Get ready to explore the "Cosmos" with Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astronomy Magazine

Hold on, a quick aside. When you say the word billion on the show, I feel like you think for a moment before you pronounce it. Were you careful in how you said the word billion, not to sound too much like Carl Sagan?

[laughs] You know, you can't step into a Sagan slot and not be conscious of the number billion. There were a couple of times I would punch it up a notch, almost as an homage, but otherwise not. I do remember a couple of times when I didn't think the editors would use those cuts where I went high on the intonation scale.

Sorry, back to our conversation. Many people who think about the future of humanity imagine us someday merging with computers. Does that seem credible to you?

No, not really. And I know I'm an outlier here. It doesn't feel credible because, you know, I have in my palm access to the internet. So you're saying, "Oh, now I'm going to wire that with a USB connection into my brainstem." How fast access am I going to want? Is it not fast enough to pull this phone out of my pocket? For me, the fact that it is right with me every day I leave the house, that doesn't leave me wanting this thing to be surgically connectedto get silicon surgically connected to my physiology.You dont crave more speed, more connection to information?

Heres a related analogy. Air transportation, in its early decades, was about how fast can you fly to your destination, how to minimize the time you're on an airplane. So planes got faster and faster. We got to jets instead of propellers, and then we got the supersonic transport. Then things started pulling back. Why? Well we had the 747. Planes got larger, they had better food, they had more leg room. The seats were more comfortable. Today we have the internet on your flight, we have any movie you'd ever want to watch, we have music.

The idea that speed was so important that we would want it at all costs gave way to a different idea: I am comfortable in this environment, and in fact I can even catch up on things. I can binge on shows I didn't have time to watch at home. You can come off the plane in a better place than you were before you entered it. And so no one is trying to make planes faster today. In fact, they're slower than before. The typical speeds are 500 to 550 miles per hour, whereas when I was growing up, the speeds were 600 to 650 miles per hour.

So to say we're going to become one with artificial intelligence because we want the speed, I just don't see that happening.

A lot of people also dream that computer technology will bring us immortality. Thats a possible world they long for: We will upload our brains, and then we'll never die.

Well, I would ask, if you upload your brain, how do you know that's still you? I don't think we understand consciousness enough to assert that. We can say that's your knowledge. That thing, that entity has all the same knowledge that you have, but is that you? I don't know.

We know that an identical twin has identical DNA to you yet they are not you. You don't have their thoughts and they don't have your thoughts. So this notion of uploading your consciousnessI'm not going to pay close attention to it until we have a secure understanding of what consciousness is in the first place.

That's a whole other mysterious world, the mental world that is still barely being explored.

Right. Its a frontier perhaps as vast as the universe itself.

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Get ready to explore the "Cosmos" with Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astronomy Magazine