're so backwards and so inane compared to what we're going to be no one says that no one says that would be a completely legitimate sentence to honor correct and and what XPRIZE is doing is of course

making that happen. So you're making it more real. We're trying to accelerate the future into the present day. So if you get everyone to think to themselves, gosh, we're such idiots compared to what we'll be in 100 years, that might be another engine of progress. Because nobody wants to be an idiot. Yeah. So let's move on. I'm going to

1900 to 1930. Oh my gosh, 1900 to 1930, we have the invention of the airplane, we have a total world war, we have a pandemic that kills more people than did the war. We have, up to 1930, okay. The atom? The structure of the atom? Yes, we finally learned the atom. Quantum physics is discovered. We are on the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics in the 1920s.

And there is no creation, storage, or retrieval of information, digital information, without an exploitation of the quantum. And we're on another heels of a quantum advance with quantum computing. But computing itself can only exist as we know it because of the foundations that were laid in that decade. And by the way, we did that without even knowing that the neutron exists. The neutron was discovered in 1930.

Look at how much we even got to figure out about the atom in the absence of the neutron. The radio comes online? Yes, the radio comes online. We have the early cinema. It's silent. Yes, black and white and silent. And black and white, but it's, oh my gosh, a moving image. There's stories where people, one of the early movies was the, was it The Great Train Robbery? Yes. It was one of the great early movies. And they have a scene with the train coming towards the camera, and people were in a cinema, and they were like...

And you think, if you've never seen that, how would you react? I saw some, was it an episode of Beverly Hillbillies or something? Where he sees a TV, and he's like, who's that man in that box? And he takes his gun and shoots it, okay? Because that's what we do in America if you're from overseas here. So, you shoot, then you ask questions. We saw the diminishment of horse manure. Oh, yes! Oh!

Sorry. There are two photos. One from 1905, Fifth Avenue, New York, Easter Sunday. There's nothing but horse-drawn carriages. Nothing. And they're horse taxis. They're horses. They are the currency of urban transportation and of farming. Ten years later, 1915, that same photo was taken. They're

Nine, no, more than that. There's like 30 automobiles for every one horse-drawn carriage. We went from a civilization that literally and figuratively was built on the backs of horses, and within 10 years, you couldn't give away a horse. You couldn't give away a horse because everyone was using a car. Now, lesson to visioneer, what's the word? Yeah, visioneers. Visioneers, okay. Lesson.

It's 1900. There's the fear of the great manure catastrophe. Yes. Which is an article written tongue in cheek. Piles. But it was in Manhattan, which is not a large place. And you access it by bridges and tunnels. It's an island. There were horses and horses do what they do. You feed them, they poop. The poop goes in the street.

The horse, you don't take it to the horse bathroom. It's in the street. And the people's whole job was to clean up the manure. Now what do you do with it? You bring it to another place and it makes a pile. Then somebody else comes in with multiple horse-drawn carriages to haul the manure out of the island. Okay? But those horses that are hauling the manure, they are pooping. Okay, so if you run the arithmetic on this...

People imagine the manure catastrophe and manure was a, it attracted flies. There were no indoor supermarkets back then, at least in the inner cities. Most of food was sold by street carts. Your fish, your fruit, all of this was street carts.

So the flies were everywhere. And it smelled. You read the descriptions and the horse urine and horse poop just permeated the conversation. Yes. It was just in the air. And so there was a lot of visioneering discussion about what to do about the horse poop.

Or the flies. So they said, let's put something in the feed so that when it comes out as poop, the flies will not be attracted to it. Because that was one of the health issues. How do you get rid of the flies if you're not going to get rid of the poop? Then another one was, what can we feed the horse to reduce the amount of poop that comes out the other side? This, by the way, is a question NASA has addressed over the Apollo era with their astronauts. Because they're sitting there in the capsule and they got to eat, but you don't want them to poop. Right?

So you want to reduce the poop? Why not? Only feeds you things your body's going to use and have no waste at all. So these are thoughts. So I'm imagining linear thinking visioneers back then would have been trying to solve the manure problem in that way.

