RocketSTEM Issue #6 - March 2014 | Page 27

Q: As a kid, what scientific depiction or invention from sci-fi movies or television did you most want to have become real? Tyson: Seen in the original StarTrek series - doors that automatically open when you approach them, and close when you walk away. Something ubiquitous today, but unimagined for most of the history of doors. Beyond that, warp drives. I, too, want to be able to cross the Galaxy during a TV commercial. Q: How can gravity cause galactic collisions when the universe is constantly stretching them away from each other? Tyson: Some galaxies -- those that are closest to one another -- tend to be gravitationally bound. The expanding universe has no effect on them. Over the eons, they will ultimately collide, coalescing into one giant mass of stars and gas. We (Milky Way denizens) are on just such a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. Q: Why is there a growing consensus that there was something before the Big Bang, and what are some of the theories of what ‘that’ was? Q: Is time tangible? Why? Tyson: If, by tangible, you mean that you can touch it, then no. But neither is space. They are coordinates of our lives. Q: Are we as a species ready to send humans to live on Mars as a colony, never to return to Earth? Tyson: No. Such a colony would be a habitat module, mimicking earth air, and providing a supply of water and food. If that’s how you are going to do it, why not stay on Earth? Like taking a luxury Winnebago with satellite TV, a bathroom, and a kitchen on a camping trip. You are not camping. The colonists who came to the new world did so, in part, to escape persecution. And they discovered, upon arriving, that you can breath the air, and eat the fruit, and use wood from the trees to make homes. A one-way trip to Mars has no such amenities. Consider also that Antarctica is wetter and balmier than the Martian surface, yet nobody is lining up to build condominiums there. The takeaway here is that people live and work among us who want to take such a one-way trip. And I will always applaud ambition. Image: Patrick Eccelsine/FOX Tyson: Quantum physics -- the most successful theory of the universe there ever was -- when combined with general relativity, offers compelling arguments for why our universe may be one of many, each with slightly different laws of physics from one another. This admits a multiverse that preceds the universe itself. 25 www.RocketSTEM.org 25