Joe Rogan - Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why There Aren't Flying Cars

We didn't hit innovation in other countries. Oh, here's one. Oh, we never even got into cars. Why there's no flying cars. Why there'll never be flying cars. Yeah. We started with this, please. Okay. Since we're two hours and 40 minutes in. Is that allowed? Oh my gosh. Yeah, we're flying, dude. No, but people don't have three hours, do they? Oh, we do it all the time. Really? Yeah. Oh, are you sure? 100%. Yeah. This is not, you sure? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Dude, I'm honored to believe your average. The ones we've done, we've all been close to three hours. Okay. In the neighborhood. Here you go. Is that a ding? Oh dear. That's rude. Okay, so let me. I flipped it. I turned that goddamn switch on. Okay, so let's go back to. Flying cars? Let's go back to why anyone would want a flying car in the first place. Because they're an asshole. Okay, no, here it is. They're stuck in traffic. So here it is. Better than everybody. So let's watch. This is one road. Okay. Okay. That was the width of your car. And you're driving on this road and there are cars behind you. The fastest you could go on that road is the speed of the slowest car on the road. Right. Make sense? Yes. This is travel in one dimension. That sucks. What you really want is travel in two dimensions. So you take the road and widen it. Let's make two lanes. Two lanes in one direction. You can have two the other way as well. That doesn't matter here. Now you have two lanes. So now I can go around you. Your slow ass car. Okay. But and that's fine. This is a great improvement on one dimensional travel. Now it's two dimensions. Okay. I can shift left or right as well as move forward or backwards to move. And the more lanes you have, the more two dimensional that is. Okay. The 405 here in Los Angeles. What is it? Six lanes each. It's 12 frickin lanes. Okay. You are fully exploiting the two dimensionality of travel. But you still have so many cars that you say to yourself, I want to bypass this traffic. If you went from one dimension to two dimensions, bypassing is just another lane. But now all 12 lanes are plugged and you want to bypass it. So you're thinking I need to travel in another dimension. I want to travel in the third dimension. If I do that, I can bypass all these cars. I want a flying car. Yeah. Okay. Well, the point is we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. Well, the helicopters have originally invented for that. They're called helicopters. They're noisy. They have to create a downward thrust of air equal to its own weight. If you're going to have a flying car, that's what it's going to have to do. They're noisy. They completely disrupt the terrain wherever they fly. So the issue is not that you want a flying car. You want to travel in that third dimension. We already do that. How do we do that? They're called tunnels. They're called bridges. When you have a huge intersection, you don't move people through one another. You build one road over the other. You build one road under the other. You are exploiting three dimensions so that traffic can go in perpendicular directions simultaneously. That's what the flying cars would have given you. But we do that at intersections because it would be impossible to move 12 lanes of traffic through an intersection that crossed another freeway. New York City has done this. We do this. The New York, you're in the streets. There's too many cars. You can't move. Let's move in the third dimension. Let's build a subway. This sounds like a guy who's trying to sell me something that's better than a flying car. You're like, listen, man, that flying car is bullshit. You can buy a flying car. I want you to appreciate moving in the third dimension. The New York City subway system moves a billion people a year. And they all go in the third dimension beneath the ground through tunnels, tunnels that are layered on top of one another. The New York City subway system is amazing. You can move that many people. It's great, but it's not as good as a flying car. It's not as cool as a flying car, but it's as effective as a flying car. No, not for a person who has a flying car. Personally, flying car doesn't have to get in line. You don't have to get on the subway. You don't have to have a token. You don't have to go through the turnstile. You don't have to deal with some guy who's rubbing his body up against yours. Flying cars and shit. You just fly around. I'm just saying. It's like a boat. Tunnels. But for the air. And bridges are flying cars. The beautiful thing about a boat is you just go wherever you want to go. Now, here's the thing. It's kind of you don't have to call air traffic control. I would turn and left. I would take you to another dimension. No, someone will have to know where the hell your flying car is going. Just the same way traffic rules matter in a street. You want this not a free for all. It is with boats. And you know what happens if a car fails? Falls. On the ground, it just stops. Right. If it land on people's houses and shit. If a flying car fails, you're dead. Right. Okay. So I want to add another dimension to this conversation. Oh, Elon