Nashville, Tenn. – Neil deGrasse Tyson dropped by the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Monday, February 26, 2024, to present The Cosmic Perspective, his somewhat comprehensive macro-view of a (slightly corrected) modern world a la Dr. Tyson’s well-known, jovial media personality. The topic is chosen by the inviting city from a list offered by Dr. Tyson upon invitation, according to Tyson.    

“Again, part of what a Cosmic Perspective is not only knowing, or placing the risk, but knowing our frailties in the Universe,” said Tyson. 

–First, area News:  

Council Woman at Large, Burkley Allen Rushes TPAC Stage to “Nashville Just Officially Recognized the Life Work of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.” 

Metro City Council Member at Large, Burkley Allen, rushed TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall stage, mid-Neil deGrasse Tyson’s inversely responding, standing ovation bow, and before the lights came up, to present visiting astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, with Metro/Nashville’s Official Recognition of his life work. 

[Tyson, happenstance-ly using Tn’s physical length as a form of measurement, referring to Elon Musk’s wealth],

“I drove… -this is a stupid story, and I don’t even have time to tell you it, but I’m in Tennessee, so I’m going to tell it to you. I drove from Texas to New York, and you can’t do that unless you drove through Tennessee, and this is long enough ago when S.O., that monopoly that was broken up, and it became Exxon and many places, and local Standard Oil and other places, I had a credit card –a gasoline credit card- that only worked for the S.O.’s and the Exxon’s not in TN (crowd empathetically aw-laughs), and my car got seven miles per gallon. It was a Mercury Montego. Downhill. Seven miles to the gallon. And so, I had to fill up at one end of Tennessee and Hope I got to the other end (woman next to Folk&Proper cackles). I didn’t have cash for gas. …That’s how I remember Tennessee from my childhood,” explained Tyson.  

“Okay. All right. So, so. Yes. There’s enough money to get you out of Tennessee. It will reach California, float them across the Pacific; yes, you’ll come right back here with your two hundred billion dollars. And you can do that 300 times (audience wows).”]

[…] Tyson, from his bow at end, before lights are back up: Hello. 

Burkley Allen, Metro Council Member at Large: I’m Burkley Allen. I’m a metro council member, and on behalf of the city of Nashville, and the mayor of… 

Tyson: You’re an elected official?!  [to audience, standing] Oh, we got an elected official. Okay.  

“I’m a public servant. A public servant,” Allen said. 

Tyson: ..Ah, okay. A public servant, yes.  …What’re you doing coming out onto my stage here? 

Council Member Allen: Just to say Thank you, because I appreciate the fact that you’re working to make sure that people understand the importance of science and, so very briefly, I would say (takes a breath)… 

“Because you advocated against proposed budget cuts to government agencies that support health, scientific education, climate change research –including the NIH, and the Environmental Protection Agency- it is fitting and Proper that the mayor and the council of the city of Nashville recognize Dr. Tyson’s continued life work [a round of applause][…] under advocacy for the environmental science, so we present to you this proclamation from the city of Nashville…” Allen said on stage, handing Dr. Tyson a blue folder.  

“Thank you!” Neil deGrasse Tyson accepted the folder. 

“Does this get me free barbeque whenever I come? (audience laughs)” 

“Everyone, Thanks for coming out,” Tyson concluded. 

Tyson: I don’t [audience member: Thank You!] take it lightly that you gave an evening of your life in a city filled with music to listen to an astrophysicist. -Music of the spheres, perhaps. We can think of it that way. 

“I, just, …you came here because you know and you value science, and I’m just, other than the few slides, I’m not here to sell you anything other than to convince you that the future matters to the civilization, and science literacy is the pivotal point of whether We will be wise enough to be the proper shepherds of our future. So, just Please take those messages out. Thank you all.”  

Also, a run in with Nashville’s Jack White @ TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall box office/will call line’s mid-line, thru-traffic split, 2/26/24, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s The Cosmic Perspective:

<Pics of texts to Ty, next day>

(Recording) White: Hey… is this the line for a will call? 

Folk & Proper: You’re at box office. Uhh, if you’ve got a will call, this is the line. 

White: Yeah, I couldn’t find my ticket… 

Folk & Proper: Yeah. Do you want to jump in line?  

White: No, I’m sorry. I… I didn’t want to cut in line. 

Folk & Proper: Oh, you’re good.  

White smiles as he continues walking towards the back of a shorter line beside us on other side of line split (which was only some dude who walked up to a free clerk behind the desk, anyway). 

White inaudibly shot-the-sht with the shorter line, for a sec. TPAC’s Box Office/Will Call associate seemingly told Mr. White he’d have to take the back of the line -or, ‘yes, the longer line is the line’- and Mr. White walked to the back of the line to wait. 

The evening was to the effect of presumption Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jack White, and Andrew Jackson went out together after the show/presentation. 

Folk & Proper turned to the gentlemen/witnesses, behind, in line.

“…Hey, man. He saw us,” one dude concluded (not on provided recording at time of press).

Cosmic Perspective, Neil deGrasse Tyson:

[Announcer over intercom] Good evening, everyone. Please welcome to the stage, your personal astro-physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson (audience applause). 

Tyson: I noticed so many of you stood up for that welcome. Thank you for that standing ovation, all three of you (crowd woo’s and laughs).

“Thanks for having me. Gosh…,” Tyson said. “I have to affirm that we are on the same page, okay?” 

“Y’all have come… on a Monday night… to a theatre!… to…”

[Audience member (AM), heckles] “We like science!” (Tyson laughs) 

“…to, to listen to an astrophysicist talk for two hours,” Tyson continued (Crowd erupts, again).”

“I don’t want any misunderstandings about that, okay?  I’m not gonna pull out a guitar, okay? Just to be clear.  …just so we know,” said Tyson.

Tyson: Do you know what we’re -they’re talking about tonight? Did they tell you? 

AM, heckling: Science! (audience chuckles). 

Tyson: Science, yes! They did all the science. Yes. Science. But then if you came and you don’t know the topic, they’re -it’s, like, my favorite topic, Ever… 

AM: We just love yuo Neeeillll! 

Tyson: Oh, thank you! Thank yeeeeww! (crowd cheers) (like a Mercy Lounge crowd). 

Tyson: It is …The Cosmic Perspective. 

“The Cosmic –No, no it’s not Cos… it’s not plural. -It is The… Cosmic Perspective, and this presentation will take you there as never before. But, let me just make clear about… (slide pops up on the screen, like we’re in class) -that’s where I work. It’s in New York City (a picture slide/PowerPoint slide of the Hayden Planetarium, Brooklyn, NY, onstage).”

“You’re all invited.”   

Tyson: If you go through the front entrance and tell them you came to this event today, they’ll still charge you $25, but they’ll smile as you go in. 

Tyson: If you do not recognize any of these icons (“across the icons” options, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Amazon links pop up on the screen for audience’s reference) …It means …you read (crowd laughs).  That’s how you spend your free time.  You read… 

[It begins] …So, I got some housekeeping, first of all (Housekeeping slide) 

First of all, who here was dragged here by the person next to them? (some raise heands) -Well, a bunch of you?! 

Tyson: So, if you were dragged by the person next to you, you don’t know who I am! (crowd laughs). 

You don’t know why this is. You have no idea!  It’ll be a couple of slides where everybody else will react and you won’t know why (crowd laughs). Just hang with us. We’ll catch you up a little later, okay? 

Housekeeping

Tyson: …Housekeeping… (slides pops up):

“Pluto!” (audience laughs. some boo) 

“Still (Not) a Planet” (audience laughs). 

“(Get Over It)” (audience laughs). 

“Okay,” he says, noticing a kid in the first rows.  “How old are you?” 

Kid: Twelve. 

Tyson: You’re twelve (audience applauses). Okay.   

Tyson, to the kid: How many planets are there? 

Kid: …Nine. 

Tyson: Oh.   He said nine.  Must be a… like, a holdout group in Nashville.  I just… Pluto had it coming. Let me just say. 

Did you know our moon had five times the mass of Pluto?  No. They didn’t tell you that, did they?  Did you know more than half of Pluto’s volume is ice? So, if you brought Pluto to where Earth is now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail! [comet]!  Did you know Pluto crosses the orbit of another planet? 

(Kids pipe up in the front).

Tyson: Oh, you knew that? That’s no kind of behavior for a planet.  …Had it coming.  …Just housekeeping. 

(slide) More housekeeping (audience laughs).

Tyson: Okay?  This is going to be a -we haven’t even started to talk, yet- a public service message from the James Webb Space Telescope (slide of Tyson cheesing in front of a collapsed version of the James Webb Telescope, grounded; like a DsnyWrld tourist pic), …okay?  

On what subject?… Onnnn visiting space aliens (audience laughs). Okay. Here we go. 

Tyson: Public service message. Here we go. 

So, first of all, the James Webb Space Telescope is all that. All right?  The same. 

Here’s what it looks like (points at slide). This is mockup-to-scale. That’s a scale 1:1 model. That’s me standing in front of it. This was at a space industry and defense meeting/conference that takes place yearly in Colorado Springs, and the manufacturers set up this model.  One of the marvels of this marvel is that this whole thing folds up into a rocket ferry, and they got launched a million miles away, and then unfurled to be this (still pic of him beside it).  

So, you’ll see a lot of scientists talking about the great discoveries.  Somebody should be interviewing the engineers, because we couldn’t figure that out ourselves (audience cheers). 

[…] Here’s one of the images of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Carina Nebula (slide).  …And let’s show you what area of the sky this actually is.

So, lets –we’re going to back out. Let’s take a look… okay? [From the Carina Nebula picture we all know, there’s a series Webb Telescope, as well as historic, and NASA images, if not all Webb, and/or NASA] …at different depths of the stars, seemingly animated together to create a zoom from the Carina Nebula, back to here (an audibly awesome slide picture of the Milky Way Galaxy, vertical, taken from the landscape of, seemingly, a Grecian beach at twilight hour.) (The “Nebula is here” arrow is about 4/5 of the way up, kinda, middle-ish, within the Milky Way’s clear visibility.   

Tyson: Here we go. 

(The audience exponentially gasps, awes, and a “no way”). 

Tyson: That’s what we were looking at. The tip of that arrow. 

Tyson: The tip of that arrow.  This telescope can take you there. And it just did. In high resolution. To a feature of our galaxy thousands of light years away.   

Why, then, is it so that the best image the U.S. Navy has of alien visitors (the recent image of the blurry, black dot taken from a fighter jet’s cockpit, with the horizon sights on, and all) (audience laughs) …is a fuzzy tic tac? (audience laughs).

In monochromatic screens? Oh, I know. Let’s zoom in, so maybe we’ll get to see the aliens. No. -And this is in our own atmosphere.  I had to Tweet about it –or X about it (slide of Tyson’s May 17, 2022, tweet of picture, inside Senate Chambers pic, with…): 

Tyson: I’m thinking… -back row, I think about you guys all the time, so let’s zoom in on this a little (audience laughs as he zooms to enlarge) Again, (Tyson reads from slide) “I’m thinking that if space aliens were actively visiting earth from across the galaxy, we would not need congressional hearing to establish this fact.” Just saying. 

Tyson: You realize a million, billion, billion photos and videos are uploaded to the internet everyday. Are there any non-fuzzy images of UFO’s? Do you know, decades ago, people used to report being abducted, but only two kinds of people had cameras: you were either a tourist or a journalist. We didn’t have cameras with us. So, you could say anything happened to you, at all, and people would say, ‘oh, my gosh. It must be true because it’s an ‘eyewitness’’ (crowd laughs). -We’ve all seen court drama’s, ‘I need a witness,’ …-said no scientist ever (crowd laughs).   

That’s not our measure of what’s true, by you swearing you’re telling the truth and being an ‘eyewitness.’   

We require better data than any of the information that is processed by your sensory system. Science did not reach achieve maturity until we could replace the human detectors –the eyes, the ears, the nose. The mouth. The taste. The touch.  Only then did we have unbiased, accurate measures of this world. And that’s foundational to the advance of modern civilization.  