The actual solution was the car. Yes. That was the solution. So that's a lesson to us all. And that happened within 10 years. So somebody in 1900, coming back in 1930, they would not recognize the landscape. They said, where's the horse? Well, it's a horse-drawn carriage without a horse. How do you do that?

Oh, it has an engine. What's an engine? Oh, it's used on fuel. What's fuel? Oh, it's gasoline. Where do you get it from? Under the ground. The heads would explode. That's just 1900 to 1930. Well, let's not forget the fact Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic. We electrify our cities. Cities are electrified. Oh, I got another quote for you. I got a quote. 1908, the quote. Man will never fly from New York to Paris.

Let you know what, you know who said that? Orville Wright. Orville frickin' Wright said that. He and his brother invent the airplane, but he cannot fly.

Think exponentially? Yeah. Because to get to Paris is an exponential thought from flying a few yards in Kitty Hawk. We go with meters, by the way. Oh, yeah. To America, Jack. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life.

It's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have...

this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today.

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please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, my

It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I don't know if you know this, that from 1930 to 1960, we introduced the first commercial jet plane. Yes. The Boeing 707. 707.

And that was done in 1956, '07 or '08? '58. '58. Okay. Do you know, by the way, that's within the next 30-year period, 1930 to 1960. Watch. Do you realize that the wingspan of the Boeing 707 is greater than the distance flown by the Wright brothers on their first flight? That's awesome. That's frickin' awesome. Yeah, give it up for the Wright brothers. Yeah, okay.

And their sister. And their sister. Tell me about their sister. We'll find out. There's a great documentary coming out that she actually did most of the work. As these things go. As these things go. Was she the one who took the picture of them? No. Somebody's got to take the picture. Wait, you left out that also...

We have an orbiting satellite. Yes. Sputnik. What day? What day and what year was Sputnik? October 4th of 57. 1957. And before that...

Not what 10 years before we break the sound barrier. Yes. Now if you said to the Wright brothers, hey, one day this will go fast enough. There'll be greater than the speed of sound. They'll laugh you out of, you know, out of Ohio. So it's still okay. So that's in those 30 years. We get atomic power. Oh, sorry. It's a world war. We crack the atom. And oh, by the way, we discover.

Plutonium named after the object formerly known as a planet and We don't get me started on that back Pluto Hold on. Hold on. By the way, I'm uh, so we stand on that by the way, yes or no Stance is a matter of what is true Peter where do you stand on whether earth is round? Yeah, it's not a stance. It's just the no, it's a definition. It's a definition. Oh

Pluto had it coming. Earth, Earth, our moon. Dwarf moon, my butt. Our moon. Dwarf planet, I should say. Who here is a Plutophile here? Raise your hand. Okay, our moon has five times the mass of Pluto. I bet they never told you that, did they? No. Okay, do you know more than half of Pluto's volume is ice? So that if it were brought to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice and it would have a tail.

It has no kind of behavior for a planet. Don't get me started. All right. So now... I think we're in 1960. But before then, I love the periodic table, and I just got to say this about it. Okay. When Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and it was finally named Uranus... Properly pronounced. If you're older than eight years old, you should say Uranus. Okay? Okay.

You get a hall pass if you're younger than eight to call it Uranus, if you want. All right. So this is the planet Uranus is discovered. Within a few years, a brand new element is discovered. Turns out to be unstable. We would use the term radioactive later on. But they named that after the new planet that was discovered. That was the element uranium. Element 92. What on us? The sky. Now watch. Yeah. Some years after that, 100 years after that.

We discover another planet, and we name it Neptune. The next element in the periodic table heavier than uranium, now number 93, was not yet named and not yet discovered until just after that planet. So they named that after the next planet, and that would be Neptunium. And there's element 94, not yet discovered, waiting its turn. The object formerly known as a planet called Pluto was discovered in 1930, okay?

Shortly after that, we discover element 94. It's named after the ninth planet, Plutonium. So the periodic table preserves Uranium, Neptunium, and Plutonium in sequence. Nice. With Pluto getting an element named on false pretense. Okay, so now, but here's the point. We discover Plutonium in 1930.

