Copyright ? 2012 National Public Radio?. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
IRA FLATOW, HOST:
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Neil deGrasse Tyson is in the house, and, well, I've known Dr. Tyson for decades. His new book, "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Future," is quite different from his other books. In this one, he appears to be a man on a space mission, trying to reinvigorate our manned space program for many of the same reasons we professed back in the space race of the '60s, though he says that's not what inspired him.
There's no space race today, you say? Neil disagrees. He says space exploration is about kicking the U.S. back into gear, into a nation that innovates, that advances the frontiers of science and technology. It's about turning our country back into a visionary country, a country that dreams.
Do you agree? Why do we need people in space when robots, like the Rovers on Mars, seem to be collecting a lot of useful information? If you'd like to talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. You can also tweet us a question @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. You can go to our website at sciencefriday.com, where we actually have a desktop diary of Neil Tyson that we'll be talking about later.
He's the author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier" and the - he's an astrophysicist, of course, at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thanks, Ira, good to be back.
FLATOW: Tell us about - you know, you seem to be - as I say, on a mission here. Am I mischaracterizing that?
TYSON: Well, you know, most missions are people's personal crusades to try to change the world so that it matches their point of view. And I don't think of it that way. I think of it as me trying to alert America of what it did well in the past and just try to sort of resurrect some of those habits and behaviors going forward for the benefit of all.
So I don't feel this as a personal mission as much as I feel it as a - just an attempt for everyone to sort of re-establish our sense of what our future needs to be.
FLATOW: But you think that time is of the essence here.
TYSON: Well, yeah. I mean, we're fading. We're sliding. We're - you look at all the symptoms in society today: We're losing jobs; the economy is tanking; we don't have many science - the interest in science is on an ebb; our performance of our students is at all-time lows on an international scale.
And what tends to happen is, you know, when you're a politician or just anybody, you say oh, we need more scientists. And you say, well, I know the solution: Let's have better science teachers. And so you put out, you allocate some money, it makes a good headline, it makes a good soundbite, and you think you're actually solving the problem that way when in fact that's just an open sore, and you're putting a Band-Aid on it without any awareness of the underlying condition that's created that - those symptoms.
FLATOW: And you think the underlying condition is that we don't have some unified - well, like the space race we had in the '60s.
TYSON: Yeah, I mean, yes it was a space race, but what specifically mattered about the space race is that every day, we were reaching farther than we had the day before. And when you do that, either literally or metaphorically, you have to invent something. You have to innovate because you're about to do what has never been done before.
That practically, by definition, is innovation, and the space program became proxy for anyone's effort to try to create a new kind of tomorrow compared with the today they were living in. And take for example the World's Fair, the New York World's Fair. You can say to yourself today, oh, I know, let's have another World's Fair and remind people what the future can be like.
No, no, that's the cart ahead of the horse. The World's Fair emerged from a culture that was dreaming about tomorrow. And so that's a - that's an expression of a state of mind that already pervaded society, and it further stoked it, of course, and it fanned the flames, and so - and it got a whole new generation engaged, as well.
But all I'm saying is today, you don't see any of that. No one is thinking about tomorrow. Nobody is dreaming. We're only thinking about surviving today.
FLATOW: Well, that's because tomorrow, in this day and age, has become very expensive.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: Well, you know, if you want to talk money...
FLATOW: Yeah, let's talk money.
TYSON: People say we can't really afford to go into space. That's if you think space is a handout. Yeah, if it's a handout, then no, we can't afford it, we've got plenty of other things we need to do. However, apart from the spinoffs, which we can - we should spend some time on or alerting people if they didn't know what some of the direct and indirect spinoffs are of space technology, that's not even the strongest argument to do it.
You can also cite the glory of discovery and scientific advance. And that's my lead reason, personally, but that's still not even the most compelling reason to do it. The most compelling reason to do it is we are fading fast on the world stage of economic strength, something that is a very uncomfortable position for us to be in because we are unfamiliar lagging in that category.
We can lag in other categories, you know, with - you know, do we have as much opera as Europe? You know, I don't know. But if you're lagging in the strength of your economy in this, the modern world, you can ask: What does it take to stoke the economy? And everybody who embraces innovations in science and technology, since the Industrial Revolution, has led the world in the strength of their economy, and that's what we're lagging in right now.
FLATOW: And you think oh, going back into space, we'll spur the economy that way?
TYSON: Yes, yes, it spurs it because it will first spur the economy directly. You can think of our presence in space and the - provided, by the way, we are advancing a space frontier, all right, none of this well, it's been 30 years, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in low-Earth orbit.