So, this is just a lesson from the James Webb Telescope. Thats all. 

…It’s doing much better than the U.S. Navy is (audience laughs). Okay. 

(slide) “Even More Housekeeping” (audience laughs) 

Tyson: Okay, so when I’m invited to a town to give a talk, such as this, I offer them a dozen or more topics, and the host picks the topic. I come speak on that topic. So, I’m not here to sell you anything.  This is not a tour where I’m selling things. I don’t think –Are they selling anything in the lobby? I don’t think so.  -Right? You’re just coming for this, right?  I don’t like book talks […] becuase you pay to hear someone talking about a book, then expected to buy it. I’m sorry, just buy the book, I stay home, and we call it even. So, no, I’m not here to sell you books… in the lobby (a slide of a, seemingly, goofy, and elementary montage of his all his books on Amazon and his social media pages pops up)(both he and the audience laughs). 

Not the lobby! (audience laughs).

I thought I’d take a minute to, okay –this book did very well. People loved this book (pointing up at Astrophysics…) There’s a kid’s version, Astrophysics for Young People…. That one did very well.   That’s for tweens, ages eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. This is, like, history and warfare. Cosmic perspectives, per se.  And, this one just came out a couple of months ago, To Infinty and Beyond.  Now, I’m gonna do the crassest thing ever, here –crassest thing I’ll do tonight is, this (slide with a QR code to a special, signed-edition, books page pops up)(crowd laughs).

Okay. There you go. Now, here’s why I’m doing this… -by the way, if you are –if you don’t know what to do this, ask the person half your age sitting next to you, and they’ll tell you. 

Tyson: So, you could get all of these books on Amazon, for cheap, but that will take you to my home museum’s shop, The American Museum of Natural History in New York where I have a prior agreement with them, for every book that they sell, I have pre-autographed them with my fancy fountain pen. Those are the only ones I’m autographing that are offered en masse, for sale. So, if you buy from them –Yes –no, you could buy them for less at Amazon, or at another place. I’m just telling you, […] here it’s like an institution, and it’s a not-for-profit institution, but I hand signed every single one of them; every last one, okay? So, that’s why I do that. 

Now, one of these books is this one (slide of To Infinity… -newer cover with his silhouette, but starry vest). This came out a year and a half ago… This entire talk is, like, one and a half chapters of this book. The entire talk is, like, exploration and the discovery of Earth and Moon; around there. That’s where we get The Cosmic Perspective on the Universe. -Everything else is also a cosmic perspective, but it’s getting into civilization. And, it’s getting into the stuff people argue about over holiday dinners, like gender identity, color and race, law and order, meat eaters and vegetarians. -Yeah, that one, right? (crowd laughs).  

Tyson: This is a barbecue town, isn’t it? (audience woots). 

Yeah, that’s not too kind to vegetarians. I guess you could barbecue vegetable, can’t you? (Crowd “yihs”). You can barbecue a portobella (laughs). More on that later. But, anyhow… there’s a whole other talk I could give, -which it would be based on this book, it’s just cosmic perspective on civilization.  We get all up in these topics that make people want to fight one another. Especially in the cesspool we call social media, so if –by the way, I haven’t been here for, like, seven years. Who came seven years ago? (several woo and clap) 

Tyson: Oh! A bunch of you! Okay. How many people have never come to see me before, ever? (hands raise).  

Tyson: Wooow! Impressive (It was surprisingly half and half, but not all piped up). 

Tyson: Thank you for coming. Thank you. Really (crowd cheers; audience members, ‘thank you!’ and ‘you’re welcome!’). 

Tyson, to book on screen: Oh, by the way, this is –apparently some people didn’t like this cover. I really like this cover. They changed it for the paperback. Paperback came out, like, a few months ago. So…. I don’t like my image, so –things- so… Plus, I think I’m chubbier than this (he looked fine). At least I’m honest, amiright?  That’s the paperback. 

Tyson: Anyway, let’s get this party started: Cosmic Perspective. It’s a view bigger than your own that offers a humbling and enlightening look at our place in time, space on earth, and in the universe. The key point here is humbling yet enlightening. You don’t often see those two words together. Also, when you’re humbled, it’s like, you don’t want to be humbled. Something attacks your ego. You walk away feeling sad, or bad.   

The Cosmic Perspective, it goes back. It goes back. So, let’s go to the eighteenth century, and there’s this fellow here, James Ferguson (slide pops up, cottage noble-core “James Ferguson – 1757 (Getty Images).” I guess that’s what he looked like. I don’t know -By the way, are there anybody in here who is in construction? Or interior design?  (few woot) 

Um, that’s a sash window. And as best I can tell, that’s a closed sash window, yet the telescope is sticking outside the window (painter put the mid-cross section of the windowpane in front of the telescope). Am I…? Can we agree with that?  A sash window, we can lift it up and down. We can see the base frame in the way (crowd laughs), so this artist –I don’t…. Man, that’s James Ferguson, physicist. And, a popularized one, so I have a lot of, sort of, resonance with him going back. 

In my best Morgan Freeman impression: “Of all sciences cultivated by mankind,” -they’re quoting James Ferguson from 1757, “of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. Formed by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the earth is discovered, but our very faculties are enlarged with the grander ideas it conveys; our mind exalted above their lone, contracted prejudices…” 

“He was feeling it,” Tyson said (audience laughs). 

Tyson: So, I’m going to take you on a tour –take you on a tour of the Cosmic Perspective.  Aaaand, let’s start out with just numbers. 

(AM in back mezzanine ‘woots’, audience laughs). 

Numbers

“Wow, [a] real number fan up there on the upper deck.  He said, ‘Yiihesss!’ [‘yes,’ as a characteur growling]. That’s called a nerd-gasm, by the way. [Noise of charactuer growling, again] ‘Yeeapp!, I can’t help it, it’s just so….’ [Tyson mimics, again].” 

Tyson: Numbers! 

All right. Most of these slides, you’re wondering whether they –like, ‘why are they wasting their time with them?’ -Just hang with me.  Okay, here we go. 

This is the number one represented three ways. Obviously, we have the word, then we have the numeral, and in the middle, it’s scientific notation (Tyson’s slide is simply a black screen with these three things typed in, seemingly, times roman font): 

One 

10° 

1 

Tyson: …sometimes called exponential notation; a ten, raised to a power, so the power to which ten is raised tells you how many spots the decimal place moves relative to the one. 

So, the decimal place on that one is right here [Tyson turns his back to the audience, facing the screen towering over him, and plants his right leg firmly on the ground. Pats it with his hand.

Where his right foot is, is the decimal place.

Tyson: It hasn’t moved at all.  So, -sorry [Tyson, over-the-shoulder, said to the audience for turning his butt to them] (audience laughs).

Tyson: I just felt like a one in that moment, and so therefore… [back to whole audience]. The decimal’s right here. It hasn’t moved at all. It’s at zero, okay? This number doesn’t need introductions. 

Tyson: Multiply it by a thousand, and we get… a thousand. 

Slide:    1,000 

                10³ 

       One thousand 
             (-kilo) 

Tyson: Metric prefix, -Kilo. Ten to the third power. Look where the decimal has moved: Three places over.  You get the number thousand. Kilo, metric prefix.  

Any old-timers here?  I’m an old-timer, by the way. I am half gray, but I tint it, because my gray is coming in in these patches, and it looks like I have some kind of skin disease, and until it’s a little more even, I’m gonna keep tamp’n it down until I have a little more uniform gray fro. And then I’ll come in with my gray afro. So, speaking to silver haired folks in the room, do you remember when we tried to get the United States to go Metric (few applauded and ‘yiiiih’d, but the whole room warmly laughed)? Yeah? Under which president? …Jimmy Carter! -Is he -is he still alive? How long has he been in –that’s not hospice if you live for another two years. What do we call that (laughs)? Is he sneakin’ potato chips on the side? Like, what’s he doing? 

So, I have a solution. You know how we could’ve converted the entire United States? Quickly, you just… into the classroom, briefly… you invite all the drug dealers in. The drug dealers are metric fluent. They know what kilos are!  Don’t leave them too long because you dont want them to badly influence, but just have them bring in some weights and measures to the meeting.  

Tyson: Let’s go up another factor, by a thousand. We’re not adding, here. We’re multiplying. We get a million.  

Slide:   1,000,000 

10⁶ 

One million 
(mega-) 

Tyson: Metric, fixed, Mega… There was a day when if your computer had mega-bytes, you were a badass, back then (crowd laughs). 

One million, ten to the sixth power.  Two cities that have a population over a million: that is Los Angelos, and my hometown, New York City (accompanying slide, stock photos of cityscapes/skylines). 

Million. Million. 

Tyson: Keep going another factor of a thousand, we get to a billion. 

Slide: 1,000,000,000 

10⁹ 

One billion 
(giga-) 

Tyson: Metric prefix, Giga-, nine zeroes. We have more billionaires in the country now than ever before (to the side of the slide, there’s an adobe stock illustration of a globe). 

Billion. 

Who here is 31 years old? Raise your hand. You have to be 31.  ……Nobody? (an AM woots). 

Tyson: Ah! Oh. Thank you. Are you the only 31-year-old, here? How many other 31-year-olds do we…. (A few other audience members woot from varying long distances. The crowds full for the theatre, but not packed-packed. Jackson Hall sits 2472, so maybe, 2000? -Fitting number)? 

Tyson: You don’t look thirty one. You look twelve, or something (audience laughs)… All right, not many 31 years old. How is that so? -Upper deck, any 31 years old? (Yeahs and woots). 

“Okay, okay, so 31 years old, this year of your life, you will have lived your billionth second (Crowd audibly breathes),” said Tyson.

“I calculated that when I turned 31 (Crowd laughs).  -Very small glass of champagne, real quick, in the second you cross over (crowd laughs). So, if you’re wearing a seat belt, and living a healthy life, you might live three billion seconds. Up to 95, perhaps? -If you take care of things,” said Tyson.

When I was a kid, I was intrigued –I’ve been a geek my whole life. I’d be at a McDonald’s on the street –on the corner. This’s how old I am: at the time, they had sold six billion hamburgers (slide of a pic of an old-school McDonald’s sign that still read the numbers), and I would watch them just up the number. Then, ten billion; fifteen billion… And then they had a Y2K problem (audience laughs), because what happened [is] they got to ninety-nine, and there were no slots to put three digits in any of their signs (as many for “old-timers,” earlier laughed now). That’s like the Y2K-esque –If you don’t know what the Y2K problem is, turn to the person next to you that’s twice your age. They will know the Y2K problem.  

So, they gave up and stalled here, until they could solve it, and I’m convinced Carl Sagan must’ve visited them, because, then, they now all say, ‘billions and billions of….(crowd laughs). They just stopped counting. They just stopped. 

Okay, who’s the richest person in the world? 

AM: Elon Musk. 

Tyson: Elon Musk. Thank you. -How come you’re the only one here that knows that? Let’s try this again, Who’s the richest person in the world? 

Er’body: Elon Musk! 

Tyson: Elon Musk. Thank you. You’re all copying her answer, there… Uh, Elon Musk (standard slide of Musk). There we go. Space X, Tesla, X, okay. He, as of this morning, has about two hundred billion dollars. And I want you to try to understand how much money that is. If you had two hundred billion one dollar bills, and you just laid them end to end -it must go west from here; from Nashville… -By the way, Tennessee is a long state (crowd laughs. One woots). 

“I drove… -this is a stupid story, and I don’t even have time to tell you it, but I’m in Tennessee, so I’m gonna tell it to you. I drove from Texas to New York, and you can’t do that unless you drove through Tennessee, and this is long enough ago when S.O., that monopoly that was broken up, and it became Exxon and many places, and local Standard Oil and other places, I had a credit card –a gasoline credit card- that only worked for the S.O.’s and the Exxon’s not in TN (crowd empathetically aw-laughs), and my car got seven miles per gallon. It was a Mercury Montego. Downhill. Seven miles to the gallon. And, so I had to fill up at one end of Tennessee and hope I got to the other end (woman next to Folk&Proper cackles). I didn’t have cash for gas. …That’s how I remember Tennessee from my childhood.”  

