StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

803 Pages·2019·171.71 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Simons

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To all the fans of StarTalk,
whose insatiable appetite for science has inspired
the rich buffet on which this book is based.
CONTENTS
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Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
About This Book
SECTION ONE
SPACE
What Do I Pack For Mars?
What Do I Eat In Space?
Can We Use Wormholes to Travel?
Who Goes There?
Are We There Yet?
SECTION TWO
PLANET EARTH
Pale Blue Dot or Big Blue Marble?
How Do We Get Water?
Where Do Storms Come From?
Is There a Solution for Pollution?
Is This the End of the World as We Know It?
SECTION THREE
BEING HUMAN
If We Evolved from Monkeys, Why Are Monkeys Still Here?
Can Science Help Me Find True Love?
What’s the Spice of Life?
Where Does Creativity Come From?
Shall We Play a Game?
Is God Real?
SECTION FOUR
FUTURES IMAGINED
When Are the Zombies Coming?
Could Superman Survive a Black Hole?
Why Don’t We Have Flying Cars Yet?
Could Bigfoot Be a Space Alien?
When Will We Be Able to Time-Travel?
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Illustrations Credits
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the StarTalk radio and television talk shows. Credit
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Introduction
W
ith those words, and the support of the
National Science Foundation (NSF), the first broadcast
of StarTalk Radio beamed out in 2007 across all of
space and time. What has followed—on the radio, on
the Internet, and on the National Geographic Channel
—is now a movement that has thrown science and pop
culture together into a whirling singularity and hurled
the result out into our universe for all to enjoy.
“Our universe is filled with secrets and mysteries, leaving us with
many questions to be answered. We find ourselves searching for
those answers as the very fabric of space, science, and society are
converging. Here, for the first time, these worlds collide!”
—STARTALK RADIO INTRODUCTION
Conversations on StarTalk can delve into viruses, like HIV, and medical advances. Credit 4
If you’re new to StarTalk, you may be wondering: What am I getting into?
The millions of fans out there have, no doubt, millions of answers to this
very good question. Maybe you can get a sense from real data. In a survey
of three arbitrarily chosen StarTalk audience members, we’ve obtained
these three assessments:
1. “StarTalk is a fun show with an intellectual science bent.”
2. “StarTalk is a discussion of pop culture within the context of science.”
3. “StarTalk is a way where you can learn science-y stuff through non-
science-y stuff—and it’s funny!”
What is StarTalk? The name says it all: Stars talk. Movie stars. TV stars.
Comedy stars. Stars of all other kinds, as well—artists, activists, authors,
opinion shapers, policymakers, and, of course, scientists. Sometimes, the
talk is about stars, like the kind that have nuclear fusion in their cores and
whose light twinkles as it passes through our atmosphere. Mostly, though,
it’s about anything and everything under those stars; and it’s not an
interview or a publicity piece—it’s a conversation. StarTalk has celebrity,
and comedy, and crazy egg-headed science. In a world where
compartmentalization is increasingly the norm, such seemingly disparate
elements, at first glance, would seem hard to combine. StarTalk reminds us