That was the - essentially the legacy of the Space Shuttle is primarily the Space Station, and engineering frontier for sure, that was an amazing piece of hardware up there the size of a football field, assembled in zero-G by astronauts and others who traveled there by Space Station and Soyuz.
So no doubt about that, but nonetheless, you are not farther away from Earth than you were the day before. And so it was not really advancing a space frontier in the way we dream of such progress. So when you do that, there are - those advances, which would have to take place among biologists because we're looking for life on Mars, chemists, physicists, geologists - they would be planetary geologists in this context - all the engineering professions, electrical engineer, mechanical engineering, especially aerospace engineering - all of these fields are stoked.
And the people active in these fields, advancing a frontier, those discoveries invariably lead to benefits back to society. Those would be the direct spinoffs.
The indirect spinoffs are the nation sees this, they feel it. The culture of discovery becomes a fundamental part of what is to be American, again, and when that is your culture, your mindset, then you carry it to everything you do.
You realize Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell were like 12, 13, 14, 15 when we landed on the moon. And their contributions are not directly related to space exploration, but it is so innovation. It is that they were in the culture of innovation, and that's exactly how they manifested that energy and that interest, and these are some of the wealthiest people in the world, biggest employers in the world.
FLATOW: And so how do you get - you know, all these presidents, the last two or three presidents, have all said it's a great idea, you know, but they say it's 30 years away, it's somebody else's job.
TYSON: Yeah, that's the problem. When Kennedy said let's go to the moon, you know, before the decade is out, he had fully expected that we would get there basically under his watch, right, had he served a second term. And that was audacious given that we didn't even have a vehicle that wouldn't kill us on the launch pad - yet.
And so that - back then, a president could make a promise with some expectation of seeing it to completion. Today, you know, when Obama gave his space speech a couple of years ago, it was quite a rousing speech. You know, we don't need to go to the moon. We've been there. Let's go on to Mars and visit the asteroids. And it sounded great, and it got applause, and then you pause and say wait a minute, when - what kind of time table is that? Oh, the 2030s.
So that's a president to be named later, right? But where's Obama? He's on the beaches of Hawaii when that's going on, right? And so on a budget not yet established. So I started losing confidence that the way our leaders were establishing these mission statements, that they'd have any chance at all of succeeding.
And I realized that the way you succeed, something that requires that much money over that much time, is to have it embedded in the zeitgeist of the nation, and then we then hold our leaders accountable for those goals rather than one leader or the next using it as a campaign slogan.
FLATOW: Do you think you can do that?
TYSON: Well, it's not up to me. It's up to the - well, what it is up to are those who understand the return on investment of what we spend on NASA versus what would come back to our culture and to our society. So right now NASA is a half-a-penny on the tax dollar. That's all it is. Most people who complain that NASA is getting too much money don't know that, OK? I've done the - you try it yourself.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: Next time you hear...
FLATOW: But all I'm saying is, back in the '60s, no one talked about, you know, how much it was going to cost. They talked about the zeitgeist. They said this is what - this is a mission. You know, this is our national destiny.
TYSON: That's because it was part of our culture, and it was part of our self-identity.
FLATOW: But people might say it was a political idea to beat the Russians because, you know, security in space.
TYSON: Oh yeah, so that's an interesting and really important point. We went to the moon not because we're explorers or discoverers or because it's in the DNA. No. Although many people want to remember that era that way. We went to the moon because we were at war with Russia, period.
And that famous speech that Kennedy gave at the joint session of Congress on May 1961, we say we'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, we remember that as him as being a visionary, and he was the - he had the charisma, and that's what it took.
No, a few paragraphs earlier in that same speech, he says if the events of recent weeks - because Yuri Gagarin had just come back out of orbit, and Russia - and like I said, we didn't even have a vehicle that wouldn't kill us on launch - he said if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny.
It was a battle cry against communism. It was a war driver. And NASA was founded on this war driver. Sputnik had just been launched. NASA was founded a year later. Everything we did in that era was reactive to what was a perceived threat.
Meanwhile, if you pulled aside the fact that we're at war, you look at the glory of the adventure, that was sufficient to stimulate a culture of innovation in a nation that was leading the world in the second half of the 20th century. So war is a big driver, but we got the tandem economic benefits from it.
So all I'm saying now is forget the war. Of course, no one wants to go into space for war. That's not a good reason. But when we reflect back on what economic return on investment that can bring, that ought to be a big enough driver as well, as the history of human civilizations demonstrates.
FLATOW: All right, we're talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." Our number, 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. And go to our website at sciencefriday.com and join the conversation.
Lots more to talk about with Neil. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." Our number, 1-800-989-8255. Let's go to Molehead(ph) City, North Carolina. Elizabeth, hi, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. Hi there.
ELIZABETH: Hello.
FLATOW: Hi there.