Tyson: Okay. All right. So, so. Yes. There’s enough money to get you out of Tennessee. It will reach California, float them across the Pacific; yes, you’ll come right back here with your two hundred billion dollars. And you can do that 300 times (audience wows). 

Tyson: “Then, what’s left over, if you just sort of put them vertically, with what’s left over, you could put them vertically [and] tape them together, and you could reach the moon and back 25 times on top of going around the earth 300 times. Then, you would have spent Elon Musk’s wealth.  

AM: That’s way too much. 

Tyson: Oh, ‘that’s way too much.’ Is that the deepest comment you can make after what I just said (crowd laughs)? Said, ‘that’s way too much,’ he said. Yeah.  

AM: We’re all trying! 

Tyson: Then I thought, is there another way to do this? I have a job. I own a car, have a home, I have food in the refrigerator, okay? I have savings. I’m building a retirement. Is there anyway i could use that information to think of how wealthy he is? Yes, there is. 

When I walk down the street and ask myself –you can ask yourself!- Um, if there’s a penny in the street, will I bend down and pick it up? No. 

Tyson: If there’s a nickel? No. 

If there’s a dime? …If I’m not in a hurry (crowd laughs).  Plus, I’m getting older, so -you get older, if you bend down, there’s no guarantee you’re getting back up. Am I right, silver-haired folks? You know I’m telling the truth. Okay. So, I’m not picking up the dime… If there’s a quarter? Picking it up every time. Okay. So, my threshold for picking up stray money in the street is between a dime and a quarter.  

Tyson: Now, ratio this to Elon Musk, and ask if he feels the same way about money as I do -relative to your wealth- how much money would have to be there for him to bend down and pick it up?  

Ten thousand dollars, Okay! Pile of cash. It’s nine thousand dollars: too busy (crowd laughs), ‘Let the homeless people get that. I have important decisions I need to make about Twitter.’ 

Billion. 

Tyson: Another factor of a thousand takes us to what? A trillion. -Billion…[then] Trillion is next.  

Slide: 1,000,000,000,000 

10¹² 

One trillion 
(tera-). 

[To the sides, there are pics of cave drawings (@DRAC, Rone-Alps, Ministre de la Culture)]. 

Tyson: Tera-, metric prefix. Many of us have a terabyte of storage on our computers. Trillion, ten to the twelfth power. One with twelve zeroes. 

If you are 31, and this year, you will live your billionth second, how old are you to live your trillionth second? 

AM: Dead.  

Tyson: Dead is the right answer, yes. Thank you. Death. Yeah, I can’t follow that, so let’s just go onto…(laughs)… No, it’s easy math, here.  

AM: 31,000!! 

Tyson: Thirty-one thousand, yes. So, 31,000 years ago, there were cave paintings. They’re all living in caves, which is where we will return if we keep doing what we’re doing to the envronment. A trillion seconds ago. You cannot count to a trillion.   

So, here’s what you do… If there’s a kid –y’know, that’s… (crowd laughs). Instead of just giving him a time out –you do give him a time out. You say, ‘Count to a trillion,’ and they will never come out of their room again (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Lets’ keep going. Up by another factor of 1,000. A million, billion, a trillion (AC kid: quadrillion!) 

Tyson: Quadrillion. Thank you. Metric prefix peta-, ten to the fifteenth power… 

Slide: 1,000,000,000,000,000 

10¹⁵ 

One quadrillion 
(peta-) 

[to the sides, adobe stock animation of people singing in a city street] 

Tyson: …fifteen zeroes. 

About two hundred of these –two hundred quadrillion is the estimated number of sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived.  

(theatre silence)

Tyson: It includes all the sounds you just made, now (crowd laughs).  

It includes congressional filibusters (crowd laughs). Yes. 

I heard someone – I once told this statistic to an audience, and someone –I shouldn’t tell you this… 

(AM: No, go ahead. Say it) 

Tyson: Okay. So, I gave the number, and the guy in the middle of the audience said, ‘That doesn’t include my wife,’ (crowd cracks up).  It was… -I don’t think you’re supposed to say that kindof stuff anymore. But he said it. 

Anyway, [the stat] includes it all. 

Tyson: Let’s go up by another factor of a thousand. A billion, trillion, quadrillion (crowd kids: quintillion!) Quintillion! You guys are good. Quintillion. 

Slide: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 

10¹⁸ 

One quintillion 
(exa-) 

[to the side, adobe stock, pic of a beach]. 

Tyson: Metric prefix, exa-. Ten to the eighteenth power. Eighteen zeroes, if I did it right. THis is about the number of grains of sand on an average beach (audience, low audible gasp). This includes all that sand that comes home, y’know… (Tyson motions around his body, dancing a little) …stuck. Right (audience laughs)? Sand gets in there, and that includes all the sand you took home –in your butt crack, yes (crowd laughs). 

-Speaking of sand, last night I saw the US premiere of Dune. Dune 2. It was in New York City. I have special invite. It’s a Warner Brothers thing. I have a cameo in one Warner Brothers movie, and they put me on a list. There’s a red carpet, and everything. It’s two hours and forty-five minutes, and there’s a lot of sand (audience laughs). 

The worm is great. The worms are the best part… If you know anything about the story, you can attract the worm by thumping on the sand, and then it hears that, and then it comes. The problem is, sand doesn’t thump (he and crowd laugh). Solid things thump. Try doing that to sand and see if anyone anywhere around you knows about it. Sand is just little particles of silicon dioxide, and they’re not going to vibrate such that they hit the next thing of sand and go through a quintillion grain of sand, because that’s not how that works. I met the descendants of the author [of Dune], Hubert? (audience: “Herbert”) -Herbert… And I didn’t want to tell him that (crowd laughs). Just let it go. It’s the future. It’s highly acoustically conducting sand, apparently.

Tyson: Let’s multiply by another factor of a thousand…  (Kid in back mezzanines, “Sextillion!”) (crowd laughs). 

Tyson: Sextillion! Give it to me there! There it is… 

(Slide): 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 

10²¹ 

One sextillion 
(zetta-) 

[to the sides, pics of stars in the universe] 

Tyson: Metric prefix, zeta-; ten to the twenty first power; this is a thousand times bigger than grains of sand on a beach, itself bigger than sounds and words, and all of these numbers are a factor of a thousand bigger than the previoussssss. Ten to the twenty first power.  

This is the estimated number of stars in the universe. 

(audience quiet) 

Tyson: And there are people who walk among us who are sure that we are alone in the universe (crowd laughs). 

Just imagine aliens having a conversation, right? And they’re looking, and they say, ‘See that star over there on the upper left. Can you see it? No, not that one. The other one. Almost try again. See, that one. Yeah. That star… has planets, and there’re life forms on the third planet that are sure that the entire universe was created just for them (crowd laughs). That’s a plausible conversation two aliens would have with each other. Just think that through. 

By the way, if you’re religious, the monk, Geordorno Bruto was burned at the stake in the year 1600, in Italy, for saying, after learning that Copernicus suggested, ‘maybe the sun is in the middle of all motion, and not the earth.’ And if that’s the case, that makes Earth a planet, like the other planets. And then, we’re not in the center of the universe. We’re just one among planets. And if that’s the case, then the other stars in the night sky, if they’re like the sun, they might have planets, too.  

That was too much for the Catholic church (crowd laughs). 

Tyson: He was a monk! A pious monk. One of his final words were, as they lit the matches, ‘Your God is too small.’   

(audience applauded). 

…And if only looking at Earth, and you have the vastness of this universe, he says, ‘Your God is too small,’ and then was ventilated (couple out there laugh). It was tough back then (Tyson, er’body laughs). 

Tyson: You think it’s bad, now (laughing)? ‘Oh, my feelings are hurt…. I feel bad…,’ and I’m just like… Those were numbers.

Have a (slide) Cosmic Perspective: More numbers (audience laughs, applause).

Tyson: Hehheh. More numbers! Let’s take a look at water. What’s the chemical symbol for water? 

Er’body, in unison: H-Two-Oh! (Tyson) Love it! …H-2-O. Two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. There they are. This is –there are two ways you can draw water molecules: one is the sticks; the other one is the volume filled by forces that combine them [the bubble model]. I prefer this. You get feeling for how much space it takes up. That’s the water molecule.  

-I’ve always been a little upset, because when you go to, like, carnivals and the circuses, and things, there’s always that person that’s doing balloon, y’know? The balloon person? Do they have a name? (Crowd tries). 

Tyson: Just the balloon guy (crowd laughs). Okay. They make all kinds of the balloon –shapes (pic of various finished balloon animals). You know, snail. I don’t know which –what some of these are, but some a unicorn, a turtle… Just imagine they made molecules (audience member woots). THat’d be a lesson, right there. That would be pretty cool. But, no. They give you stuff –you know, next time I find one, I’m going to give him a catalogue of molecules, and we’ll see if he stays in business, actually, after that.  

Anyhow, here we go. There are more molecules of water in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world’s oceans (whistles).  

What that means is, if you drink a glass of water, and then it comes back out of your body in any number of ways, there’s enough molecules to scatter into every other glass of water anyone draws from this earth.   So, we’re connected by shared molecules that’ve passed through our kidneys, through time and space. We can say the same thing about air. What’s the number one molecule in our atmosphere? (Crowd collectively, nitrogen). 

Tyson: Who said oxygen? …It’s not. Sorry. No, it’s Nitrogen. We’re 78 percent nitrogen, twenty-a little bit percent oxygen, they bind together to make molecules, so there are more air molecules in a breath of air than there are breaths of air in earth’s atmosphere, so you can make a list of any historical characters of any people, and it’s a certainty that you have consumed water, and breathed air that went through the kidneys and lungs of any random set of people throughout time.  

(Slide, list of people throughout time: Socrates, 400 B.C.; Ghengis Khan, A.D. 1200; Joan of Arc, 15^th c.; Napoleon Bonaparte, 19^th c.; Ludwig Von Beethoven, 19^th c.; Abreham Lincoln 19^th c.; Billy the Kid, 19^th c.; Sigmund Freud, 20^th c.). 

Put Jesus up here. Yeah, Mohammad. You share molecules with them. I just picked at random here (guy cackles, then crowd)…(audience member: That’s Bill & Ted!)  

Tyson: Bill and Ted, of course (er’body laughs). 

-Who here’s never seen Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure. Who here? Raise your hand (one person claps).  

Tyson: Okay, security, escort her out (applause). 

-It’s 80’s cannon, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The movie is waaay better than it deserves to be, would you agree? (audience: yes). That movie could have just been awful, but is completely charming. All these characters were drawn from time and brought into the present, and it’s -oh, by the way, I give a whole other talk called, An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies (audience laughs). -Call me back. I can come back, and we can do this (audience applause). Yeah.  

In that talk, there’s a whole section about time travel. I highlight interesting scenes where they did very clever –had very clever solutions to time travel challenges.  About half the stuff I talk about is where movies mess up, okay? Like, the movie, Armageddon, violates more laws of physics…. per minute (audience laughs). 

Intelligence

Tyson: More Cosmic Perspective. How about intelligence? (Slide, More Cosmic Perspective, Intelligence) (audience member: Yes!) 

Tyson: Woah! Okay.  -Now, I dont care how you define intelligence for the point I’m going to make. It just doesn’t matter. What I would say is –we could ask -what’s -who’s the most intelligent species on earth, ever? Humans. Humans. (some murmurs) -Wait, someone wants to say dolphins. Did a dolphin build your house? Or this theatre? Or were they contemplating calculus the other night, and they tell you about that? (crowd softly laughs).  I was just –there was this cute comic, once, where two dolphins are swimming, and there’s a person –they can see a person up… -it might be one of these water parks, or something, and one dolphin says to the other, of the humans, ‘they face each other and make sounds, but it’s not conclusive whether they’re actally communicating.’ or something (crowd laughs). So, yeah. Humans. Who defines humans as being intelligent? 