It is weaponized, turned into a bomb, and deployed 15 years later.

That is the pace of what's going on at the time. The two bombs was a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. We knew uranium would work. We were not sure about plutonium. It was new boy on the block. And so that's what was tested at famously now portrayed in the film Oppenheimer. They tested the plutonium bomb, not the uranium bomb.

And that's the one that then was dropped on Nagasaki. Point is, between 1930 and 1960, we crack the atom, weaponize the atom, break the sound barrier, go into space. Oh my gosh! Is there anything about 1960 that would be recognizable to anyone from 1930? I think not. Let's keep going. So, 1960 to 1990. A lot. Oh, yeah!

A lot. Computers go from specialized room-sized equipment that serve the military and scientists to things you have on your desk. Standalone computers. This is something they got wrong in the movie 2001. Old timer here, when was the movie released? 1960-- Oh! 1968. He's good! He's good! 1968, the vision of life in the year 2001.

We all saw that. It was like, wow, that's how we'll be living in 2001. And in there, the main ship's computer was one huge computer. Because back then in 1968, if you want a more powerful computer, it had to be bigger. This whole idea that the computers get smaller and smaller and are carried on your hip, that's not a thought. They're linearly extrapolating this. They got sort of FaceTime in a tablet, correct?

A little bit. Okay, we can cherry pick that and say, wow, look how brilliant they were, they got this correct. I can tell you this, that in 2001, oh, there's a quote from someone, from the futurist, the magazine, Arthur C. Clarke, that says, in the year 2000, there'll be 50,000 people living and working in space.

that was, maybe he was trying to think exponentially, but he definitely got that wrong, okay? In the year 2003, people were living and working in space. So, space has a unique problem. Yes, it's expensive. Where, up until Sputnik launched, space was an inaccessible domain, and people imagined it would be centuries before we landed on the moon. When Sputnik was launched, everyone went into exponential mode,

But they erred in the wrong way, and I'll tell you why in a minute. Kennedy announces we're going to the moon before the decade is out. And he said that at a time we didn't yet have a vessel that could launch and not blow up that was capable of carrying people. It was prophetic. This was a badass prediction. It was. Okay? Before the decade is out. All right. So he says this.

And then everyone who's trying to predict the future, we're on the moon by 1969, we'll be on Mars by 1980, 1985. And of course, the Space Task Group, you know, part of the White House, was predicting by 1984 that we would be going to Mars. Yeah, but they were clueless. They were clueless. On budgets. No, no. Budget is irrelevant here for the reasons I was about to say. Educate me. So...

The problem that, by the way, I wrote a whole other book on this. It was titled, when I submitted it, Failure to Launch, The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts, because the predictions never match the reality. And the publisher, no, we can't have delusion and failure in the title. So it got reworded Space Chronicles Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Took all the teeth out of the title. Here's the problem.

Everyone naively presumed, well, we're Americans and we're explorers. That's why we're going to the moon. And this is a natural progression of exploration. And at no time did anyone ask themselves, why are we doing it?

They presumed it's because it's in our DNA. No! It may be in our DNA, but it doesn't happen unless somebody pays for it. And who's going to pay for it? Not just anybody, not just the National Science Foundation, not just NASA. Somebody's got to write the check. Who's going to write the check? Congress. And so when Kennedy says, "We'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth," we think that's the stirring rhetoric of a future-thinking young president.

Excuse me, let's go back to that same speech delivered on May 25th, 1961 to a joint session of Congress. Oh, what happened just six weeks before that? Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space and came back safely. What's the date? Thank you, Loretta. Oh! April 12th, 1961. Add six weeks to that, a joint session of Congress is called. Okay? Oh, by the way,

I have to slip in, put a pin in that. Why did we lose our ship, lose our poop when Sputnik launched? I'll tell you why. Sputnik, a radio transmitter, was launched in the hollowed-out shell of an intercontinental ballistic missile. So if that could be deployed over our country, that meant Russia could deliver a nuclear warhead immediately.

over our space. And back then, there were international restrictions on access to your airspace. You can't just fly anywhere unless you have permission. But there was no treaty about your space space, the space above your air.