ELIZABETH: Hey.
FLATOW: Hey. Go ahead.
ELIZABETH: What inspired him to start writing?
FLATOW: Yeah. Are you interested yourself, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH: Yes, I'm very interested. I'm a very big fan of science, and I've always loved you.
TYSON: Well, thank you very much. And so this book, I didn't really want to write this book, and I gave a lot of speeches on where I thought NASA should be and our relationship to it, and I realized that while it was very warmly received in the room, nothing ultimately ended up affecting policy or any fundamental changes in how America was conducting its relationship to space.
So then I decided to collect it all together, and so what - this book is basically every thought I've ever had about our past, present and future in space. And it's really a reality check on the delusional thinking that is so prevalent, where people think they actually understand why things happen or why they don't.
And then they blame the wrong thing, and then they come up with the wrong solutions. So I put it all together more to now offer it for people to give them a chance to digest it and possible affect policy.
FLATOW: OK, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH: Yeah.
FLATOW: Did you like that answer?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, it was a very good answer.
TYSON: All right, well, thank you.
FLATOW: Thanks for listening. Have a good weekend.
ELIZABETH: Thanks.
FLATOW: Bye-bye. Neil, you write in the book, referring to astronauts, that, quote, people need their heroes. Who were yours? Did you have role models?
TYSON: Yeah, I think role model is - for me that's a whole conversation, by the way. I'll try to shorten it. For me role models is an overrated concept because typically when you look for a role model, you're trying to find someone who, like, looks like you or grew up where you grew up or had the same struggles in life.
And if you have ambitions towards a profession for which there's no role model, in that - as defined that way, then you can't go into that profession. So I think it's a self-defeating notion that you've got to find a person - for example, if I needed a black astrophysicist from the Bronx to be my role model so that I can be an astrophysicist, I would have never been an astrophysicist, and I realized this very early.
So what I did was I created - I assembled my role models a la carte. So I found the scientist who I wanted to emulate and the educator and the person who had good moral fiber and the person who had a good sense of humor. And I patched all this together to become a hybrid role model that I would then use, and in that way you're not beholden to what might be personality quirks in one person or another.
That's why we say, oh, some people, we don't want them to be role models because they're using drugs, even though they're a really great basketball player or a novelist or whatever. Well, that's because your concept of role model means you want to be everything that person is.
And that's just - we're all individuals.
FLATOW: But people are looking at you as a role model, as someone - it's not just...
TYSON: Yeah, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. I'm just saying I think this ? I think role - you should pick your role models a la carte, and you'll stand a much better chance of doing exactly what you want to do in the world without requiring that someone did it before you.
In fact, if you only do what people did who came before you, nothing would ever change in the world. The people we remember the most are those who did what no one did before them, and that takes courage, and it takes some capacity within you to navigate places where no one has been before.
FLATOW: I'd say that the person in my lifetime who most influenced the way people thought about space, besides Walt Disney, was, you know - or people who were very influential - was Carl Sagan.
TYSON: Oh, indeed, indeed, he - because he was one of the first scientists, maybe even the first scientist, to exploit the value of mass media in serving the interest of the advance of science, knowing that science, at least in America, is primarily a tax base-funded enterprise.
And so you have the right as a taxpayer to learn what are the scientists doing in the lab and in the telescopes and in the, you know, you - it's an obligation - not only do you have the right to know, it's our obligation to tell you. And he took that to extremes never before seen.
FLATOW: Was he one of the elements of your role model?
TYSON: No, because - well, in a way, but I first met him when I was 17, and I was - I knew I wanted to do astrophysics since age nine - nine, 10, 11. So I saw that he was out there, and I thought he was great, but the way in which he influenced me most was when I met him at his office, at Cornell. I was still in high school.
And I had just been admitted to Cornell, but I was still deciding what school to go to because I had several choices. Unbeknownst to me, the admissions office sent him my application, which was dripping with the universe, of course, and he sent me a personal letter inviting me to Cornell and to see his lab, to help me decide whether or not I would choose Cornell as a school.
And I went up there. I followed through on it. He met me outside on a Saturday. It was snowing. I went - toured the lab, toured part of the campus, and I'm ready to go back to New York, it begins to snow a little heavier. He takes me to the bus station because I had come up on a bus from New York City, and he said if the bus can't get through, here's my phone number. Call me, you can spend the night if you can't get through.
It was like: Who am I for him to treat me this way? He had already been on "The Tonight Show." He was already famous. Not - it was before "Cosmos," but nonetheless he was already famous. And I said to myself: If I am ever remotely this visible and this famous when I am an adult, I will surely give the attention to students that come my way that he has given to me.
