LEVEL (2021) - Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Reply to the world...

Video Transcript:

You Chuck gotta get this off my chest like now now now When people say they want to go into space. I want to go. What do they typically mean by that? I mean, I'm gonna be an astronaut. I'm gonna be I'm going into space man. I'm going up there Up there and generally I mean they want to go into orbit Excuse me the Did you just say right most anyone who has ever been in space? They don't mean that they want to go to space man Well, well, okay if that's the case do you know how many people have left lower Earth orbit? Well first of all you are going to have to define low earth orbit for me. Okay, sorry Okay Because I'll say I'll say it another way all right the Apollo astronauts okay, okay that left Earth right To go to the moon all right, okay, and that's that space. Okay, wait a minute So those are the only people who have ever left earth for a destination Every other astronaut hundreds of them are called astronauts and we still say they went into space and What that means is they went into low earth orbit. Oh, that's just awful It's a low earth orbit is in practice You know where the space station is it's about a couple hundred miles up so so if so the distance from earth's surface to the space station is Less than the distance from New York City to Washington DC. Oh Oh God, why are you depressing me like this? I'm just trying to be honest about this awful Okay, so when people say to me you want to go into space and because somebody's got some orbital tourist thing And I'm thinking to me space is the large scale structure of the universe. Thank you Not boldly going where hundreds have gone before driving around the block as low earth orbit Indicates, okay, so yeah, you can drive to earth orbit in you know three or four hours. Oh, right If the road we're pointing straight up so NASA and Others I'm not implicating NASA uniquely in this when they say we are going into space That's what they mean, okay? Now there's a functional definition of space damn so space X should be no it gets worse they should be called Leo X Low earth orbit X Yeah, 100 kilometers up Or about 62 miles Okay, all right, see if you if you do the conversion so if you get to that altitude whether or not you're in orbit You go above the blue sky all right the daytime blue sky then that sky gets darker and darker It is black the black space is so you can have earth behind you the blackness of space over to one side and the brilliant sun Off to the other side welcome space baby I don't have a problem with that except that definition Depends on earth's atmosphere doesn't it? Yeah, it does suppose earth's atmosphere were half as thick As it is all right now you go on 31 and 30 now you go in 50 kilometers 31 miles up Okay, that's terrible now suppose it was one fourth is thick Now you go in 25 kilometers and 15 miles up All right now suppose it was one tenth this thick is then it's ten miles up and suppose we didn't have an atmosphere at all So then are you still in space just by standing here on earth? Because under those situ and that circumstance you would look up and you would no longer have a blue sky No God No God please no no Someone at NASA told Neil we're not going to let you go head-to-head with Eric DuBay because he'll make you look foolish Proof me wrong You