Musk is tunnels. Okay. Ready? Exactly. Exactly. So watch. Here's a desk in front of me. Okay. I it's a physical desk and I have a lot of sheets of paper and and so I lay them side by side, I tile the desk with all my sheets of paper, then there's no desk surface left. I ran out of two dimensional space. If I want to store more pages on my desk, what do I do? I get one of those organizers. I've just introduced a third dimension. So now I could have pages in another dimension sitting above the page that was previously occupying another place that I couldn't have put another sheet. That's three dimensions. Yes. Okay. If we were two dimensional people, we would wonder what happened to that sheet of paper because we have no access to that third dimension. You would, it would just left our universe. At this point, I'd be trying to back out of the showroom and I'd say, thank you, but I'm going to go to the flying car place. So now watch, but look at how much you've increased your storage by introducing another dimension. Now imagine a fourth spatial dimension. We don't have access to that. But we're now filling all three dimensions and a four dimensional creature will say, well, just put it up in this direction. What would be the fourth dimension in that regard? You can't imagine it because our brain evolved in three dimensions. We haven't, we can describe it mathematically. Maybe a wormhole in Pasadena, downtown LA. So our storage needs would be, you could open a door, put it through this portal to the fourth dimension and close the door and look on the other side of the door and nothing would be there. Yeah. Just the way on the surface of the desk, if you live in the surface of the desk, someone opens a door, they put the paper through the door, close the door and you look around it and say, where did it go? I have no idea. Cause you can't even see, you can't even imagine that third dimension. We cannot imagine a fourth dimension, but if the world one day gets so crowded that even three dimensional space has traffic. Access to a fourth dimension would greatly help that. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Good luck with that. Getting people to step through. I still, what is this, Jamie? Some flying thing that just came out last month. Oh, look at this thing. Wait a minute. That's CGI. That part seems CGI, but it's actually flying over grass. Why? It's moving it. Look at this thing. What is it? Solar powered? I don't know. Huh? The trailer like showing it, describing it. Does it have sound? Does it make sound? No, it looks like it looks like a human sized drone. Yes. It's exactly what it looks like. Okay. What about something like this? What about something like this with really powerful magnets all outside the outer edge so it repels against other drones? She won a maglev flying car. So if you get so close, like, Oh, I see. It'll be like a force field. Slam into each other. Oh, so it'd be like, uh, it'd be like a, um, bumper cars, but with, with cushions. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Some sort of electromagnetic force field that, you know, everyone agrees that you don't have ones that are attracted to each other, but are opposed. By the way, see how big that human human sized drone is. Have you ever heard how loud a drone is? Fucking loud. Yeah. You can't, you can't even have a conversation. Yeah. I got an asshole in my neighborhood flies on around. That's what shotguns are for. Yeah. I wish I had one. I've never fired a gun in my life, but the first time I ever used one is to shoot the drone that's going to be looking through my window at my apartment. Oh, yeah. This is fucking asshole in my neighborhood. He flies on all over people's yards, but I can't uncork. They already think I'm crazy. There's no way. And if I shoot it with a bow and arrow, I'm not sure I'll hit it. By the way, did that video have a sound accompanying with it? Has some, some, a little bit, there's music and some description of it. Oh, it's music, but it's not the actual sound of those propellers. You know this, but they have on their webpage here that it's quieter than a car on a freeway. What? It's quieter than electric car. No, at 150 feet away. Measured at 150 feet. That's incredible. Okay. It's about the same as a car. Well, it says electric. The motorcycle's no count. So they're counting that as an electric car though. Oh, they are. Yeah. Yeah. Gasoline car is on the bottom, but is that... But cars today are not... That's on top. Wait, wait, just to be... That's energy consumption. I don't know if they're using the same icon to represent... See, they're using the same icon for electric car. So it's the sound of an electric car. No, no. So there's no engine there. But no, don't get deceived there because that's energy consumption. See, energy consumption uses the same icon for electric cars as it does for gasoline car. And then down... No, see it says noise. It shows highway, just car. It doesn't tell you 76 dBA. Yeah. Right, right. There's no way 76 dBA is the sound because electric car is far quieter than a regular car. All you hear is the drone of the tires. But what happens is above a certain speed, the aerodynamic noise is greater than the... So