And it benchmarked how I think about how I spend my time. You know, the president of my institution or the White House could call me, I said you've got to wait because I've got a student sitting here that I'm talking to. That's the extent to which I have prioritized that mission. And I credit that to Carl Sagan.
FLATOW: That is certainly a role model. And is that the reason why...
TYSON: Well, that's the a la carte part of the role model.
FLATOW: Well, you could have different reasons why somebody is your role model.
TYSON: Sure. Uh-huh. But by that measure, I have 12 role models.
FLATOW: Yeah. But is that the reason why you're going to be doing the new version of "Cosmos"?
TYSON: I don't - I think most reasons for most things are more complex than just saying that's the reason. It turns out that I've become quite visible over the past couple of years, in part because I'm based in New York City, and all the major news-gathering headquarters - and you yourself, your studios, are right there - an easy date for me to come to the studio or of you to come up.
And I hand you some soundbites, and they put it on the evening news. And so I'm happy to serve the public appetite for the universe. I'm also happy to report that about 85 percent of those media encounters are because a producer saw some news story that the universe flinched, and they wanted a comment.
Only about 15 percent are created because of the marketing of some product, like in this case, this is because there's someone - there's a book that I just wrote, and so the publisher wants to maximize that exposure. That's 15 percent of it. The rest is a genuine interest that the public has.
And so given my early intersection with Carl and my present visibility, I feel almost duty-bound to serve the role as the host of the - this reboot of "Cosmos," which we're currently engaged in, as perhaps many of your listeners already know.
FLATOW: And when can we look forward to that?
TYSON: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's still - we're still scripting and probably no sooner than fall of next year, more likely spring of 2014. So it's a while.
FLATOW: You would look good in a turtleneck.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: And a corduroy jacket.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: I'm still working on my billions - no, I'm going to try to find something where I can say it's trillions and trillions, because we've got to keep moving forward here, you know.
FLATOW: Right, 1-800-989-8255. Talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." A lot of people would like to know about what's going on. Let's go to Steve in Chicago. Hi, Steve.
STEVE: Hi, how are you?
FLATOW: Hi there, go ahead.
STEVE: Thank you very much for the program, Ira. I love the opportunity and the thoughts that it provokes. My question, comment is: I'm a child of the '50s (unintelligible) I lived through an incredible age. While I was growing up, you know, some of the families on the street had a television. Some of them had a phone, you know, it was a party line. We have space race, we have spinoffs that have obviously affected our lives for the better.
DARPA turned into the Internet. I can't comprehend even how to talk about the changes that the Internet has, you know, created, opportunities. We go into space, yes, we should allocate some resources to continuing our space exploration. But it looks as though the history, the latter half of the last century, there are problems here on Earth that were ignored, and I think, you know, our resources would be far better spent improving our quality of life here while at the same time we continue to, you know, push the space frontier forward.
But this is the only planet we have right now, and it's going to be a while before we can get to another one. We need to concentrate our efforts here at home.
TYSON: All right. So that's a common sentiment, and it's an easy-to-understand sentiment, except it's not properly motivated by how we're actually spending money. For example, people say, why are we spending money up there? We have problems down here on Earth. So let's tackle social problems for the moment. Let's ask the budget, how much budget - Budget, how much do you spend on social programs and on education? That turns out, when you add it up, it's 50 times what we spend on NASA right now, 50 times.
STEVE: Exactly.
TYSON: And so we are concerned about what's going on here on Earth. We are trying to solve those problems. So for someone to suggest - I'm not saying you said this, but in the spirit of what you said, one might suggest zero NASA's budget, and give that money to the social programs. That would increase the social program budget by 2 percent, and...
STEVE: No, no, that wouldn't solve the problem.
TYSON: No, no, that would not solve - it would not solve the problem.
STEVE: ...(unintelligible) spending on it, on social programs, is not there. The effectiveness of the spending in the space race, and, you know, what budget allocations were given before, those have had very positive spinoffs.
TYSON: Right, right. So I'm just...
STEVE: There's a greater payback ratio.
TYSON: Right, right. And so when we talk about payback ratios, that's it. Something about - now, if we talk about not social programs, but the environment and just Earth, protecting it for our own survival, consider, of course, that Mars once had liquid running water coursing over its surface, and today it's bone-dry. Something bad happened on Mars. Some knob turned on Mars.
I want to know what that knob is because we could be turning just one of those knobs here on Earth. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Some other knob got turned there. I want to understand what's going on in the rest of the universe because I gain insight to what's happening here on Earth. And so - yeah. Go on.
FLATOW: I was just going to say do you think in this political year, you might turn this into a question of...
