Hey there, this is Jason Gatz and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

This morning on the way to the school bus, my almost 11-year-old son was explaining to me that if you shrunk an elephant down to the size of a mouse,

it would shiver, then die because of its slow mitochondria due to something

called the rule of squared threes, which he also proceeded to explain. Then he explained

something about neutron stars, claiming that they are essentially a giant atom, which I don't

think is actually true. Then he started on another topic, and I explained that this was all

very wonderful, but I had learned all the science my brain could hold at 7.15 a.m. Sadly, my own journey as a scientist ended in high school

biology when I put the dissected tail of a fetal pig on a toothpick and said hors d'oeuvre to several

classmates, which earned me an F for the project. But happily, there are people like my guest

today, astronomer Michelle Thawar, and my son

Emre, who are excellent at explaining scientific wonders to dumb cops like myself.

Michelle is, let me take a deep breath here, the assistant director of science for communications

at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and her inspiring perspective on science and

humanity which she shares in

her TV shows and her podcast, Orbital Path, makes me wish that biology teacher had had a better

sense of humor. Welcome to think again, Michelle. How old did you say your son was? He's 11. Well,

he'll be 11 in January. That's some pretty cool stuff for an 11-year-old to know. He's watching this thing. I'm sure you know about this thing. Kirkazot, have you seen this on YouTube? Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this is like an animated, you know, science explainy thing, but it also gets into like transhumanism and all this stuff. And actually sometimes gets into some values that I'm a little, yeah,

transhumanism, for example, I'm not sure I'm totally on board with.

I guess, you know, transhumanism is one of the few things I'm actually optimistic about right now.

To me, it really does seem like kind of a natural stage in human evolution that eventually

we're going to leave behind the, you know, the meat puppets that we are.

Yeah.

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