March 20, 2013 8:01 pm

The First StarTalk Live

Stacey Severn's photo of Eugene Mirman and Neil deGrasse Tyson at The Bell House, 2-7-13.

StarTalk Live! started as part of the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival in 2011. Here, Eugene Mirman and Neil deGrasse Tyson on the stage of the Bell House a couple years later. Credit: Stacey Severn.

After attending our last StarTalk Live, the one at Town Hall in New York City with guests Buzz Aldrin, John Oliver and Andrew Chaikin, I decided to go back and listen to the very first StarTalk Live, recorded September 15, 2011 at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. Actually, it wasn’t all that long ago, so it’s not like watching the first episode of The Daily Show and thinking, wow, everyone looked so young back then.

All of the elements we know and love were there. Eugene Mirman brought a couple of comedians, in this case Kristen Schaal and Scott Adsit. Neil brought a guest too: Alan Alda, who, it turns out, has some serious science literacy chops, from hosting Scientific American Frontiers on PBS to playing physicist Richard Feynman in a play. He’s even written his own play about science, The Passion of Marie Curie, a biographical drama of the scientist who not only received the Nobel Physics Prize in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity, but also won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for the isolation of pure radium, making her the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences so far (according to Wikipedia).

I’d be interested in your opinion, but I think this show had more comedy than most episodes of StarTalk Live. Perhaps because it was part of the 4th Annual Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, or maybe because Alan Alda was every bit as funny as the three comedians on stage.

Whatever subject astrophysicist and host Neil deGrasse Tyson brought up, the rest of the group on stage pounced on it. Questions like “How do we define life?” and “Have we ever been visited by Aliens?” turn into rapid fire quips about handsome Southern republican aliens, alien tourists and secret alien light babies. “Could life on Earth have originated on Mars” brings up the subject of stowaway microbes and panspermia… but let’s not go there here, shall we?

Neil matched comedy with poetry, quoting Robert Frost during a discussion of the many ways the Universe seems to be out to kill us. His blow-by-blow description of how Kristen Schaal’s theoretical “Death by Black Hole” would play out was riveting. (Can you say “Spaghettification?”) And his discussion of Apophis, the Rose Bowl-sized asteroid headed towards Earth that was named for the Egyptian God of Death and Darkness, was a blast. Literally.

Listen to StarTalk Live at the Bell House (Part 1)

Listen to StarTalk Live at the Bell House (Part 2)

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!

–Jeffrey Simons

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