TYSON: I think it - first, it shouldn't be a question. It should be an obvious, blunt, yeah, of course, we're going to invest in NASA because not only do we get those spinoffs - by the way, NASA was the primary instigator of the miniaturization of electronics at the beginning of the electronics revolution, the microelectronics revolution.
You know, when we - back when our grandparents had radios as furniture in their living room, no one actually had the thought: Gee, one day I want to carry that around in my pocket. It was just not even a thought. NASA says: We need to put electronics on space probes, and every ounce that it weighs costs us in fuel, so I want to make it as light as possible and as small as possible. That launched an entire movement that then became self-sustaining in the electronics marketplace, for sure. But the thought to do that and the valuation of what that means was birthed at NASA. So my bigger issue here is that the culture of innovation is what is triggered by NASA.
And there's another one. Let's go back to environment for a moment. Consider that when we went to the moon with the objective of studying the moon, at least in part - it would be the last mission to the moon that actually had a geologist on it, not the first, but that's another conversation. So you go to the moon, and - Apollo 8 was the first to do this - you look back and you see Earth suspended there in the void of space. That was a photo taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 when they did their figure eight around the moon.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
TYSON: Do you realize that between 1968 and 1972 and '73, this is when - these are all the missions where we went to the moon and landed, and a little bit after that - are the primary legislation in America to protect the Earth? The Environmental Protection Agency was in that period. The major adjustment, major improvements to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the banning of DDT - all of this happened in that period. Earth Day started. You know the organization Doctors Without Borders? That started in 1970. Where do you even get the phrase without borders? That didn't really have currency in our language until we saw Earth in space, from the moon, not drawn by mapmakers, with countries colored in, but drawn by nature itself, with land, water, air.
FLATOW: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." And so you're saying that we had the culture, and that culture spurred other things that we had no way of even predicting what would come out of it.
TYSON: That's correct. And so that is what happens when you innovate. When you innovate, new ideas, new products, new ways of thinking arrive in your lap. And then if you exploit that, if you're in a free market enterprise, you can exploit it for financial gain, for cultural gain, for emotional gain, for spiritual gain. So by my read of history, I trace the modern environmental movement to those years that we went to the moon.
FLATOW: I hear you. Is it possible - but the spur - as you said before, the spur was a political-military race. Is it possible to use that again to get us going? Because I can't see how we can get that, like Sisyphus pushing that thing up and down a hill, how we can get it rolling downhill. Could we say that China has already said they're going to the moon and other places as political leverage?
TYSON: OK. So - oh, by the way, just real quick, I compiled this list. I just wanted to - so the major revisions to the Clean Air Act occurred in 1970. The first Earth Day was 1970 in San Francisco. First National Earth Day was in Washington, both of those 1970. EPA was established in 1970. The "Hellstrom Chronicle," remember that movie...
FLATOW: Sure.
TYSON: ...the documentary about insects? That was 1971. Doctors Without Borders found in 1971. DDT ban, 1972. The "Whole Earth Catalog" was published between 1968 and 1972. Comprehensive Endangered Species Act was 1973. The catalytic converter for cars was put into play in 1973. That - how did that - what, all in just those years? The same years we are walking on the moon looking back to Earth? Earth became a precious place to preserve after we went to the moon because going to the moon enabled us to learn about Earth for the first time.
FLATOW: All right. I'm going to stop you there because we have to take a break and let you catch your breath after that. That was a great list.
TYSON: OK. Catching my breath.
I'm coming back, though.
FLATOW: You are. You're coming back. And he will be after this break. Talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." That was an amazing period of years. We all lived through it, an amazing amount of accomplishment there. And, you know, 1969, going to the moon and landing on the moon in 1970s and all those early years where all those stuff happened from that iconic photograph perhaps. We're going to take a break.
1-80-989-8255. You can tweet us, @scifri. Flora Lichtman's going to join us. We're going to take a look at Neil Tyson's desk with our little desktop chronicles there. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson who is astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." We're going to take a little desktop diary tour of his desk in just a few minutes with Flora, who's here with us in the studio. But before we do that, you talk about pie-in-the-sky stuff to a lot of people. But some of these things are really even more down-to-earth issues, like talking in your book about the possibility of an asteroid crashing into Earth. And we still can't do anything about that, or we're not motivated or moved or whatever.
TYSON: Yeah. That was my big guns. I was saving that for last, you know, if you still didn't agree with me. I was going to say...
FLATOW: Oh, no. This is the time to wheel out the gun and...
TYSON: No. If you - if there's still a lingering doubt, there's - we know there are asteroids out there whose orbit cross that of Earth's, and the catalogue now is in the tens of thousands. Most are small. Some are large. And we want to track them as accurately as possible so that we can predict in the future if one of them is actually going to hit. We're going to have some near-misses coming up, one in 2029 on April 13, the asteroid Apophis. It's the size of the Rose Bowl. It will come - if the Rose Bowl were an egg cup and you placed it in the full bowl of the stadium, that's the size of the Asteroid. It will come closer to Earth and our orbiting communication satellites.