in a landing airplane. So here's what you do. You live in LA? Go to the in and out near LAX, which is right near a landing strip. Okay. Yeah. And listen to the sound of the planes as they come in for landing. Most of that sound is airfoil noise, not engine noise. Oh. Yeah. Which is why you can pretty much still maintain a conversation. You're old enough. We remember a plane would fly overhead in a city and you'd have to halt your conversation until it finished. Why? What happened? Engines got quieter and quieter, which enabled people to build real estate closer and closer to airports and not have a sound problem. That's poor fucks. But it didn't happen overnight. It was slow and steady. No kidding. Yeah. I never... I forgot about that. It's airfoil noise. I forgot that you had to stop talking when planes were flying. Oh, I remember it. In fact, Shea Stadium in New York City near LaGuardia Airport, the announcers had to stop anytime a plane flew over it. Wow. They couldn't announce the game. That's crazy. And when the Mets were in the World Series in 1969, Mayor Lindsey redirected the airport traffic to not fly over the World Series games. Wow. I thought that was a badass move of him, of his. Mayor Lindsey. Wow. Yeah. I completely forgot how loud planes used to be. Used to be correct. And now they're now there. It's a sound that's in the in the in the noise of the street. You don't even stop and notice it. You didn't even pay attention at all. You barely hear. You barely hear it. And so next time you're at a runway and when it's landing, it's much noise you're taking off because it's got to gain altitude. But coming down, it's most of that sound is glider noise. And evidence of this is is the noise of air going over the airfoil of the fuselage. If you do, you know, the moment they deploy the landing gear next time you're in an airplane, when they say we are clear for landing. Just listen. Yeah, listen to the ambient sound of the plane. Then listen to the sound after they deploy the landing. It's four, three times as loud. It ramps up hard. Hard because of the sound of the air going around something that's not aerodynamic. The freaking wheels. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I just never, for whatever reason, I never remembered that airplanes used to be louder. I think about all the time. So why can't I have a flying car? You still you want the drone flying car? Yeah. Yeah. So you need a you wouldn't want it. That would look ugly if two of those collide in the sky. But what about my magnet theory? What do you what do you know? Now it's got to have more power to lift the weight of the magnet. Solar, bro. Plus, you get some testosterone infused guy who doesn't want to let you ahead of them. They try to bump you. That kind of thing. You break the propeller and then you both fall out of the sky. Skyrage. Skyrage. Oh, it's a lot of day. I rage. We know it'll do it'll cull the herd of testosterone driven men. Okay, but what if they do it? But the only way they work is through like the same sort of Tesla system that allows them to have, you know, automated cars. Auto. Yeah. No, if you have automated cars, you don't need flying cars. Yeah, you do because first too many of them. There'll be fewer cards on the road. But how do you figure that? Oh, my gosh. My gosh. Automated cars. Yes. Fewer cars. Yes. How so? How so? How so? Because. Because what? Your second greatest asset, your car, most people's second greatest asset, spends 90% of its time doing nothing. You drive to work and it's parked. Okay. You come home and it's parked. Right. 90% of its time doing nothing. Okay. I come to work 10 minutes after you, a half hour after you, an hour after you, I'm using your car. You ain't using my car. I'm telling you right now, you're not using my car. No one's using the name of his car. I forgot. This is LA. This is not going to happen. Okay. For people where the car is a utility rather than something you're trying to get chicks with on the street corner. Oh, stop. People try to get chicks in New York too. Don't drive past me. Not with the cars. There's a lot of people that do. Nobody has cars. But if you do, you're a baller. You got one of them spots. It costs you a thousand bucks a month. Baby. I've seen some fancy cars when I've been in New York City. Some fancy cars, but that's not it. It's not 100%. It's not 100%. Yeah, but that's just that one stupid spot where you could still own the car, but you'll be delegated to a lane where you won't be able to drive as fast as the automatic. Consider that if you're in a self-driving car and it wants to change lanes, it communicates that to other self-driving cars near it. Now self-driving cars tell you to fuck off. No, you have to program like that. Now I have a rude self-driving car. This is a Joe Rogan upload. It's a rude Russian bot car that's not letting anybody in. The Joe Rogan upload. I feel like it wouldn't change anything if there's automated cars in Los Angeles. I really do. I don't think there'd be any less traffic. I just think they're going to make a lane that'll take automated cars and it'll go 120 miles an hour and watching everybody with their wasted horsepower in their in their in their truck and traffic.