All right? So there it was. We lost it. We totally... Within a year, NASA was founded. A year and a day later. And this became a military priority. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, under the... But it does go back to budgets. No, it's not just budget. Budget's like put a number here or a number there. I'm talking about motivation. Because in that... Back to Kennedy's speech. Go to Cape Canaveral. Kennedy Space Center there, the center...

the front entrance, there's a bust of Kennedy chiseled in the granite are those words, put a man on the moon, return him safely to Earth before, it's there. And you just say, yeah. In that same speech, here's what he said several paragraphs earlier. I quote,

If the events of recent weeks couldn't even utter the man's name, Yuri Gagarin, if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to know the world, the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. That was the battle cry against communism that dislodged the money to go to the moon.

That's what did it. It's not just budget with, add the budget. It's what is your motivation? I agree with you. It was the, I don't want to die. But it was, anyway, listen. No, no, what I'm saying is, no, no, what I'm saying is, this is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it's really not a matter of a budget. It's a matter of motivation. What is motivating us? Okay? Okay? It's not about a budget, about what motivates our guy to fly across the Atlantic. He couldn't.

He had a paycheck at the other end of that. That wasn't about budget, it was about motivation, okay? So, I wrote an essay, late 1990s, for the Columbia history of the 20th century. And it was called Paths to Discovery. And I wanted to assess what were the drivers, not the budgets, the drivers of people doing major, major projects, civilization committing to major projects. And if I could find out what...

motivated people over the centuries and millennia, maybe I could find a way to motivate people to go to Mars. Because it's really expensive. Let's find out what the motivation... So I set up this table. At the end, there were only three motivators. Not five. Fear, curiosity, and greed. Curiosity is not one of the motivators. Are you going to allow me to tell you what the three... I did the work, okay? Listen to me. Okay, fine.

But I've got something that has nothing to do with curiosity. Nothing to do with curiosity. That's the problem here. Okay? Number one drive is the I don't want to die motivator. That's the fear. We'll give you that. I don't want to die. Okay? Next, I don't want to die poor. So that's the money one. That's great. The third one is the will, perceived will or real will of royalty or deity. Okay?

Much less in operation today than it was in past centuries. So, list the most expensive things humans have ever done.

There's like the Great Pyramids. There's the Manhattan Project. There's the Apollo Project. There's... The Human Genome Project. Well, not the most expensive thing. I'm talking expensive. All right. There's only $3 billion. That's nothing. I know. I got that in my left pocket. Okay? They can be big without being... I'm talking about expensive in human and physical capital. The Cathedral Building of Europe.

If you can list them, we can quibble on the sequence, but all of them will be drawn from one of those three drivers. Do you know what the... In modern times, remove the royalty and deity, it leaves economics and war. And I'm telling you that everyone thinks we went to the moon for curiosity's sake, and because that's what they thought, they believed we'd keep going. The moment we got to the moon, looked over our shoulder, and the Ruskies weren't there? They weren't there? Yeah.

We ended the Apollo program! We did. We got Apollo 18... But we have 60 years more to go and six minutes on the clock. Oh, sorry! So, I will say this. There is a... Sorry. There is a scientific ratio of the motivator of fear to curiosity, and it's the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget. Yeah, that ratio is infinite. Yeah, and unfortunate. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin.

The truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time.

If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, so I'm going to finish up the 1990s by saying we've got the desktop computer. We've got women entering the workforce. We got the transistors creating the entire chip revolution. We go to the moon nine times.

a pretty good time. 1990 to 2020, let's take it to this last 30-year segment. A lot occurring there. Yes, so 1960 to 1990, that's obvious. The Cold Cold War, all of this. 1990 to 2020, that's in the lifetime of most of us in this room. I remember 1990 with the dial-up modem to try to get

you know, back to my computer at my office. The internet wasn't really a thing yet. And yeah, in the movie, You Got Mail, people look forward to their emails. Oh my gosh. I got mail. Let me like stop everything and go read it. All right. Here's one of my favorites is 1989. If you had a fax machine, you were badass.