It would be the closest biggest things we've ever seen in the history of our capacity to know these things. And there's another one slated for 2040, but we need better data on that before we should start freaking out. But I don't want to go extinct from an Asteroid when we have a space program that could have done something about it. That would just be embarrassing.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: I don't want to be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy when they find out we went extinct with a space program sitting there and did nothing about it when we knew the dinosaurs, if they had a space program, they surely would have deflected their asteroid that rendered them extinct.
FLATOW: But you can't get anybody, I mean, you know, how do you get some - I'm looking to find a way that you can get people excited about one thing.
TYSON: I'll tell you how.
FLATOW: How do you get people excited?
TYSON: I'll tell you how. And it is a long story, and I don't have time to explain it. But I wrote a chapter in a book called "The Columbia History of the 20th Century" back in the late 1990s. And so in there, I wanted to say, you know, I want to go to Mars and - but that's going to be really expensive. And let me look at the history of major funded projects throughout culture and throughout time and see what drivers worked for them. And they make a whole book of all these drivers, and you have charts, and you just cross reference and say, let's do this because it worked then, right?
And to my surprise, I found only three drivers of major funded projects in the history of our species. The number one among them is war, the I-don't-want-to-die driver. And that's responsible for the Great Wall of China, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Project. When war is - when you might die, water flows like rivers, like - or tapped keg, whatever is your preference there.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
TYSON: Another driver is, of course, economic return, the promise of economic return. And that's what drove the Columbus voyages and the Magellan voyages. And, you know, Columbus himself was a discoverer, no doubt about it, but the people who wrote the check were not. That was Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, and they say Columbus, here. Here's a satchel full of Spanish flags. Put them wherever you land and claim this - and claim that in the name of Spain. And this was - and tell us what riches there are there for us to exploit. That's essentially the back story of that mission. And so the promise of economic gain is a huge driver in the history of the world.
And third is the praise of gods and royalty. So you get the pyramids and the cathedrals of Europe and the U.K. And so that's a major enterprise, a major investment in human and financial capital to achieve some collective goal that the society values. So, I'm saying, I don't want to go into space for war even though we did that in the '60s. The benefit was the economic return. So I'm saying, shed the war baggage. Do it for the economic return. Then you're not going to complain what it costs because all that matters is your return on that investment.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. But look how laughed at Newt Gingrich was when he suggested that we build a colony on the moon. Now, whatever your political stripe, you could at least use it as a starting point to talk about.
TYSON: I didn't laugh at him. In fact, the media coverage is so polarized that they didn't quite now how to interpret my comments. I was on MSNBC reacting to big - they pulled me in. And I said, well, you know, people say he's crazy. What kind of - he's too ambitious or too - you know, since we've already been to the moon, to say let's build a colony there in eight years is less ambitious than Kennedy in 1961 saying, let's walk on the moon in eight years even though we - because, at that time, we hadn't even have a spacecraft to take us anywhere. So you want to compare? Kennedy was more audacious than Gingrich. The people who criticize Gingrich are the people who just don't like Gingrich, so they don't like anything he says.
And even juxtapose his comically presented comment that on - and his colony will put 13,000 Americans and have them petition for statehood. That was hilarious actually, but that was not spoken in the same part of his speech where he wanted to put the colony on the moon. So that's not completely crazy. At the end of this, the conservative press said Tyson sympathizes with Gingrich's plan. And the liberal press said Tyson shoots down Gingrich's moon proposal. So that told me I must've been doing the right thing.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: But you do agree we should go to the moon first as a stepping stone to go back to Mars?
TYSON: No. I think yes, but I'd rather phrase that whole statement differently.
FLATOW: Please.
TYSON: What I want is to turn the solar system, especially the near solar system, into our backyard. And if it becomes your backyard, you then have a suite of launch vehicles that you design and build. And you strap on one kind of booster configuration or another that'll take you to the moon if that's where you so choose. Take you to Mars if that's what's necessary. Take you to an asteroid when it's time to deflect it. Take you to some space station if there's a geopolitical reason to do so. Take you to the backside of the moon if you want to be a tourist. Make space an ever-advancing frontier, so that every new step we take innovates. And it's not just we go here or there, I want to go everywhere. And so the attitude is space is our backyard.
When you're a kid and put out in the backyard - and if it's the city then the metaphorical backyard - you don't want to be restricted to where you want to go. You want to let your curiosity take you wherever it might - wherever it pulls. So no - and any space enthusiast was not critical of Gingrich for those comments.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So it's like getting on a plane? I can take it wherever I wanted to go.