Audience: Humans. 

Tyson: Humans! There’s our ego again. What’s the next closest species to humans? 

Audience: Chimpanzee! 

Tyson: Chimpanzee! The Apes is a very broad category. I’ve known some apes and some of them are great (silence, eventually laughter). 

Tyson: That’s an anthropology joke (Brittany wasn’t paying attention). 

Tyson: I knew some Great Apes. Yeah (audience member cackles). 

Tyson: …Sorry (crowd laughs).  -Actually, that’s a dad joke, isn’t it?  Yeah. That’s a total Dad joke.  

Tyson:  Uuum… (slide of tryptic animating chimp using box to reach banana), Okay, so Chimps. Here are some chimps, or chimp, that would be considered intelligent (points at slide).  

Tyson: Sees a banana. Stacks boxes to reach the banana. Our toddlers can figure this out. Really. Sometimes they can do rudimentary signs, a toddler. So, smart chimps equal our toddlers in many tasks and talents. -Smart chimps.  We share 99 percent identical DNA with chimp.  

What they do is stack boxes, yet we have poetry and music, and the Hubble Telescope, and the James Webb Telescope, and they just stack boxes. So, our ego has the urge to say, ‘What a different that one percent makes’ (Crowd laughs). 

Tyson: Suppose, instead, you ask, ‘Maybe the difference between stacking boxes and the James Webb Telescope is as small as that one percent would indicate. -You say, ‘No. C’mon, Tyson, how could? Of course, it’s gotta be big… -How could?…’ 

Tyson: Contemplate that possibility. 

Imagine another species shows up that’s one percent beyond us in intelligence the way we are beyond the chimps. What would we look like to them? 

AM: Chimpanzees! 

Tyson: Yes! Thank you. They would comb the Earth, exhume Steven Hawking, roll him forward, and say, ‘Steven Hawking is slightly smarter than the rest of the humans, because he could do astrophysics calculations in his head, …like little Timmy, little alien Timmy, here, in preschool (crowd giggles), Shartok, or whatever they name the kid, ‘Oh, Shartok, what’d you do today?’ 

Tyson, as Shartok: ‘Oh, Mommy, Daddy, I derived the principle of calculus!’ 

Tyson, as Shartok: ‘Oh, that’s so cuuuute. Put it on the refridgerator. What else did you…?’ 

Tyson, as Shartok: ‘I composed four sonnets, and I did all this, so…’ 

Tyson: -How smart are we then? One percent. 

Suppose it’s not one percent, it’s five percent. Ten percent! They would be so much smarter than us, they would not even know what they were up to. I don’t even know if they still have -Do they still have ant farms in the elementary school class? Yeah. You might have read about them. They have ants, and you can see them. They’re busy making their tunnels. Do the ants know they’re in a…? I don’t know. 

Could it be that we humans, on Earth, that we’re occupying a little acquarium/terrarium for the amusement of aliens that are ten percent on the DNA scale, smarter than us? 

Audience Member: Yeah, but their pics are fuzzy! 

Tyson: -So, I used to serve on the board of NASA, so I used to have access to photos whenever they’re released. This is one of them. Don’t tell anyone I smuggled this out (Slide, adobe graphic of a couple of stereotypical aliens viewing Earth out of their spaceship’s bay window, about Moon’s distance from Earth) (audience laughs).  

Tyson: Yeah. These are ones that made Earth, and then disappeared for their own amusement -You ever notice people, whenever they imagine aliens, they never have any hair? 

AM: Or clothes! 

Tyson: That’s kinda.. I find that interesting. And it’s not obvious at all how they reproduce (audience laughs). So, however smart you think we are, it’s because we’re doing the defining of what is smart. And we have to audacity to say, ‘oh, let’s go search the universe for other intelligent life.’ ‘Other intelligent life.’  

Imagine aliens coming to visit Earth: [Tyson, as alien] ‘Oh, Earth is so beautiful. We’re gonna take this galactic tour book. Hot Spots of Earth? Let’s go visit Earth. Oh… What species dominates Earth? Oh, that’s interesting… Oh, wait, they drew lines on the land mass… Oh, they can’t cross them/they can’t even communicate with each other, and they want to kill these other people because they’re worshipping different Gods, they’re skin color is differently reflective of sun light, they sleep with one kind of people versus another kind, and they’re killing each other over all of thisssssss…. 

AM: Yup! (applause) 

Tyson: The aliens will then run back home and say, ‘There is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.’ 

(Crowd erupts, whistles, cackles, and woots)

Tyson: Doesn’t have to be astronomical to be a Cosmic Perspective, it can be in Biology. 

Biology

Audience members, ‘woo!’ and ‘yeaaaah!’ 

Tyson: Oh! Some more nerd-gasms, there, with some biologists.  Take a look at our gut! 

(Slide, “OUr Gut!” as well as a cross section of the human gut anatomy). 

Tyson: So, look at our large intestine, right there (a couple audience members woot). There are more microbes in one centimeter of -…in four tents of an inch (crowd laughs) -there are more microbes in one four-tenths of an inch segment of your large intestine.  More microbes there than all the human beings that have ever been born.   

Tyson: And we like to think we’re in charge. 

Tyson: If you disturb those microbes, then They’re in charge. 

Tyson: They control your life.  

…You know exactly the nearest distance to the toilet (crowd giggles). 

“To them, we are simply darkened anaerobic vessels of fecal matter. [Tyson, as us all] ‘No, but I’m human, and I…’ -No. To them, you’re just a darkened vessel of poop,” said Tyson.  

-We’re still in biology. How about the tree of life? (Slide, “Tree of Life,” Darwin’s July, 1837 start). 

Tyson: This is very first tree of life ever drawn. Charles Darwin.  

“The Tree of Life is a measure of the speciation of branches of life in the tree of life. So, he draws this and at each node is a speciation point. -And this is in a sketch book in 1837. And he was a humble man. A humble scientist. So, he says, ‘I think’.” 

Tyson, excitedly: Like, yeeeah! Yougotit,buddy. He got to ‘thinking.’ He knew it.  Let’s update this Tree of Life. This is a modern tree of life, we’re describing. 

(Slide, massive, updated tree of life circle that fans out interacting, conjoining, and fracturing lines that represents species over the course of Earth’s history from the middle out into every current species on Earth at its outer edge) 

Tyson: So, the center of this circle is the beginning of Earth, and the outer perimeter is today. All right. So time iminates from the center, four and a half billion years ago, to modern day. And on the outer perimiter, it’s fuzzy, but it’s physically written the names of 3000 of the most successful species on Earth. There’s probably ten million species. We still don’t know the total number. It’s in the tens of millions. You can’t fit all of it. So, just get the most successful species, and they’re written on the outer edge.   

In that sense, everything on that perimeter is equally as evolved in the sense that we aallllllll came from earlier versions of life. -And you see the speciation that continues.   

Now, notice the lines don’t go to the center. All our evidence tells us that life took a little time to get going in order for -about a half a billion years- and that’s what accounts for that.  

Then you have the kingdoms, here. There’s a fungal kingdom. You have protists [SO MUCH MYSTERY IN PROTISTS! It’s where we throw the undeterminable. Apparently, its biomass on Earth is twice as big as animals!], the plant kingdom, and animal kingdom, but when I grew up –again, old-timer. Silver hair- We only talked about two kingdoms, allright. The Plant and The Animal kingdom. And when they showed the animal kingdom, depending on when you went to school, what textbook you used, […] it would show humans as the pinnacle of evolution –excuse me, it would show White humans as the pinnacle (audience laughs). White, Male humans as the pinnacle of evolution. All other creatures were less evolved that us. This is what we were taught back in the 50’s and 60’s, and going into a little bit of the 1970’s. We were at the top.  

Let’s look at a couple of interesting things, here. You noticed the animals in the upper left, Fungi are the bottom left… So, Mushrooms are an entire branch of The Tree of Life. An entire branch.  

Okay, so that circle there (points about half-way up from the middle, between the Animal and Fungi Kingdoms, next to one another and overlapping like a Vinn diagram on the modern Tree of Life) is the common ancestor between all animals and all mushrooms. So, at that point, there was a split, and that branch became animals, and this branch became fungusssss.  

Now, here’s an interesting fact. There’s another branch, right there (points at spot), which is where the common ancestor of what would become animals and fungi split from green plants, which means that we and mushrooms are more genetically alike than either of us are to green plants.  

Now think about it… We’ve all described mushrooms as tasting…. 

Audience kid in back: Awful! 

Tyson: Awful, yes, -sorry, there’s a kid staying in the loft (Tyson chuckles). No, if you bite into a Portobello, what’s a common…? To me, it tastes meaty. Mushrooms taste meaty –Maybe we’re biting into ourselves (audience laughs) in some ways (kid, inaudible [Maybe, ‘Umami!’])? ‘Mushrooms taste meaty,’ said no one, ever!, of Kale! (audience laughs). Kale is way off on the upper right side of this diagram.  

Tyson: Plus, mushrooms Loooove us.  There are many skin diseases that all come from fungus. Yeast is a fungus. Ringworm is a fungus. Athlete’s feet is fungus. We have a long relationship inteacting with the fungal kingdom. There’s an entire tv series on this. What’s it called? 

(Audience murmurs).  

Tyson: “The Last of Us?” They’re basically zombies, right? 

(Audience grumps). 

Tyson: Okay. But, they’re like fungal zombies. Is that fair? 

Audience grumpy laughs [Nashville gets serious about its survivalist and zombie scenarios, man. No matter who you are. Only city that would beat Nash out for most potential/coolest, post-apocalyptic cityscape would be Louisville, and that’s only because their 70’s-Memphis tower’s architecture is more abundant right off the interstate, and Louisville already has a The Last of Us feel to it, anyway -You know what I’m talkin’ about, Louisville]. 

Tyson: Plus, some people have a whole relationship with mushrooms (audience laughs). …They talk to them. 

Tyson: Where are we on this chart? 

We’re gonna be up in the animal section. Okay? So, let’s zoom in and see where we are (zooming in like a mo-fo, past all kinds of branches conjoining, splitting, ending, and converging. Still zooming]. Very different from what I was taught in my biology class… There you go. Let’s zoom in. Get a little closer… 

(Audience’s engaged giggling recognizably turns wowwing) 

Tyson: There you go (zoom winds up focusing in a several now legible names at the outer edge of the Tree of Life)… There we go! Homo Sapiens… Yup. Just one brach in the tree of life.  -I’m looking nearby. I don’t see Chimpanzees nearby.

How come?   

(Audience member inaudibly pipes up in the front, Tyson reacts) Tyson: They’re not successful! Someone paying attention to me from ten minutes ago, ‘they’re not successful.’ But, what is?  

Tyson: Mus Musculus! What is that? 

Audience member: Mice. 

Tyson: Mice! Mice are sitting right there. It’s not an accident that they make most excellent laboratory specimens to test the effects of drugs, environment, diet on humans. That’s not an act, it’s sitting right there. In the split –this split from there comes down here. These are all split to the right here (pointing around the zoom). These all split off to the right. And what’s neat enough, Rattus [Norvegicus?] 

Tyson, audience: Rats! Mice and rats (audience murmurs)!  They have obesity, they have cancers, they… they… they have appetite… -everything that we have, they have. 

(Audience member in front points with a question, real quick). 

Tyson: Oh (tracking his finger), where were you, again?… Oh, the Mississipianus (audience laughs)? Yeah, I don’t know what that is. Does anybody?… 

Audience member, up top: Alligator! 

Tyson: Alligator. Oh, yeah. There’s alligators up here (audience laughs). Yeah. Gator Mississipianus? Yeah. 

So, yeah, this is very different from white male humans at the top of the evolutionary chart. 

Tyson:  So, how many people here are card-carrying geeks?  (scattered hands raised across the audience) Okay. A few of you… A few of you.  Are you geeky enough to do this? 