Fax machine, okay. 1989 was the release date of Back to the Future Part II, which took place in the year 2015. Okay? So Back to the Future Part II was made in 1980, released in 1989, took place in 1989, and they go to the future 2015. So you get to see how they imagine it. Fine. If you remember the movie, our lead character, Marty, he irritates his bosses, his boss, and he gets fired.

Well, he's living in a home of the future. And any home in 1989 has one fax machine. That home has four fax machines because that's the home of the future. And the boss alerts him that he's fired and you see this montage of fax machines showing that you're fired, you're fired, you're fired. And by the way, the fax machine is dot matrix.

In the future. Oh my god. We sequenced the human genome during this period of time. Pretty extraordinary. Three billion dollars today. I got one other thing. I gotta finish the facts. Old timers will remember early 1990s AT&T had a series of ads called You Will. And they asked, have you ever wanted to whatever? And they say, you will.

And AT&T will bring it to you. So they're imagining the future. And they got a lot right. I don't want to take it away from them. But one of them, they show somebody doing something I've never thought of doing, never wanted to do, never will do, never did do. It was somebody on a beach chair in the surf, okay? In the sand. And he's working on a tablet. That was a good prediction. And he says, have you ever wanted to...

Send a fax from the beach? You will! So, it's like, that's linear thinking. The future. So...

If I were to leave people with a lesson, it's try to break out of your linear thinking and imagine what other technologies might come from the side. Things you're not even thinking of. The convergence of technology. That's what the smartphone is. The smartphone didn't invent GPS. It didn't invent digital storage. It didn't even invent touchscreens. Or the digital camera. Or the digital camera. The touchscreen, in fact, was invented by a, was it NSF? A grant to...

to the the archives to the US archives the museum grouping of the archives because they don't want people typing on keyboards to get information And so they developed this screen that can respond to you as you're tourists moving through the facility That's how we got invented It was the innovation just for that and that then has transformed our lives in almost every way little things like that and today

If you show someone a little, you bring someone from 1990 to today, and they take them to a restaurant, and they say, well, where's the menu? They say, oh, it's that little pattern of dots in the middle of the table. They can't, they won't relate. Oh, can we get a taxi? No, I'll just pull out my smartphone. What's a smartphone? By the way, it would be smart.

seven, no, how many, 17 years from 1990 before the smartphone arrived. Okay? So this whole thing about, well, I have a cell phone and that, you know, don't you all remember seeing the movie, um, um,

Wall Street. And I remembered seeing Gecko on the beach with his shoulder-mounted cell phone. And I said, wow, I wish I was rich so that I could have a phone like that and talk without any wires. And it was like, that was my imagining the future. And I had no idea what the future would bring. And, and, last thing, last thing, and...

Sir, you have kids? This is my 100-year-old man in the front row. So, had your kids said to you, "Dad, one day I want to grow up and be a YouTube influencer." "And I want to out-earn any money you've ever made in your life doing it." You -- I don't -- This is -- These are conversations -- This is the thing. We don't even know how to have them. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I will just for the hell of it -- Oh, and you're here in L.A.

We don't have this in New York yet. We're going down the street, and there's a car with no driver going by. It's like, where's the driver? What? What is that? They're making left turns. You've seen these, right? L.A. people, it's just like the driverless cars. They're just in the middle of the traffic. Like, where's it going? I don't know.

But it feels like it knows it belongs there, right? Because it's got all the sensors, the cameras and things. So, I don't know. People said in 2020, let's imagine 2050. You can't. You can't. You're not. That's my favorite request on stage. Can you give us a prediction for 2050? I'll do it. I'll still do it. I can barely give a prediction for 2030. I'll still do it, but I'm doing it in the spirit of...

of how humbled I would be when the actual 2050 comes based on what I've researched for the past 150 years. So, I'm gonna make three predictions. I'm gonna make three predictions. One, we will have designer drugs. They'll analyze your genome, find drugs that will have no side effects for you.

