The night I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, Neil deGrasse Tyson made his umpteenth appearance on The Daily Show. During his conversation with Jon Stewart, he once again trumpeted the rise of the geeks. "We only enter the future," he said, "on the intellectual capital brought to this world by the geekosphere." And then Stewart asked him who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman.

We won. Nerd stuff is everywhere. Resistance is futile. At almost any time, and almost anywhere—the cinema, on network TV, wherever it is that we watch Netflix—there's a superhero staring back at us. But if there's anything to be gleaned from seeing the Avengers and Tyson (a hero in his own astrophysicist right) on two different screens in the same night, it's that maybe we won a little too much.