Momentum is a basic concept in physics: mass in motion, moving in a particular direction. But it also provides an interesting way to think about how a human life takes shape.

In this episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler starts with the physics of momentum, inertia, conservation laws, and the strange rotations of planets like Uranus and Venus. From there, the conversation moves into biology, energy efficiency, the high metabolic cost of the human brain, learning, automaticity, and why repeated behaviors become increasingly resistant to change.

The same process can play out across an entire life. Decisions accumulate. Habits become easier. Responsibilities grow. The path you are already traveling can become increasingly difficult to leave, even when it is no longer taking you somewhere you want to go.

But that works in the other direction too.

Dr. Dakotah reflects on making his first science communication video, beginning a book while still in graduate school, and how small intentional decisions eventually accumulated into an entirely different career.

The lesson isn’t that the equations of physics literally govern our careers, relationships, or choices. It’s that momentum offers a useful way to think about them: motion matters, but so does direction.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Dr. Dakotah Tyler reflects on the lowest periods of his life, finding purpose through football, losing that identity after a knee injury, and eventually starting over academically on the path toward a PhD in astrophysics.

But the point of the story is the difference between believing in yourself and maintaining hope in yourself. You can doubt whether you’ll succeed. You can get exhausted. You can question whether the path you chose is going to work. But as long as you still have some vision of who you could become, you have a reason to keep moving.

This episode is about building a life slowly, brick by brick, rejecting the fantasy of overnight success, and refusing to abandon the person you still hope to become.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Stars do much more than light up the universe. They create the environments where planets form, provide energy to those planets, manufacture new elements through fusion, and eventually return that material to the galaxy where another generation of stars, planets, and potentially life can form.

In this episode of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, Dr. Dakotah Tyler explains what happens inside stars, why quantum tunneling is necessary for fusion in the Sun, and why more massive stars actually live much shorter lives despite having more fuel.

The episode also explores the astrobiological consequences of stellar lifetimes, from red dwarfs that may survive for trillions of years to massive stars that can die before their planets have enough time to fully form.

Along the way, we visit the Cambrian explosion, some of the strangest organisms in Earth’s evolutionary history, the death of massive stars, and a supernova Dr. Dakotah Tyler personally observed during graduate school.

Ultimately, the elements inside planets and living things were produced by earlier generations of stars. The atoms inside your body existed before Earth, and some of them may continue their journey long after Earth is gone.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Arian Foster is a former NFL running back who played for the Houston Texans and Miami Dolphins. He also studied philosophy and, after reaching the NFL, developed a deep interest in science, physics, and some of the biggest questions about reality.

In this conversation, expect to hear Arian and Dr. Dakotah Tyler talk about general relativity, scientific expertise, misinformation, distrust of science, “doing your own research,” and why changing your mind when new evidence appears is a feature of science rather than a weakness.

The conversation eventually moves into the Big Bang, dark energy, the possible fate of the universe, the block universe, quantum field theory, consciousness, determinism, free will, God, religion, capitalism, democracy, human nature, and the strange stories humans build to hold societies together.

They also discuss Star Trek, the Borg, whether humans may eventually merge with artificial intelligence, why Arian strongly dislikes AI replacing human creativity, and what happens when people begin outsourcing their thinking to machines.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Could an advanced civilization evolve on a planet where trees and wood never existed?

In this speculative astrobiology episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler constructs a rocky super-Earth with stronger gravity, widespread volcanic activity, and immense crystal formations that function ecologically like forests. A six-limbed aquatic species gradually moves onto land and evolves the dexterity, spatial reasoning, memory, and problem-solving abilities needed to survive inside this dangerous three-dimensional environment.

Expect to learn why trees were so important to human evolution, why intelligent marine animals have not developed technological civilizations, and how evolution repurposes traits that originally evolved for survival. The imagined hexapods eventually learn to manipulate light, ignite fires without wood, excavate crystal cities, harness electrical properties, and develop advanced optics and astronomy.

This is not a prediction of what aliens must look like. It is a scientifically grounded world-building experiment exploring one plausible path to intelligence and civilization on a world very different from Earth.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

The Space Traders by Derrick Bell pdf: https://blog.richmond.edu/criticalracetheory/files/2019/02/The-Chronicle-of-the-Space-Traders.pdf

Derrick Bell was a civil rights lawyer and the first Black tenured professor at Harvard Law School. In his 1992 story The Space Traders, extraterrestrial visitors offer the United States enough gold and technology to erase its debt, restore the environment, and provide practically unlimited clean energy. Their price is every Black person in America.

In this episode, expect to learn how Bell imagines the offer moving through the president’s cabinet, Congress, corporate America, religious institutions, civil rights organizations, and a national vote. The story examines how political leaders can decide on an outcome first and then search the law for the precedent needed to defend it.

The conversation also covers tokenism, respectability politics, capitalism, public self-interest, the limits of legal equality, and whether the United States would make the same decision today. It ends with a larger science-fiction question: if aliens arrived, who would have the authority to speak for humanity?

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

In Part 3 of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, Dr. Dakotah Tyler traces the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the formation of worlds capable of supporting life.

Expect to learn about the three major lines of evidence for the Big Bang, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, the first stars, and how stellar explosions created the heavier elements needed to build planets.

The episode also covers planet formation, migrating gas giants, the Grand Tack model, why Mars may be so small, how Earth got some of its water, the giant impact that formed the Moon, and why icy moons such as Europa may contain oceans beneath their surfaces.

This series is adapted from astrobiology courses taught at UCLA and Pomona College.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This is Part 2 of the Dr. StarKid astrobiology series.

Before we can talk seriously about life beyond Earth, we have to understand how humans figured out Earth was not the center of everything. This episode walks through the ideas, assumptions, observations, and arguments that moved us from ancient skywatching to modern astrophysics.

Expect to learn about ancient debates over infinite worlds, human pattern recognition, the night sky as an early scientific tool, planets as “wanderers,” retrograde motion, epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, and Einstein’s update to gravity.

We also get into Tycho Brahe’s brass nose and drunk moose, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, why orbits work, and why this history matters for astrobiology.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This version has the corrected audio

Tony Baker is a comedian, actor, creator, and lifelong astronomy fan who came into this conversation ready with the National Geographic space book that first got him hooked as a kid.

Expect to learn how Tony thinks about space, comedy, God, science, acting, stand-up, observation, crows, astrology, astronomy, alien life, and the absurd luck of existing at all. We talk about why comedians are professional observers, why space makes us feel small in a good way, whether intelligent life is out there, why aliens probably have not visited Earth, and why the distances between stars and galaxies are so hard to overcome.

The conversation also covers dinosaurs, mass extinctions, water worlds, Mars, Venus, Saturn, the Moon, natural disasters, whether Tony would go to space, and why humans may be the biggest threat to life on Earth.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Tony Baker is a comedian, actor, creator, and lifelong astronomy fan who came into this conversation ready with the National Geographic space book that first got him hooked as a kid.

Expect to learn how Tony thinks about space, comedy, God, science, acting, stand-up, observation, crows, astrology, astronomy, alien life, and the absurd luck of existing at all. We talk about why comedians are professional observers, why space makes us feel small in a good way, whether intelligent life is out there, why aliens probably have not visited Earth, and why the distances between stars and galaxies are so hard to overcome.

The conversation also covers dinosaurs, mass extinctions, water worlds, Mars, Venus, Saturn, the Moon, natural disasters, whether Tony would go to space, and why humans may be the biggest threat to life on Earth.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.