(Audience audibly wows and laughs) .

Tyson: Yeah, you thought you were a geek, didnt you? No. However geeky you are, the geek spectrum goes to infinite (audience laughs). 

Okay. There’s the original Darwin. This must’ve hurt, “just thinking [about it] This one’s a little bit better, right there; ‘better,’ as in it must’ve hurt less (audience laughs) -That’s biology in a Cosmic Perspective. 

-How ‘bout other perspectives?  

“Life is Fragile”

Tyson: How about that Life is Fragile?   

(Slide, “Fragile”) 

Tyson: So, is there… -How many here resonate with the Green movement?  A show of hands? (some audience claps, one woots) …That did not sound resounding (audience laughs and give second go, louder) No! You didn’t have to! This isn’t a test (audience continues auplasing). Tyson: I was just observing. Some of you don’t care about… the future of civilization. …That’s fine (audience laughs), but for those of you who are all into Green, I want to alert you of something.  

Within the Green movement, you have people who say things like, (as a whimping, New England hippie) ‘Mother Nature feels….’ ‘You need to take care of Mother Nature, Mother Nature takes care of you…’ ‘Nurturrrres, and Naturrrres, and Sun, [trailing whimpswhimps]…’  

Tyson: For you to think that, you’d have to ignore some blunt facts such as Earth actually wants to kill you. It wants to kill you. It is trying hard to kill you. All the time. All the time. Millions of people. Nearly a billion people have died of Earth trying to kill us, and I keep thinking that earthquakes is just Earth trying to shake us off: ‘Get off me…Just…..’ (Tyson, as Earth, shakes). 

(long silence). 

Tyson: How about the Universe?Okay!  -The Universe is trying to kill you, too! Okay? It’s really good at it. Like, there’re some things here that are rare, like, avoid black holes, but you probably won’t die from a black hole, but impacts! (Slide, crater hole in AZ) -‘Oh, my Gaaahhhh! Impacts!’ 

Any of you here from AZ? (One woots). A couple of you up there, okay. Arizona – Famous for their holes in the ground (audience giggles). …There’re two big holes in the ground. 

Tyson: When I was a kid, drove across country –I was driven across country, and I visited both. They’re not near each other, but when you’re coming from New York City, you visit both, okay? So one day, it’s this huuuuge canyon, …that’s Grand (audience laughs) -That’s a Grand Canyon (audience giggles). 

It’s even grander when you realize it took millions of years to carve into the terrain. That’s unless you’re standing over here where there’s a plack that says, ‘Carved in 40 Days and 40 Nights’ (audience giggles). 

“It’s over here,” he motioned somewhere over there, then back to his presentation. 

“Whichever of these you embrace, it was not nearly as impressive to me as the other hole in the ground (slide of the Crater)(audience oohs, and applause) 

Tyson: Forty days, a million years, a fraction of a second. This is nearly a mile across. You can sink a sixty story building in the center of this.  

Tyson: This is Meteor Crater, ‘cause in my field, that’s how we roll. …We call it what it is (audience laughs). Meteor Crater.  

We discovered spots on the sun. You want to know what we called them? 

Tyson, Audience: Sunspots. 

Big red stars? -Red Giants (audience giggles). 

Yes. Unlike other sciences, our vocabularys highly trasparent. I can’t say that for the chemists, or the biologists, and especially not the geologist (snarling, a little). Uh.  

Tyson: Any geologists out there? You know I’m telling the truth. -Walking through the woods, I have geology colleagues. I say, ‘that’s a pretty rock,’ they say, ‘oh, that’s orth-craze-quart-stone…’, ‘I don’t want your rock anymore. You keep it!’ (audience laughs).   …I don’t give a schist about your rock (audience laughs). 

“Moon Glow Bath Beads”? “Celestial Seasoning Tea”? See people take our words and label products with them. Milky Way Candybar (couple woots, TN); “Mars Bars,” -That;s the family name, I’m takin’ it, “Maaaaarrrsss Bars.”  Pulsar watches? You remember those? Quasar Televisions?? Old Timers’ll remember those (one claps) 

Cars! Car names! An entire car company named Saturn. Mercury. (front row kid pipes up, ‘Subaru’) Tyson: Subaru! He knows! Subaru is the Japanese word for the cluster of stars in the night sky called Pleaides (a few woot). That’s why the Subaru logo has stars on it.  ‘Oh, yeeeeaaahhh….’(audience laughs).  

Tyson: Call me the day there’s a candy bar called deoxyribonucleic acidj (audience laughs)… then we’ll talk. 

So, you don’t want to be near this the day it happened. We think it happened between thirty and fifty thousand years ago.  

What most impressed me about this crater is that is Juuuuust…..barely missed the visitors center (audience laughs ass) (there’s a visitor’s center on the north side of the impact crater).  Just, what are the odds? Whoa.  

This was pretty innocent. (slide with K-T extinction, and P-T extinction, graph of extinction intensity-by-ages/eras text and the J What we’re really worried about are the ones that will totally take you out. The ones that… -Now, the KT-extinction, that’s the famous one that took out T-Rex. This is a much worse extinction that we have not unambiguously associated with an asteroid. We’re not entirely sure what created that, but here’s a chart, and todays right here (points to today), and the geologists call today, ‘zero.’ -The Geologists, they do stuff that does not otherwise make sense until you explain it, where as ‘Meteor Crater,’ does not require an explanation, okay? (audience laughs). 

So, this is today, counting time in millions of years, backwards. You get to 50-65 million years ago, and there’s the end of T-Rex, and all his big-toothed dinosaurs. And we are now -our ancestors- are running on foot, and we can evolve to something more ambitious than a tree shroom (shuffle, murmurs). 

This is that extinction that nearly took out 90 percent of all species on earth at the end of the Kernian period, there. Now here’s somthing interesting […] What’s that dinosaur with the [audience member in front pipes up] -Tyson: Stegosaurus, thank you.   …Wow. That was good. I just did this (Tyson barely moves his hand back), and he knew what I was talking about (audience giggles). 

Tyson: Very impressed. Y’all are a good audience, here. You guys knew all your numbers right up to sextillion. Wow. -Like, am I actually teaching y’all anything? (crowd laughs) Tyson: I just do this (flails stegosaurus-like) and you’re like, ‘Stegosaurus!’ (crowd laughs), and it like (acts surprised), ‘can you make me think you had to think about it for a minute (crowd laughs). ALlright.’ 

Tyson: The Stegosaurus went extinct in this episode, which means we are closer in time to the extinction of T-Rex, than the extinction of T-Rex is to the extinction of Stegosaurus. We think of dinosaurs existing all together, long ago? No. They dominated the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. It was just bad luck that asteroid came and took them out. There’s no reason why they still wouldn’t be here today with an auditorium filled with dinosaurs (audience laughs). 

Tyson: The one that took out T-Rex was an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest, represented here (slide of the drawing of the impact. Ptero’s and sht flying, looking surprised, and sht. Direction of impact different from the shockwave’s path, all that…) 

I once showed this in a high school auditorium. -Who sits in the front row of a high school auditorium? 

Tyson: Nerds. -Who here did not know nerds sit in the front row at high school? That’s common knowledge. Anyway, a nerd in the front row raised his hand, ‘Doc Tyson, is that an actual photograph?’ (crowd laughs)

Tyson: Iiiiiiii….. back then, I was kind. I kind of had a snark, but I just said, ‘No.’ (crowd laughs) But if the me of today had heard that question then, I would’ve said, ‘yes, it is a photograph.’ ‘The pterodactyl [sic] had a digital camera, and it took pictures of the whole event. We dug up the fossils, and we got the SD chip, and we put it in the computer… (crowd laughing at his escalation)(applause) Tyson: Can’t wait to see when he figures out, ‘oh, its not a photo (deep highschooler voice)(crowd giggles)  Tyson: I think I have an SD chip in my pocket (reaches into his pocket for coincidence) I have an SD (SanDisk) chip right in my pocket (he pulls an SD chip from his pocket).

Tyson, in glory: I didn’t do it for applause, I just happen to have an SD chip, and it does not have an actual record of [when] the asteroid struck. Just… happen… to have… 

Tyson: So, it’s a credit to the artist, Don Davis, who represents a lot of scientifically accurate phenomenon that we don’t otherwise have photographs of. Well, we still get hit, but not of that size. Ten years ago, Chelyabinsk? Russia’s Ural Mountains? Oh, my gosh! This is actual, forward facing, dash cam footage. You can see the light in the sky right there? (audience members: yes). This is actual footage. The car is on a curve, so it looks like its stationary for a bit just cause the car is tracking it, and then you’ll see it run its course. This happened something like 9:30 in the morning:

Shows clip (about twenty seconds of a filled, quiet theatre). 

Tyson, during clips: Now, this is near Siberia, and I’ve always heard that Siberians are stoic people. That video has sound (audience laughs). That was the sound inside the car (audience laughs). Now, had I been in the car, even though I would know what I was looking at, I’d say, ‘HOLY SHEEE-YYYYOT-UH!!! Car would swerve (audience cackles) (A Nashville trifecta, John Cleese dropping the F-bomb on stage, Keillor saying sht and fck on stage, and now Tyson’s ‘sheeyot,’ all within a year).

Tyson: For reasons I do not have the authority to divulge for you, we don’t know a lot about this meteor: About the size of this stage; 10,000 tons going 40,000 miles per –Mach 50; energy, 500 kilotons. The two bombs dropped in Japan were twenty kilo tons each (murmurs). Exploded at an altitude or 20 miles; made of stone. 

It exploded over Cheylbinsk, Russia. No one died. 

(audience member in back: How?). 

Tyson: But nearly 8,000 people were injured. Lacerations, mostly -We’ll get to that in a moment. The point is –well, okay. If the Japanese bombs were only 20 kilotons, and this was only 500 kilotons, why didn’t it do more damage? 

Tyson: This one exploded 20 miles up. 

If you paid attention to every sentence in the film Oppenheimer, you will know what altitude the war bombs were dropped. Its a calculation phycists do during war time. It’s -You don’t have the thing hit the ground and explode. Half the energy then makes a crater. It doesnt’ maximize damage, so they do the calculation, and they show about a half a mile up, the blast radius maximizes to do the most damage. Half a mile up. 20 miles up is 40 times higher in the sky, so that energy is significantly diluted by the time it hits the ground.  

And so, here’s the damage it did (slide of buildings with busted out windows and blast wave damage). 

So, we’re still in a shooting gallery. I just want to make this clear. There’s a blast wave, collapsed windows, buildings. Now, here’s why people were injured:  

You saw it, basically, instantaneously, because light travels really really fast. But, sound does not. Sound takes about five seconds per mile to move. If its twenty miles up, it takes about a minute and a half for the sound wave –the shock wave- to reach you from what you just observed. So, imagine this scenario: You’re sitting there eating breakfast, and a Steven Spielbergian bright light comes through the window. You say, ‘oh, I wonder what that light is.’ You put down your knife and fork, walk towards the (Tyson looks down and ‘I dunno,’ mid-sentence, determinant it’s a bad idea to walk to the window in these situations) -walk towards the window. They look out the window… Bam! (audience giggles) 

Tyson: The shockwave shatters the glass and lacerates their face. The injuries were mostly these lacerations.  Here is a compilation of camera footage of this. Here we go.  

(Video plays) Tyson: They just saw it pass overhead. 

(Big boom. Glass shattering) (audience member: that is loud) Tyson: Yep. That’s the shockwave. 

(Big Boom. Russian voice, “Yuuuuh!”) 

(Distant Boom. Car alarms go off). 

(seemingly a Death metal club in full force, rockin’; sound wave hits; they all stop) (audience giggles). 

(Lastly, a quiet video in an office space, like a call center. Woman standing beside wall. Shockwave. Male, Russian coworker comes blasting/falling through wall like GlassPitcher Man, but not meaning to. Woman unfazed) (audience laughs, applauses).  