Why do we have to be a statistic in the reported side effects? You know, I'm not very side effect prone, so I generally ignore that, but many people are. So figure that out, medical community, so that there are no side effects. Have the medicine do only what it's supposed to do. Don't make it make you throw up or give you diarrhea or depressive thoughts or rashes. Fix that. Okay, that's one. Two, I think in the not too distant future,

All cars on the road will be self-driving electric. And you say, "No, that can't be right." No, no, because we went from horses to cars in 10 years. I'm just talking about going from cars to another kind of car. That can surely be less time than going from horses to cars. Self-driving cars. And, you know how you start that? Only self-driving cars in the HOV lane. Then, then these cars know where all the other cars are.

You want to change lanes, it tells the other car, "I'm changing lanes now." They part, it changes lanes. And they can even text and drive at the same time with no loss of their acuity on the road. Because they're frickin' electric computers. And they can drive 120 miles an hour with two cars distance between them because there's not going to be something they don't anticipate. And so, once you see that cutting down your travel time, I think it's going to go quickly.

And suppose, but you're a car enthusiast. What do you do? I'd like my classic car. There'll be car parks for you to drive in. Is that any different from people who like riding horses and you go to the stables and ride horses? It's quaint. A quaint memory of a bucolic past. So...

So, you've got your Ferrari, whatever, you park it at the car park, you'll take an electric car to get there, and you can do your thing as we now people who ride horses. So I see that happening. Last thing, I'd like to see space, people ask me, where should we go next in space? All of space. Why does it have to be a next destination? When we built the interstate system, which to the tune of $100 billion, by the way, about the same as going to the moon,

What drove that? Well, war drove that. What's the other name for the interstate system? Old timer? Oh, he's scratching his head. The Eisenhower internet system. He went to Europe in the Second World War, saw the Autobahn survive under rain and snow and tanks could roll over without it falling off the side of the road. He says, "I want that in my country."

as a defense project. And so, the initial monies for that all came from the defense. We're informed by our posture as a country that didn't want to get invaded and wanted to keep our military ready on the-- and you may know the interstate system doesn't go over mountains, it goes through them. And after every distance, there's a certain stretch that is straight so that you can land an airplane on it if you have to. It is to military specs.

That's how that money got dislodged. So, I'm saying, when you build the interstate, you don't build, let's just go from New York to LA. No, give people choices. So you send the interstate everywhere, let people's creativity take them to wherever they want to start whatever businesses they want or have whatever free life they want to lead in a country that we still think is free. And so, when I think of space, I think of not a rocket to go here or there,

get a warehouse of sort of strap-on boosters, and I say, "I wanna do science on the backside of this comet that's coming through. We need these three boosters and this rocket, and we'll schedule the launch in three months." Think about that. I do. Then the entire solar system becomes our backyard.

And it's not this other place. It is a... we will have a relationship with it. And, yeah, let's mine some asteroids. We have wars on Earth over the limited access to resources that are plentiful in the universe, in our own backyard. The future of space is one where an entire category of warfare will be rendered obsolete because access to resources will be unlimited.

We'll still fight over which gods you worship or what your skin color is, probably, but this category of war would be gone forever. If the entire solar system had lanes that you would take and you decided where you wanted to go and it wasn't something, a single national destination. And the only thing we know about these predictions are? They're going to be wrong. Yes.

All right, everybody. Let's give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you. Let me shake your hand. Come here. I want to shake your hand. Come here. Here's our old timer right here. Here we go. All right.

We are woefully overscheduled, but I cannot not take a few questions, which is the definitive side of saying let me take a few questions here. Okay, all right. So we've got microphones. Okay, so raise your hand, kids first. Okay, so we've got two over here. The microphone givers, you decide. Okay.