TYSON: Yes. And when we built the Eisenhower Interstate System, you don't say, we will build one road from New York to Los Angeles and that will be our country. No, you build roads everywhere. And people - I like the mountains, you like the valleys. Somebody else likes the salt lakes, you know? Other people like the Great Lakes and beaches. So then people can express their own creativity and their own freedoms, because I'd like to keep telling ourselves that we live in a free country.
And so once you engage in that kind of enterprise - oh, by the way, the - with regard to Gingrich, like I said, the country is just polarized. They just want to argue no matter what comes up, without actually thinking it through. There is a place to land in the middle that's not a compromise. It's just a really good idea that transcends politics. It's not even bipartisan. It's nonpartisan. It's a nonpartisan idea. What a concept, right, where everyone say, hey, let's just do that.
FLATOW: Yeah. 1-800-989-8255 is our number. Joining us now is Flora Lichtman, a multimedia editor who visited your office. Did she not? And she was welcomed very well. I can tell from the video that she brought back.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLORA LICHTMAN, BYLINE: Yes, very graciously. Hi, Dr. Tyson.
TYSON: Hello.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: Yes. So Dr. Tyson let us in, let us rummage through his desk drawers, almost.
TYSON: Well, I have to say you were not the first people I let tour my office.
LICHTMAN: I noticed that. I felt a little hurt today.
TYSON: No, no. It's...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: No, you're like the third camera crew to say what - you got some good stuff for me? So - but I just want disclosure.
FLATOW: But no one does it better than Flora.
TYSON: OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: Thank you, Ira. We did uncover some things that I think not everyone got. For example - if this isn't a reason to go our website right now, I don't know, - we saw a picture of you in a unitard from your wrestling days.
TYSON: But I thought you didn't photograph that though, did you?
LICHTMAN: Oh, yes.
TYSON: Oh, wow. OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
TYSON: And, by the way, in the wrestling circles, they're not called unitards. They're called singlets, OK?
LICHTMAN: Oh, well. Good to know. Singlets.
TYSON: Yeah.
LICHTMAN: Singlet it is.
TYSON: It is a singlet, yes. But that was back when I was buff. Now, I'm chubby and 54 and, you know, just waiting to sit in the couch and watch TV.
FLATOW: So Flora has exclusive footage to view it.
LICHTMAN: Apparently...
TYSON: Definitely.
LICHTMAN: ...unwillingly, I'm sorry.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: No, no. It's exclusive footage now, that you actually picked that up. Mm-hmm.
LICHTMAN: OK. So what else did we see? We saw a few kind of amazing things like you made this desk lamp when you were just 12...
TYSON: Yeah.
LICHTMAN: ...that was space-themed. What - will you tell us that story?
TYSON: Yeah, I was in shop class as people are, you know? In fact, by the way, I'm so old that back then, only the boys took shop class. The girls were in the cooking...
FLATOW: Remember that Bill Cosby routine talking about shop.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: So me and the boys, right, are just making stuff, right? And one of the plans was to make a lamp. And they already had these pre-existing plans that were pretty easy and straightforward and tested some key principles that you learn. I said, no. No, I'm not doing some pre-existing plan. I like Saturn, and I want to design a lamp after Saturn.
And so after some hemming and hawing, they allowed me to do it. I glued together blocks, lathed a sphere out of this cube of blocks, cut a wooden ring. And the wooden ring now - and you drill a hole to the sphere, put the cord up through. And now I have a Saturn lamp with a base. And so the way it works is you press down the ring, the ring pivots. You press it down and the light turns on and off. And I've had it - it's been my official desk lamp since middle school. And I still have it in my office at the Hayden Planetarium.
LICHTMAN: Oh, it's really adorable. I mean...
TYSON: Well, thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: Yeah. You're welcome. I like it.
TYSON: No one has ever called anything I've done adorable. That's so cute.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: So one thing I wanted to ask you, this came up in our interview when we did this video. But even though you knew from such a young age that you are interested in space and you were so passionate about it, even giving lectures in your teens, you - it sounds like you got some pushback that not everyone encouraged you to go in this direction.
TYSON: Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, my story is not unique among those who want to achieve in ways that people don't expect and then everyone says, oh, you'll never make it or why bother? This is easier. Do that. So my story about people telling me what I should or shouldn't do is not unique. But since you've asked, I can tell you that at no time was there an adult other than my parents who sort of invested in my interests. that They took me around to buy the lens for the telescope or the tripod. Or if there are some exotic conjunction of planets and moons that existed and can be visible from only one location, they would drive me there. So they were supportive of my interest.
But outside of that, it was clear that society was not ready for me to become an astrophysicist because, first, in the street, it's important that you're athletic, right? Otherwise, you can't hang out. So I was pretty athletic, but I knew that was not my primary interest. But anybody who saw my athletics but then heard me say, I want to be an astrophysicist, they said, oh, no, no, no, you should just play basketball. That's where you really should be. And they're saying this as though this is in my own best interest and thinking that they're doing me a favor by suggesting this.
So it was clear that there were pre-existing stereotypes that people - not in any overt, sort of racist way, but just to how they saw life. They could not see life with me as an astrophysicist, only doing things where others of my skin color had done before. And that was throughout my life up to probably my late 20s, early 30s.
LICHTMAN: So how did you not get discouraged? I mean, how did you muster the ego to keep pushing on?
TYSON: Yeah, it's not ego. It's more mettle than ego. I was - we're going to have a vocabulary lesson here that will do.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: Uh oh.
TYSON: So I had really deep fuel reserves. I had fuel reserves down in places they couldn't have imagined. So every time there was a naysayer that consume some of my energy capital, as it were, I would reach into the reserves and pull out more. And the reserves got low, really low a few times. And up into college, there were a couple of times where it's like, whoa, I don't know if I can keep this up. And, you know, the last few drops and I'd get over that hump and then continue. But I stuck with it, and I'm glad that I had because now, you know, I'm the happiest person in the world. And as Carl Sagan said, when you're in love, you want to tell the world. And so I love sharing the cosmic love.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow with Flora Lichtman, talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." Neil, if you were put in charge of all of our space efforts, would you take the job?
TYSON: No, because the person in charge of the space efforts reports to the president. And right now, the president's plan is not the plan that I think is in our best interest. It requires vastly more money than anyone is allocating, and the argument they're giving is we can't afford right now, when the real answer is we can afford to not do it. So the only way to actually affect this change is to convince the public of why it's good for them and good for their economy. By the way, when you innovate, you create innovative things in your marketplace and the jobs can't go overseas because they haven't figured out how to do it yet.
One of the symptoms of an absence of innovation is the fact that you lose your jobs. Everyone else catches up with you. They can do what you do better than you or cheaper than you. And in a multinational corporate - free market enterprise, it is the company's obligation to take the factory to a place where they can make it more cheaply. But in the '60s and '70s, was anyone complaining that jobs were going overseas? I don't remember that - because we were innovating in ways that the rest of the world was playing catch up. And so I - so, for me, the motivation is to compel the nation to want to do this so that we - as a stoking force on our economy, and that - and once the nation wants to do it, the pressure then gets put on our lawmakers. And then what they end up putting into place is the expression of our wishes, not some political whim that happens to be - make a good campaign slogan.
FLATOW: So you don't think talking to President Obama, for example, would help any?
TYSON: Well, OK, it turns out because of all the attention this book has garnered this week, in the media, you're like Friday, right? But it's been going on since Monday and - but I was looking forward to you the most, Ira, as you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: Good recovery.
TYSON: All right, shoo. I was like, where was I going on that one?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TYSON: OK. So - but it turns out that I got a phone call from the Senate, and they want me to testify in front of the Senate House Committee on - I mean, the Senate Committee on Commerce - next Wednesday. And I'll be testifying after the head of NASA to comment on where I think the future of NASA should be in its relationship to the nation. So that's bittersweet for me, because, personally, I don't like trying to influence politicians, who are themselves representative of huge numbers of people.
As an educator, I'd rather enlighten the people and educate the people and let they be the ones who put the pressure on their elected officials. I feel like I'm circumventing the electoral process by speaking directly to senators. But if it's just a matter of clueing them in to what my thoughts are, I'm happy to do that and I've been invited to do so.
FLATOW: Good luck to you and...
TYSON: Thank you. Thank you.
FLATOW: ...good luck with the book as always. Neil deDrasse Tyson, author of " Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." He's also astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. Speaking of which, before we go, we want to invite you to a special broadcast of SCIENCE FRIDAY from the American Museum of Natural History. We're going to be talking to biologist E.O. Wilson, among other guests, at the Museum of Natural History on March 28, special night, Wednesday night, special broadcast. You can go to our website and find out about more tickets to the show, right there. Thank you, Flora Lichtman, for the desktop diaries. They're up there on our SCIENCE FRIDAY website.
LICHTMAN: Thanks, Ira, and thanks to Dr. Tyson for such a gracious tour.
FLATOW: And you can go to our website and see the video up there right now, and also all the other videos that are up there for your enjoyment. I'm Ira Flatow in New York.
Copyright ? 2012 National Public Radio?. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
daylight savings time humpback whale humpback whale barrel roll anagram 180 degrees cory smoot
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.