Tyson: Where did he come from? (audience laughs). 

(Another quiet video, quiet theatre) Tyson, watching: So, there’s something called “the Fog of War,” where some people have no idea what’s going on. You don’t even know what direction to run in, but you just run. 

(Video of classroom w/ sound blast, teacher interrupted). 

Tyson: Here’s the coolest thing about this last video… In all the other videos, what’d the adults do? 

Audience: Run. 

Tyson: They ran. What’d the kids do? 

Audience: Looked. 

Tyson: They want to look! They’re kids! They’re just curious! 

Now here’s what’s interesting…Curiosity does not always keep you alive (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Think about it. -There we are in the Serengeti, and someone in the tribe says, ‘I wann make sure that’s a lion in the bushes over there. I’m gonna go check it out.’ 

If it is a lion, they are Samarily removed from the gene pool (audience laughs).

Tyson: So, I will never require for everyone to be curious. It would be counter to how we survive as a species. And even the some of us who are curious, they don’t always come back: ‘I wonder what’s inside that dark cave where these bear foot prints lead in. Let me go find out.’ -There’s a limit to this, so kids are All curious, basically. They learn to not be later on as adults.  

So, just as a reminder that we are in a shooting gallery. That happened just ten years ago. And how do we avoid them? Again, part of what a Cosmic Perspective is not only knowing our place in the Universe, it’s also knowing our frailties in the Universe, because you cherish that which you have, not being certain it’ll always be there. –But we’re going to try and control that fate. NASA has a double asteroid-meteorite test acronym to what? 

Audience: DART 

(Slide, “DART”) 

Tyson: DART. There you go. It even has a mission patch. 

(Slide: DART’s mission patch) 

Did someone say, ‘Awwww?!’  It’s a mission patch. It shouldn’t conjure emotions of any kind unless you’re an embroiderer of any kind and impressed with the embroidery on this (audience laughs). 

Tyson: So, this just happened. Just like a couple years ago. NASA launched a new mission, crashed into an asteroid, defends planet Earth. This is the image –Oh, so we found a double asteroid out there… 

(Slide of Dimorphos and Didymos). 

Audience member: Fuzzy!! (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Ahhhhh! (laughs).  This is a Fuzzy image of an asteroid… 80,000,000 miles away (crowd laughs, applauses). Not sitting in front of the damn jet fighter. Eighty million miles away. So, we discovered this (pointing at Dimorphos). That’s a moonlet of this asteroid (points at Didymos, the larger of the two), and it orbits this asteroid, so we had a mission to slam into the moonlet because we know, precisely, it takes to complete its orbit, and checked to see how much changed. And that would be the measure of our success. So, here’s a schematic of what’s going on here (slide, schematic of the process).  

So, there’s the orbit of the moonlet, space craft comes in, collides with it –so it’s a direct impact, deploys a monitoring spacecraft made by the Italians that went by to observe it, and we wanted to see if we could put it into a new orbit. In fact, here is the actual footage of that encounter…  It’s less fuzzy! (audience laughs). 

Here it is. This is the actual footage. This is Didymos. This is… I forgot the name of the other…  

Audience: Dimorphos! 

Tyson, along with the still frames captured animated to show getting closer to impact, mouthing and humming the Jaws theme percussion and baritone lifts, respectively… 

Tyson, creating an explosion “Pssheewww” with his mouth as the screen turns red after the impact slide: That’s the blood! (crowd laughs) 

Tyson: This was, indeed, successful. It changed the –this is, now, two years ago- it changed the path by this much… Let’s see… The original orbit was nearly 12 hours, and they took off 32 minutes from the orbit. And we would’ve been happy if it managed to take off only 73 seconds. So, that’s what we were hoping to acheive. We actually took off 32 minutes (audience applauses).

Tyson: Yes. There’s something else that’s implied here, but I’m going to be explicit.  

Tyson: The DART mission was a space probe launched from Earth, a moving platform, to intercept an asteroid’s movement -a moving target. It then hits the target, deploys another space craft to observe it, we calculate the phenomenon, and we drop the orbital period by 32 minutes. 

(audience member claps). 

This is Science. Yet there are people that walk among us that’re, ‘I don’t trust science. What does science even know?’ (Audience applauses) ‘Science is no better than any human.’ ‘Look I’m not gonna take a vaccine. I saw a two hour Youtube video that (audience laughs, claps harder)’, ‘I’m an expert….’(audience is cheering). 

Tyson: My favorite poster ever (slide of comic): Asteroids are nature’s way of asking, ‘How’s the Space Program coming along?’ (audience laughs). 

Chemistry

Tyson: How about Chemistry?  

Audience member: Woo! 

Tyson: Oh!  …Chemistry. Got some people liking some chemistry.   

Here’s something we can ask… Are we made of rare ingredients? 

Audience: No. 

Tyson: That was rhetorical (audience laughs).  

One can ask, because if we were, we’d be made of something special happening here on Earth -once again feeding your ego- happened here, and never anywhere else, so you can ask that question. We have asked that question in modern astrophysics. You can’t just deduce this. It is a very careful, extensive set of measurements over decades. Okay? 

We can ask, ‘what is the abundance of elements in the universe?’ Then, compare it to earth. 

(Slide, to create comparative list: Universe v. Earth):  

The number one atom in the universe is hydrogen. Again, you cannot just deduce this, you have to measure this. It’s one of the triumphs of 20^th century astrophysicists to come to this knowledge. 

The next most abundant element is helium. Nine out of ten atoms in the universe is hydrogen. Eight out of ten atoms are helium. -By the way, I was listening one time to a radio play. These aliens were coming to Earth, sucking up our water supply because they thrive on hydrogen (audience member cackles). Yet 90 percent of the universe is hydrogen (audience laughs). They were taking our water supply (audience laughs) because the author of this story only got so far in science class to know that water was H2O, but didn’t go beyond earth to know what else is in the universe. I was very disappointed. Quickly changed the channel on the…. 

(Tyson notices a kid in the front) Tyson, to kid: That’s -we…There used to be these little things called radios in the car, (to audience) I’m explaining to my 12-year-old, here (audience giggles).  

Tyson: Yeah, so the radio, right? You could only listen to what they sent to your radio. Couldn’t fast forward. You couldn’t ‘like’ it, or ‘dislike’ it. All you could do is change the channel to another station.  

Tyson, to kid: Yes. I beg for you pity (audience laughs). 

-Third, Oxygen (pointing at the slide as they all orderly appear) 

Fourth, Carbon. 

Fifth, Nitrogen. 

Sixth –my favorite element of them all,  Other! (audience laughs).  

Now, life on Earth. Let’s look at humans. What’s the number one molecule in the human body (murmurs ‘water,’ and one outspoke, ‘Carbon’). 

Tyson: No, carbon is an atom. Not a molecule, and you’ve been told we’re carbon-based life, and so that duped you into thinking we have more carbon than anything. We are more than half water. 

(audience member wows). 

Tyson: And water has H – Two – O, if we’re paying attention from an hour ago. H – Two – O. The number one atom in our body is hydrogen. Found not only in our water supply, but rampant in our biochemistry. Hydrogen is.

Next. It’s not helium (audience laughs) -[and, he means ‘on Earth,’ as compared to the universe]. Helium is chemically inert. And even if it were there, your body couldn’t do anytning with it. So, we do have helium balloons. It’s a very light gas, so if you inhale it, you sound like Micky Mouse. 

[Isn’t it one of the elements the worlds so reliant upon on Russian to provide, relations could never really sever? Which ones were those? The dental filling element/compoud, and helium?)  

Tyson, changing subjects: You know Pluto was Mickey’s dog (audience laughs, none the wiser). And I’m fully disturbed by that because mouse [sic] should not own a dog. (audence member in back, ‘[…] also a dog![?]’) So, I had to find out why. So, I went to the Disney headquarters. Spoke with Roy Disney, the nephew. So, here’s the answer:  

In the Disney Pantheon, if you do not wear clothes, you can be owned by another animal who does (audience giggles).  

Tyson: So, Mickey is a sharp dresser, isn’t he? Gloves, and things. Pluto runs around butt-naked, on all fours. Lives in a doghouse. Barks. Unlike, …. (audience, ‘Goofy!’) Tyson: Goofy! Who wears clothes. Walks bi-pedly. He has a family, a wife, a kid. He pays a mortgage… 

Tyson: I bet you never thought you’d come here tonight an learn that (audience laughs, some clap). 

-Helium. Helium is in a column of elements we call the…  (some audience, ‘noble gases!’). 

Tyson: You know why it’s called Noble Gases… 

(Audience member: ‘Cause it…’) 

Tyson: -No you don’t. Let me tell you. You think you know but let me tell you (he’s got a bit in mind).  

The noble gases were hard to discover because they don’t interact with other elements. The Brits were primarily responsible for discovering most of the elements in that column. When they discovered these elements did not interact with other elements, they called them ‘Noble.’  

Tyson: Ewwwwwww (deep resentment). We fought a war in England to get away from that kind of thinking. I find it unforgivabe that there ascenine class system managed to make its way onto something as majestic as the Periodic Table of Elements (audience applause). 

Tyson: Of course, what they got wrong is, these elements don’t even talk to other normal elements (audience laughs). Okay. So, really, they should have called it the ‘hermit’ column (audience laughs). They don’t talk to anybody.  

(Momentary theatre silence as slide of balloon animals goes up).

Tyson: You know it’s weird with the balloo… -you know, I’ve never inhaled helium in a balloon. I’m sorry. I’m not that adventurous, but the kids do all the time. I think it gives the wrong sign, y’know, because you have the balloons on it, and you go (makes the sucking helium out of a balloon sound with accompanying face) (audience laughs). I think it gives the wrong signal to children, I think. As a dad (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Okay. Next. What’s the next element of life on Earth. It’s got to be what? 

(Audience, and Folk & Proper, together: Oxygen). 

Tyson: Oxygen, of course. To complete the water molecule.  

Next: Carbon.  

Next: Nitrogen.  

Altogether, class! Next! (Audience: Other!).  

We are one for one, in order, the same ingredients in the Universe that are chemically active, so what happened here on earth was opportunistic –chemically opportunistic. And we know where these elements come from -a triumph of twentieth century astrophysics. They’re forged in stars that are born in gas clouds. 

(Slide of nebula pops back up) Tyson: This image from James Webb Space Telescope, deep within, are stars that are born, and at the center of those stars is a crucible that takes its birthing wheels: Hydrogen -converts it to Helium. Then to Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Silcon. Iron. All the elements we’re made of are manu… -The heavy elements- were manufactured in the center of stars, and then explode, scattering that enrichment, so that the next generation of stars has the ingredients to make planets. And on at least one of those plants, to make life, and these gas clouds are everywhere [and HUGE/Space is BIG].

-And by the way, this… (zooms in on a, seemingly, border of the Nebula), some people call this the hand of God (it’s some ridges at the outer rim of visible gas resembling fingers), if God had three fingers (audience laughs). Hand of God. 

Tyson: These gas clouds are everywhere. We zoom in close, there’re gas clouds there. The Universe is filled with these places where… (right then, an ‘edgy’ photoshopped pic of the Chinese spy/weather balloon that floated over the US’s entirety in Jan. – Feb. 2023 [2023 Chinese balloon incident – Wikipedia] passes across the nebula, on screen).

Tyson: Ignore that. We’re not talking about that (audience giggles). That’s a separate talk on national security. Not what you came here for (one applause). 

Tyson: So, [peak within? seek within?]. It’s everywhere.  

Tyson: So,…So, it’s not just …figuratively true, …it is literally true that we are stardust. And you might stand out under the skies and look up, and say, ‘I feel small,’ and ‘the Universe is large,’ and maybe that damages your ego, perhaps? I don’t know. But I can tell you that when I look up and see the stars, I know this relationship [parapersonal, when thought about], I say to myself ‘I’m not only alive in the universe, the universe is alive within Me.’  

And that is a discovery of 20^th century astrophysics, a gift to civilization that borders on the spiritual.  

There’s a connectivity to the Cosmos, so that I feel large when I look up rather than small. 

Extracurricular

1:54:25, Tyson: Now, I realize I’m running a little longer tonight. This is a school night isn’t it (audience kids: ‘Naaaaaaahhhhhh,’ some, ‘Yeah!) (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Oh, somebody said, ‘nah, I’m not going to class tomorrow (audience laughs) (kid yells). 

Tyson: Okay, so here’s what I did. So, just in case, who here is, like, not yet a teenager? Just make some noise (several woot and yeah) Tyson, to one of the closer ones: How old are you, right here? How old? 

Kid, inaudible: 11; Tyson: And you? Another Kid inaudible: 11 1/2; Tyson: You’re also 11? And you? Next kid: 13; Tyson: Thir -teenager! Welcome to being a teenager. Now, you’re responsible, okay? All through the years you’ve been saying, ‘I don’t know any better ‘cause I’m just twelve.’ -Teenager… No excuses.  

Tyson: Okay, so I made a letter for you… Actually, I might not need to show it if I end on time.  I’ll hold the letter. It’s a –its a hall pass for you for tomorrow just in case you’re sleepy in class. But, I’m gonna need to finish up here, if I keep going. (Kid in front, ‘Please!’) I’ll keep going, okay? (Audience silent, seemingly on board and in tune) (Folk & Proper applause from the back mezzanine). 

Tyson: What happens is, I kind of start telling stories that aren’t budgeted into the clock, and y’know, you didn’t really need to know Pluto runs around butt naked (audience laughs). That just came out of me, and it wasn’t timed out, so… 

Anyway, go back twenty, forty years, in New York City when we built the Hayden Planiterium. That’s when I got into trouble with Pluto, because in the new facility, we took Pluto and moved it over here with the other dirty iceballs in the outer solar system, and the New York Times noticed this, and they had a headline –page one headline, below the fold… 

Tyson, turns to front row kids, again: So newspapers used to be… (audience laughs) …on paper. That’s why they’re called ‘newspaper.’ And you have your money, and you’d go to your corner store, and they’d be folded there on a shelf. So, you pull out the paper, unfold it. There’d be a main headline, and then there’d be another headline below it, below the fold. Not as important as the top headline, but still on page one.  

Tyson: Below the fold, on page one was a headline, “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York” (audience laughs). 

Tyson: That’s when that hate mail started coming in… from third graders (audience laughs). 

I have filling cabinets of hate-mail, becuase I was the director of the Hay… -I didn’t demote Pluto. I was just an accessory. Pluto had it coming. -I definitely drove the getaway car, but I didn’t plan the crime.   

Tyson: Anyhow, in that new facility, we opened with a show that zoom out from our planet to the edge of the universe, and Earth shrank down. The solar system shrank down. Our galaxy shrank down. You can barely notice it in the den [dim?] of light in the Universe. I got a letter to my office within a month of that opening show. It was from a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (a group in the back cackles). Tyson: back row, I gotcha (audience giggles). Okay.  

Tyson, reading (slide of letter up): ‘I’m an assistant professor of social/culture psychology, University of Pennsylvania. I want to discuss the possibility of a research project in collaboration with the planetarium. My research focuses on the psychological experiences that focus on the feelings of insignificance (audience laughs, one cackles) Tyson: Bummer of a job that is (audience laughs).  

But what is that? Does he come in from work? (Tyson, as guy walking in, coming home, drabbly) ‘Honey, I’m home…’ [as wife] ‘Well, hi, dear, how was your day at work?’ [drab husband] ‘Insignifican….’ [Tyson:] Okay, How does that work at home? I don’t know! 

Tyson, reading: ‘I recently saw this space show at the planetarium. Needless to say, it was the most dramatic eliciting of feelings of smallness and insignificance that I have yet encountered (audience is in, laughing) I’d be grateful to conduct a simple survey at the planetarium.  

Tyson: I think they wanted to give a survey of people before they entered the space show, all happy and them all happy coming out, being all depressed by seeing how small we are. 

I assert…, I declare…, I claim… that if you went up there standing tall and came out crouched over, its because you had an unjustifiably too-high ego to begin with (audience picks up applause). 

Tyson: -Yeah, you thought you were the center of the universe? You should be walking out like this (audience laughs). 

Tyson: We got two more categories here. Everybody doing okay? (crowd yells and woos)… 

Culture 

Tyson: Culture (slide, “Culture”). 

Succeeding emphasis, scattered kids: ‘Woo!’, ‘Whoa!’ ‘Yeah,’ ‘Woo!’ 

Tyson, laughing: Oh, Stop! Now you just lying. THis is not nerdgasm-worthy, over culture. Sorry. You don’t get credit for that (audience laughs) 

Tyson: All right. Let’s go back to ‘Merica, 2010 (audience laughs) Tyson: ‘Merica. …Talkin’ about old times. How many old-timers we got here? 

Guy in back: Yeeeeah! 

Tyson: Thank you, old-timer.  

Tyson: You go back in the 50’s and 60’s -not the 70’s, but the 60’s- [and] you didn’t have to wait too long before there was a cover story in Time Magazine; in Book magazine; in Collier’s Magazine, titled, “The Cities of Tomorow,” “The Homes of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow.” Everything was about tomorrow. There was a sense of hope that permeated culture. Even in the middle of all the trauma that was going on in the world. It was all about how tomorrow was envisioned yesterday (slides of all these futuristic, construction paper, German expressionism-to-Deco ads in magazines of the 60’s and 70’s; lot of Disney/Bob McCall stuff, too). 

Tyson, pointing at slide: In this city, everyone is sort of walling away from civilization, coming up to the new city, here (Bob McCall/Disney pic of Tomorrowland-esque city with folks arriving at it, on foot, walking up to it from distant hills). It has all the nationalities, all lined up, but of course the white people get here first, so (audience laughs) -and the Mexicans are looking behind them… There’s a river right here they cant cross (audience laughs).  

Tyson: I didn’t make this! Don’t shoot the messenger! (audience laughs). 

So, I think, […] this is the future. I’m worried… -I’m interested, because if you zoom in, it looks like there’s a gravity problem on the other side of the… (zooming in, there are people in space suits flying around, low, in the city, somehow). Tyson: I dunno. I dunno. 

Tyson (with slide): 1968. The album art for what movie? 

Audience: 2001… 

Tyson, at slide of 2001’s cover art: 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

Tyson, at new slide: A PanAm space shuttle coming from a space station being built. This is how people thought about the world back then. It wasn’t just the drugs in the 1960’s. There was a genuine feeling we were headed towards this future. Even cities you wouldn’t even imagine would have this level of –like Detroit (60’s, angular, shape-placed, German expressionist/Deco magazine cover ad of Detroit, skyscrapers connected by roads). 

Tyson: Who would’ve thought that Detroit would be a city of tomorrow? That’s like, …no (audience giggles). 

Tyson: Here’s an actual photo of the World’s Fair grounds (NY, ‘64), and I went, -I went to this. That’s how old. And not as an infant (audience laughs). And, in just a time of hope, the international flags, and the first flag was the flag of the UN. That’s how… that’s how –Yes we were still at war. It was Cold War with the Russia -the Soviet Union. There was a hot war in Southeast Asia; Civil Rights Movement –Martin Luther King was very –had just given a speech a year ealier, so yeah, this is… The World had problems, but you part the curtains and there was this sense of hope that prevailed. And just so you know, it’s not just me, Old-timers, would you agree with this sentiment (our audience’s old-times applaud in force). Tyson: Yeah. Okay. I’m not just making this up. 

I thought about this. I said, ‘why do we have this technology?’ I said, I think I know why. -Because we were going to the moon, and everybody knew it required Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology. We knew this. 

Tyson: But I’ll tell you what happened…. What was the subtopic of this talk? (Audience murmurs) […] Tyson: Oh, I’m sorry, topic?  

Audience: ‘cosmic perspective’ 

Tyson: We -We went to the moon to explore the moon, Yes.  But you know what we did? We looked over our shoulders and discovered Earth for the first time.

Earth.

Tyson: I have a quote from Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut.

“You develop an instant global consciousness of people-orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty, you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter-million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’ (audience applause).  

Tyson: That’s a cosmic perspective that transcends what you might have heard as The Overview Effect. The Overview Effect, that’s what astronauts feel as they orbit the Earth (“a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.” -Wiki). 

Tyson: If Earth were a school room globe (slide, shool room globe), you know how high above the Earth we orbit? One centimeter. Four-tenths of an inch (audience laughs). So, no. They don’t see the entire earth. That only happens when you go to the moon. And when you look at Earth, you see it in all of its magic and glory, the oceans, and land, and clouds. What you do not see is the school room globe where somebody color-coded the land masses so that you knew who your enemies, and who your friends are. No, I didn’t think that as a kid. I thought, ‘oh, this will be very helpful. It’s very international.’ And as I got older, I was saying, ‘that’s not what Earth looks like from space.’ There’s an injustice happening here, because we’re being tribalized by these forces of illustration on its surface. At least have another glove on the back shelf that shows as seen from space, but no. That’s the glove we all saw. In space you don’t see color-coded countries.  

Actually, there are two places on Earth where from space you can see a national boundary. Two places.

(slide, The Korean Peninsula) (theatre silence, taking it in). 

Tyson: […] Fully visible at night. By the way, human beings live on each side of that line. …No. More than that, Koreans live on both sides of that line. But forces of politics create that difference. That’s visible from space… at night (audience silence). 

Tyson: One other place… You can see this in the daytime.  

(Israel, and surrounding countries, r/MapPorn, u/Homesanto) Tyson: Israel, and surrounding nations.

Here, because this is basically desert, what you’ll notice is, because there’s a boundary especially visible between Israel and Egypt, but all the surrounding nations are much dryer, visible from space, then Israel, itself. Israel heavily irrigates, and this is the GDP per capita comparison between and surrounding countries (slide comparing Israel’s GDP per capita to surrounding countries). 

Slide, “12x Jordan,” “14x Palestine and Egypt,” “100x Syria.” 

Tyson: That’s visible from space, as well. …Not visible from night, but visible in the daytime. Otherwise, no. You don’t see national borders. 

Tyson: Now, it took a long while before anyone drew Earth with clouds (slide, 1940’s Life Magazine cover). 

That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? To draw Earth, they drew a circle, and they drew continents, but what about the clouds. We had to, like, see the clouds on Earth from space before it became a part of how we thought of Earth. Here it is, 1960, Life magazine knew a portrait of our planet –yes, Earth, with no atsmosphere (audience laughs). Billions of people suffocated (audience laughs).  

Tyson: Well, maybe Star Trek will know better. Let’s go to our first year of Star Trek, as well. 

AM: 1966! 

Tyson: ‘66. Thank you. Geeky folks in the audience! Give me a fist bump on that. C’mon up here (audience applause) (geeky dude from first row gets up to bump Dr. Tyson, leaning off the stage). 

Tyson: Nineteen sixt –six years later, surely Star Trek knows… (first season Star Trek graphic of Earth with no clouds) Nope. No, they don’t (audience laughs). Tell you a little secret, if you look at any modern stream or broadcast of Star Trek, they have swapped out all these images with modern images of the planets. Just to sort of preserve the visual impact of… So, if you see this today, Earth will have clouds. If they visit other planetary surfaces, they’ve used, like, NASA images of Mars, and other planets, so –but, yeah, I got an original, here, one for us to see today.  

Tyson: Well, let’s keep taking a look.  

Tyson: I submit to you that when we first went to the moon in 1968, to one year after we stopped going to the moon, the environmental movement was birthed, and flourished. Flourished. 

Personally, I credit NASA. But I credit it in a way that you might not otherwise think, because everyone that wasn’t engaged in the environmental movement said, ‘Then why you want to clean up Earth?’  

Tyson, as green person: ‘Well, because it’s the right thing to do, now.’ 

Tyson: No one says, ‘Oh, because I saw Earth from space.’ 

That image with Earth’s rise over the lunar horizon was obtained in Dec. 1968, by Apollo 8, forgotten because they didn’t land on the moon. But, they went to the moon. They were the first mission to leave Earth. For destination. We saw that image, it was a firmware upgrade to our awareness, of ourselves, to our relationship with Earth. It was a Cosmic Perspective implant brought to you by the Apollo program. 

Tyson: Between those years, all of this happened (slide listing the following events): The Whole Earth Catalogue was published (audience member claps six times, emphatically). Why did they call it Whole Earth? That’s interesting.  

The first Earth Day was happening while we were going to the moon. First in the United States, and then internationally. 

NOAA was founded in 1970. The first time we have Ocean and Atmosphere in the same sentence. 

The EPA was founded in 1970. by a Republican president, I might add (one ‘woo!’). 

The Comprehensive Clean Air Act, 1970. The crying –the crying Indian? Remember him? That’s 1970. Plus, he’s Italian descent (audience laughs). 

Tyson: You could get away with it, back then. Today, not so much. Okay? 

Tyson: Well, so what else happened while we were on the moon? Doctors Without Borders. They probably would’ve still been founded, but would they have said ‘without borders’? I don’t think so. They might’ve said ‘Global-trotting Doctors,’ or ‘International doctors.’ 

DDT is banned. Comprehensive Clean Water Act. And we finally banned lead in gas. All of this happened while we were on the moon. It could’ve happened ten years earlier, but it didn’t. It could’ve happened ten years after, but it didn’t.  

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was 1962.  

Did any of these happen then? No. She got the ear of President Kennedy, in 1962. They even formed a little commission to see, ‘do we ban [DN egg, or have dee egg?] (audience laughs hard) Do we need to ban DDT? But what happens? Kennedy dies, and she dies. Tragically from cancer. So, that took the air out of that.  

Then we build up in Vietnam. There was campus unrest. Civil Rights Movement. And in the middle of all that, we do this: Earth. We finally started caring about Earth.  

Not just the fluid stream behind your –in your neighborhood… Earth. As a wholistic system of land, oceans, atmospheres.  

So, is this misleading to look at Earth like this? Is this even… Are we diluting ourselves? 

Because, if you get closer… You get up close… What do you see? 

(Slides reeling protest imagery, Guy Fawkes-masked protester, hucking; George Floyd protests, ’20; Portland, ’20-21; January 6th assault, ’21; Russia’s war on Ukraine, ’22- ; Hamas-Israeli War”)

Tyson: You see this. You see human beings. We’re the same species. We… You don’t see this from space. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. I don’t know. 

The reason why I don’t know is, if you take the world’s leaders, and you send them to space. And -if you want to bring any of them back, then, maybe, they will change, just as Edgar Mitchell imagined.  

They just… These are human beings slaughtering other human beings.  

Earth. Close up. …Close up. 

(theatre silence). 

Tyson: Now, I want to leave you with a very –with a positive note. …But before I do that, I -here you go… 

(slide of tardy excuse) (crowd comes out of it, ‘ha! That’s funny,’ ‘Oh, my gawd,’ and ‘Yeah, okay…’ -eventually rustling and chatter). 

Tyson: […] You’re welcome. …This is your hall pass. I think I spelled things correctly, but I…. 

This evening, your students –You can zoom into this, even from the back row, I’m quite sure -Imagine how good your camera would be photographing an alien (crowd laughs). It would go viral over night. Cat videos go viral. If you get an alien walking out of a flying saucer to say ‘hi’ to you… 

Tyson reads: ‘The talk ran long, which may explain why your student may be a little sleepy, Tuesday morning. But it’s not a free hall pass. Don’t hesitate to ask your student to share with fellow classmates some of the knowledge gleaned tonight…’  

Tyson: Oh, they ‘may,’ or ‘will,’ pick one of those word. ‘May delight in this exercise…’ Okay. 

Scale

Tyson: Let me give you my final Cosmic Perspective, here. Scale. 

Audience Member, bro-emphatically: Whoo! 

Tyson: Oh, Stop! (audience cracks up, woots more). 

Tyson: That felt a little forced. It was a good one, it just… 

Tyson: All right. In 1977, we launched two Voyager missions, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. This spacecraft is about, that antennae is about this big. The dish is about that big. It was designed to gain enough energy from flybys of Jupiter and Saturn to escape the solar system forever.  

(Slide: The golden, Voyager disks). 

Carl Sagan knew this, and was very active at NASA, at the time, and they devised some iconography to affix to the sides of this craft so that if aliens ever found them, they’d have some information about us. And this plac happened to go on the side of Pioneer 10 and 11, two other spacecraft that have left the solar system, but a lot of this imagery is repeated in Voyager. There’s a little spider diagram there. That’s the distance and direction to pulsars in the galaxy (Pulsars are pulsating stars [he waits for laughs at the astrophysicist’s cleverness in naming]) (audience member cough to eventual muffled giggle). 

Tyson, pointing up at the slide: You can use that to triangulate our location, and he gives a representation of the solar system, here: The sun. The third planet out. There’s a path leading from it that swings around Jupiter, and that spacecraft looks like what’s behind those two human figures, there, so the aliens would get a sense, our size relative to the craft.  

Tyson, noticing something, and reminding himself: Oh, yeah. We’ll get to that in a moment. So -So, couple things to notice, there’s a comic where they have aliens that recovered the space craft, and you can see the illustration of the two humans –and these are, like, aliens in tuxedos, and they were like, ‘Oh, those humans look just like us, but they don’t wear clothes (audience laughs).’  

Tyson: Not bad, once you’re past security. 

Tyson: Plus, there’s presentism. Some people look at this and say, ‘well why is the man waving and the woman isn’t?’ 

Tyson: Chill for a moment. This plac was 1975, 1976? Women were nowhere to be found anywhere doing anything at any time. The fact that there is even a woman on this at all was highly progressive. You can’t come to this fifty-five years later and say, ‘these misogynist men,’ no this was amazing. To judge it by today’s standards is called Presentism. You’ve got to go into time and ask yourself, ‘what did it take to actually get this through NASA? And whatever censors they do make it through, they’re standing all out there like this? (the woman and man on the gold disks are nekkid-as-hell). 

Tyson: Now, this has our return address. Would you give your email to a stranger on the street? So, this is the return address to the solar system to any aliens in the galaxy, so…. Maybe that was not a good idea, but I think we’re safe, because back then, Pluto was represented as a planet (crowd cracks up).  

Tyson: So, the aliens will come looking for a nine-planet system, and we won’t be that (audience laughs). So, Pluto will have saved up in the end (audience laughs) from the evil aliens (audience applause). 

Here is the disk that went to the side of Voyager. There’s the repeated spider diagram, this is the hydrogen molecule. There’s some other iconography. That, and he sent a record album –I think these are coming back, right? (audience member: they have) Tyson: Record album… 

Tyson: Lemme find a twelve-year-old (audience chuckles). 

Tyson, to one of the twelve-year-olds: So, in the olden days, you had to scratch lines in vinyl, and then you get a diamond needle and stick it in that groove and jiggle. It would send vibrations to a magnet, though wires, and convert an electrical signal into a sound signal that went into your speaker, and that’s how we listened to music (audience laughs) (one audience member’s dusty, woo!). 

[Folk & Proper took pride Tyson’s Cosmic Perspective came to explanation of newspapers before vinyl records, to the youths. -How’s that for reverence, White?] 

Tyson: Yeah, we had more, carrying music on our hip. -So, So! 

Tyson, at pic of the gold records: This, of course, in 1977, they’re not giving them, like, an iPhone, or anything. So, here is music of Earth. There was, like, Mozart, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and…. Greetings from multiple languages. They went to the steps of the UN, one day, as people came out to give greeting to the aliens in all the different languages (some audience laugh). …Very colorful. 

Tyson: There’s a skit on Saturday Night Live, where the aliens got ahold of [the records], and they sent a message back, to be read by [Time Magazine editors about to publish] […] Tyson, as press, asking, in skit, ‘what does it say? What does it say?’ 

Tyson, as [Time Magazine editors, Martin and Aykroyd] [Martin]: Send More Chuck Berry (audience laughs). 

Tyson: Well, 13 years after it was launched, Voyager passed Neptune… the last planet in the solar system (audience laughs) -I told you to get over it (audience laughs), Carl Sagan, who was influential at NASA, at the time, convinced NASA to have the onboard camera turn around and face back to the inner solar system, enabling Earth to take its very first selfie. 

Slide of The Pale Blue Dot. 

Tyson: And that became to be known as “The Pale Blue Dot.” 

From that, Carl Sagan wrote a book called, The Pale Blue Dot, where he waxxed poetic about world politics, culture, our past and present, and future.  

Well, that photo of the pale blue dot was reprised in the Cassini mission to Saturn. This is not a mission that was a fly-by, but to go to Saturn and orbit, and stay there for thirteen years. 

Tyson: The Pale Blue Dot as a version taken from Saturn. 

Can we dim all the lights in the house for a second…  

Tyson, in his Barry White: ‘Oh, that’s beautiful.’ ‘Oh, yeeeah (audience laughs). Tyson: Yeahhhhhhh (a couple woots). 

Tyson: Here is Saturn (audience member giggles) From Cassini (one, two claps in the back). 

You see it from behind. You don’t ever get to see it from behind, because it’s an outer planet. You always see it fully lit by the sun […] And you see, the ring system is not one ring, but many. 

A friend and colleague, Carolyn Porco, whose head of the imaging team of Casini found exactly when the space craft was oriented so that it could see Earth [cup fell, so quiet] …from Saturn.  

Tyson: I will now end with a resuccation from the book of Carl (successively, audience shuffle-laughs, then a single applause, and an audience member, ‘Amen.’ Crowd laughs). 

Tyson: ‘If you look at Earth from space, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.  

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived out their lives, the agony of all our joys our sufferings, thousands of confident religions and ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward. Every creator and destroyer of civilizations. Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morales, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a moat of dust. 

Earth is a very small stage in a vast, cosmic arena.  

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and in triumph, they can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot are scarcely indistinguishable of some other inhabitants from some other corner of the dot. 

How frequent there are misunderstandings. How eager they are to kill one another. How fervent their hatred is. Our postulisms, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely spec in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint from elsewhere that they’ll come and save us from ourselves. It’s up to us.”  

Tyson: It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there’s perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionatley for one another, and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever know. 

(audience silence). 

Tyson: Thank you, Nashville (crowd erupts with it all). 

Neill deGrasse Tyson’s touring schedule, partially dictated by host-city invitation, will be taking Tyson to the Beacon Theatre in New York, New York on March 20, 2024, followed by a west-side run beginning at Reynolds Hall in Las Vegas, April 14 – 15; an appearances at Paramount Theatre in Seattle, April 15 – 16; The George S, and Delores Dore Eccles Theatre in Salt Lake, Weds. April 17; then back over here for a heavy-hitting run starting at the Keybank State Theatre in Cleveland, OH, May 7, 2024; The Chicago Theatre, Chicago, IL, May 9; and the State Theatre in Minneapolis, May 10, 2024. He appears in TX, PA, and CO for the remaining year, so he does ~20 shows a year?  

2024 dates, as of now, can be found at the unofficial fan site, Neil deGrasse Tyson Tour | Get Your Tickets Today!  

The link to Tyson’s Hayden Planetarium gift shop, autographed copy availabilty site is linked in caption below the QR code pic, or Author Neil deGrasse Tyson – Books | AMNH Store. 

A full catalogue of every Tyson book can be found at though where ever you find your books are sold, as well as his home site, Neil deGrasse Tyson, more specifically, Author Neil deGrasse Tyson – Books | AMNH Store 

It’s pretty cool being merely three degrees away from the Voyager out there, right now, when Neil deGrasse Tyson is in the room. -There aren’t that many degrees closer, y’know. 

Again, part of what a Cosmic Perspective is not only knowing, or placing the risk, but knowing our frailties in the Universe.