Come on, come on, we're losing time. Hand them out. When you were mentioning all of the innovations in the different periods, you didn't list contraception. Now, there's a thousand ones we didn't list. Well, I know, but I think it's a really specific one, particularly where we are at this point in time. Okay, so important. There are advances that are very important

in our culture, especially in health and well-being. You know, there's discovery of vaccines, but that goes even farther back. There's the discovery of sanitation. These contributed to our life expectancy. It's

It's not just the discovery of contraception, it's how widely available it became and how inexpensive it was. Women enter the workforce, women's right to vote. All of these things occurred during the last century. At the exact same time that you said that, voting rights. So that period of time, that was a huge social change. Women in the workforce, women being able to decide. Half the population of the United States. So I just wanted to comment on that. So I tried to keep the advances international.

and votes came to different people at different times. - Okay, we've got two microphones over here. - These are important. Yes, I can tell you this, that there are people saying, "Oh, it's worst ever for women or blacks or trans or gay." No, it's not worse than ever.

If I had a time machine and I said, you can go in here and put any time you want to go in the past or the future. If you are a female person of color on the gender spectrum, there is no time in the past that you would choose it. It was much better in 1960 when the Sunday paper, the Sunday paper had a section. Old timer, remember this. Sunday paper had a section. It was called the women's section. It had the recipes and the...

Okay? That's... The women had their place. All that's different and gone. And so I'm saying, those... If you're not white male...

Go to the future, not the past. In this time machine. Alright, fantastic. Let's go over here, then we'll come here. Please, go ahead. Yes, you. Hi, I'm an undergrad student. I think I'm the only one here. Excuse me. So, you were a big portion of my childhood and why science was cool in the late 90s, early 2000s. But my question is, what would your 12-year-old self say to you now? I don't know.

If my 12-year-old self showed up, like, right here? I think you say you're pretty cool. I don't know. I haven't thought about that. You know, it would probably be, it's like, you can actually make a career of the universe? That's probably what I, because I... Let's flip the question. What would you tell your 12-year-old self now? No, she did not ask that question.

But that question, everybody asked that one. So I'm saying, I think-- - But you're not answering it. - When I was 12, I was not certain, 'cause I knew at age nine I was interested in the universe. By age 11, you ask me what I wanna be when I grow up, I say astrophysicist, okay? To that annoying question that adults ask kids. So by age 12,

I'm not entirely certain I can make a career of being an astrophysicist. So, I made sure that I went into college. I majored in physics, which has many more pathways from it than just astrophysics. My college degree is in physics. And I even considered engineering just to broaden the job spectrum for me to come out. So, I would just be...

I'm delightfully surprised that I could, what my deep interest at age 12 could be pursued all the way into adulthood. - Excellent. - Yes. - One last question. - All right, first off, I just wanna really thank you for carrying the torch of Carl Sagan for the love of science and just bringing it to the current generation. - Well, thank you. Carl famously said, "When you're in love, "you wanna tell the world." So, yes. - I agree. - Yeah. - I'll take it right here.

So, what I want to ask you is if you had to choose an X Prize in astrophysics, what would you choose? If you had to create an X Prize for astrophysics?

Would I choose to be the same as what would get a Nobel Prize? No, you're asking what would you want the world to work on that is a 10x bold problem, a moonshot, something that people don't think is possible, but if enough people work on it, it might get... Scour the solar system for life that is a genesis other than what occurred on Earth. But if that happened, it would get a Nobel Prize. So we don't need the X Prize anymore.

For the science. Because we have our reward system built in. But the Nobel Prize is a retrospective for something done in the past. It's about incentivizing new people to come in and take on something that's worth doing. Something audacious we should be doing, but people feel too limited. You mean a single goal that'll... Okay, how about... Now, I have my own personal XPRIZE. I want suborbital flight.

so that I can go to Tokyo, have lunch, and come back for dinner to New York. Because if you're suborbital, any two places on Earth are within 45 minutes of each other. That gets pitched every other year here at Visionary. So where is it? Where is it? Okay. And so... Asteroid detection. Yeah, but we got that. I like the mining. Asteroid mining. The first person...

or group who can send a lander to an asteroid, dig, get material from it, and bring it back to Earth. Or take it to the moon, where it might be useful for colonies that would be set up there. How's that for an X Prize? That sounds great. An Astro X Prize. For less than the cost of getting it. All right, everybody. Again, let's give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson.