>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]   [Applause]
>> Randy Hultgren: Thank you all for being here.
My name is Congressman Randy Hultgren.
And I am fortunate possible one of the co-chairs
of the newly created bipartisan House Science
and National Labs Caucus.
Many of you are probably familiar with Neil deGrasse Tyson,
but for anybody who isn't,
he is basically the Chuck Norris of science.
Not just a PhD astrophysicist, he's a ballroom dancer
with several dozen honorary doctorates,
nearly a million Twitter followers --
all of us politicians are very jealous --
and then a vest collection that is legendary.
His Twitter feed alone is, in my opinion,
one of the most fascinating things available on the Internet.
Ranging from the fact that in 1492 it took three months
to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but in 2010 it took fifteen minutes
for the space shuttle to do the same thing.
To the more humorous observation that while Mars and the Milky Way
and the moon all have candy named after them, no one has yet decided
to name food after Uranus.
It's not hard to see why Dr. Tyson was named as one
of Time magazine's hundred most influential people in the world.
Before Dr. Tyson begins, I want to just say a quick word
about the Science and National Labs Caucus.
Representatives Fattah, Lujan, Nunnelee,
and I founded this bipartisan caucus because all of us inherently believe
that basic research and scientific exploration are embedded
in our national DNA.
And with pervasive economic uncertainty, it's more important
than ever that we reinforce our national commitment
to these vital endeavors because science is a part of the identity
of who we are as a nation.
We may not know precisely what impacts these activities will have,
but we know from past experience that an improved understanding
of the universe enhances our lives in ways we can't even imagine.
As a people we strive not only for economic growth, prosperity
and job creation, but also for exploration at both our mental
and physical frontiers, pushing ourselves against the boundaries
of both our capabilities and our understanding.
With a pedigree spanning a half century, it is self-evident
that basic research drives our understanding of the universe,
and from that understanding the payoffs are incalculably high --
which is why science-driven technology has accounted for more
than fifty percent of the economic growth
of the US economy during the last half century.
But science is an ecosystem.
And we must not pollute it with political expediency
because this will always come at the expense
of fundamental long-term scientific research
in which this nation needs to invest.
So I hope that members of Congress
and their staff here today take a look at our new caucus.
Because it's time for a cultural change here in Congress with respect
to the understanding and appreciating the role
that science plays in our quality of life,
and that change is what we hope to accomplish in the caucus.
I'll quickly wrap up by noting that over
in the Rayburn building there is a line from Proverbs engraved
on the wall in the Science, Space, and Technology committee
and it says: "Where there is no vision the people perish."
And while that seems hyperbolic, in terms --
I think in terms of the American spirit --
it becomes exceptionally true.
And there is no person in this country better able
to inspire a vision than the astrophysicist Dr. Neil
deGrasse Tyson.
So please join me in this bipartisan co-chair of the Science
and National Labs Caucus in welcoming Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
[ Applause ]   >> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Thank you.
[Laughter] I just like messing with the sound guy.
Keeping them awake.   So I got to put my gum out.
Don't look.
[Laughter] Thank you first for that warm welcome and all of you
to come listen to my cosmic and scientific musings today.
I understand there's some voting going on in the House,
so I'll try not to take it personally
if the members need to leave and vote.
But we'll talk about you when you leave, I promise.
I want to begin -- can I get a little more volume?
[Inaudible]
I want to begin by talking about an observation I made
about fifteen years ago which changed my life.
And it changed my relationship with the public
and with government and with agencies.
I was minding my own business in the manicured lawns of university land.
And I was asked to write a chapter
for The Columbia History of the 20th Century.
Columbia University has a publishing arm.
And this was to reflect on
and interpret events of the 20th century.
It was not an accounting of events so much
as it was an assessment of what it meant.
The reason why I was asked -- I was not their first choice.
This was 1996.   Their first choice was Carl Sagan.
But Carl Sagan had taken ill.   He would die a year later.
And they came to me next.   And these are awesome shoes to fill.
Just, "What?
Now I have to write something in some way that would match or rival
that which you would have gotten from Carl Sagan?"
So I thought long and hard about this.
They wanted me to write about discovery.
And I said, "Okay.   I don't know."
And I scratched my head, and weeks later I said, "All right.
Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to write about the transition
from the discovery of places to the discovery of ideas."
And that's an important transition in our species.
Because it used to mean, "Oh, let's discover a new land,"
and you'd build a boat or you'd hike there or you'd ascend the mountain,
navigate the valley, and then you found new place.
That was discovery.
Not until the earth got mapped did the urge to discover take us
to another dimension, and it was the dimension of thought --
the dimension of thought.   So I said to myself, "All right.
Tell me about all the activities
that the human species has engaged in, in its history."
Because, you know, personally I want to go to Mars.
All right?   I'm a little too old.
But I want us as a species to go to Mars.
That's just a side thing I have.   Just don't [laughter].
You don't have to want to do that too; it's just what I want to do.
And I thought to myself, "Well, that is a place.
It's not just an idea, but it's a place plus ideas.
There might be life there.   We might learn something."
There are new discoveries in the new places.
So I said, "All right, what did people do in the past
to engage in expensive projects?"
Because if we go to Mars, that's going to be expensive.
And somebody's going to have
to write the check if we did such a thing.
Is that even justifiable to do this?
Actually, we put the money in the bank and then they write the check.
Okay? We're all family here.   That's how that works.
All right?
So I said, "Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to look
at all the things humans have done throughout time,
find out what it cost as a fraction of the GDP of the day, and then ask,
'How much does it cost to go to Mars today?'" And then line that up
in the chart, and find out what motivated them
to do whatever was this other activity.
And maybe we can duplicate that in modern times.
"That's how we would then engage
in major funded projects," I thought to myself.
So I thought this would easily fill the chapter:
Talking about ways people were motivated to do great things.
I was going to -- different chapters
on all the different ways people justified it.
And here is what I found: There were only three motivators in the history
of human culture -- three motivators --
that drove nations and states to do great things.
"Great" as in large, unforgettably magnificent,
or unforgettably devastating.
Just an investment of human and finance capital.
We can make a list of what would be there.
So the pyramids -- that's big and expensive.
And they're still around.   The pyramids.
By the way, do you know the next thing in human culture
that was built that was taller than the pyramids?
Eiffel Tower.   The Eiffel Tower.
What was that?   Eighteen -- eighteen?
Right? Five thousand years later we figured out how
to make something taller.
Actually, there was a cathedral in the 1400s,
but they didn't quite know how
to sustain domes, so it was a short-lived.
So. All right.   Pyramids would be on there.
The Great Wall of China.
The Manhattan Project.   The Apollo Project.
The Columbus voyages.
We'd all agree these are expensive things undertaken by nations.
What did they have in common?   Only one of three things,
the greatest driver of them all is obvious.
It's the "I don't want to die" driver, all right?
The war driver.
That's where you get the Great Wall of China.
That's where you get the Manhattan Project.
Time and time and again the conduct of our species has demonstrated
that if you feel threatened, money flows like rivers to minimize
that threat or eradicate it altogether.
No matter the project.
There's another driver -- the promise of economic return.
That's how you get the Columbus voyages,
and Magellan voyages, Lewis and Clark.
You get investments where people say, "I don't want to die poor."
Okay? There's a third driver there's less of today --
less of it today, but common centuries ago --
and that's the praise of royalty or deity.
That got you the cathedral building in Europe, whole episodes where most
of the GDP went into building -- not most, big chunks of the GDP --
went into building cathedrals.   The pyramids.
That's praise of royalty.
There's less of that today, hardly any of that today.
You don't see whole nations investing huge amount of money
in the service of God or their king.   Just doesn't happen much anymore.
So there are two drivers -- two drivers.
If you want to do something expensive
and it does not fulfill one of those two drivers,
it's not going to happen.
Period. Unless you're going to claim that you live
in a very special community that differs in its outlook on the causes
and effects of investment and human dreams.
If you have to say that you are different from every civilization
that has come before you.   I don't see evidence of that.
Three drivers.   All right.
I'm going to get back to those in a moment.
This new caucus that was established, Science
and National Labs -- most people never heard of national labs.
No offense here, but I think I'm right.
All right?   What is a national lab?
You probably heard of a few of them.
Their names kind of resonate in the 20th century history books --
Brookhaven Lab, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Stanford Linear Accelerator.
You know, you get these places,
and you knew some big physics was going on there.
It is a community of centers where big research takes place.
A lot of them owe their birth to sort
of 20th century sort of military.
It was like we knew that physicists are experts in matter, motion,
and energy, and war is about putting energy that is here, there.
That's all it is.
Okay? If there's a target, you don't want that target to exist anymore,
you take the energy that you created here and you put it at the target.
That destroys the target.
That is war reduced to its most fundamental laws of physics.
All right.   Well, I understand that.
You can build centers because you feel threatened.
There's a cold war, sure.   I understand that.
Even though I'm an academic I understand that.
We almost had the largest accelerator in the world --
Superconducting Super Collider.
Started construction on it in Texas in the 1980s.
It was the next frontier in physics.
If you go in a place in energy that no one has been before,
you're going to discover something.
It's that simple because you're stepping
where no one has stepped before.
That is exploration in the laboratory.
So here we are, riding a century
of American leadership in particle physics.
Do you know the periodic table of elements?
If I put the national flag on the box according
to what nation discovered each element --
there's quite a few there.
Most of them are western European nations.
America is strongly represented.
But do you know where we're best represented?
Down at the bottom, the heavy elements --
after uranium, neptunium, plutonium --
we have californium, we have berkelium.
All right?
If you discover stuff, you get to name it.
Continuing that tradition the physicists said, "Let's keep going."
1989 comes around.
By the way, you can analyze this in other ways.
I'm not going to stop you.
But what I'm going to say is that when peace broke out,
it became harder for people to justify --
particularly those writing the checks --
why you'd be spending this much money on physics anymore.
Soviet Union was gone.   Budget got cut to zero.
And that knocked out the frontier of particle physics in America.
Well, interesting thing about science is
that it continues anywhere else the world.
You don't have a monopoly on it.   So CERN, the center for --
that's the French spelling
of the European Center for Nuclear Research.
But I'm told that in French it spells the word CERN --
Center europeenne recherche nucleaire something.
[Laughter] Anyhow, they built the large Hadron Collider --
the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
And they discovered the Higgs boson.   Page one story.
Even here.
We had American scientists there, by the way.
And there are actually significant scientific contributions
from scientists based, in fact,
at FERMI lab who contributed to that discovery.
But that fact got lost.
The American contribution to that discovery got lost in the news cycle
because it got discovered on European soil.
So it just didn't -- it's hard to take pride in something
that someone else announces in another country.
What they discovered was the Higgs boson.
You know what that is?   It's got a weird name.
It's a particle that grants mass --
it's a particle whose field grants mass to other particles.
In fact, it's been colloquially called the "God particle."
Because if you hand out mass, you're in charge,
all right, of the particle physics.   You're at, like -- you're the one.
And so the way it hands out mass -- give an analogy.
I've heard this given but I think I've improved on the analogy,
but the origin of this example I don't take credit for.
If you think of a party in Los Angeles.
Not in the east coast, west coast.
Los Angeles party and it's very crowded.
And a really famous person walks into the party.
So what happens?
Everybody crowds around the famous person.
So the famous person then cannot move very quickly
through that party.
No matter what they -- they're sluggish through that party.
They have a very high party mass.
And if you're a nobody by Hollywood standards, then no one will crowd
around you and you can just walk freely
through the party uninhindered; you have a low party mass.
So the Higgs field is like a party in Los Angeles.
You either have a high party mass or low party mass,
and this is the interaction of the Higgs field with other particles.
It's an important discovery.
Nobel Prize will probably be given for it.
We would have discovered that particle twenty years ago.
Our accelerator was three times the power of that one.
So that would have come out first day.
Okay? Turn on the switch.   Pop, there it is.
Higgs boson for you.   [Laughter] All right?
Like a vending machine.   So.
Now, why do I mention this?
Well, war isn't the only driver; economics is, too.
It's a huge driver.
If we have a suite of centers that previously were
in the service the defending of country in some way
because you hire physicists, and physicist is the physics of nuclei
that led to the bomb that leads to advance weaponry, I understand that.
But economics matters, too.
Imagine if you took this suite of national labs and said,
"The country has needs, the country has --
we want to engage in projects that are too big for a university."
University is, like, a professor and maybe a lab.
Some things require the government.
And it's not immediately -- it's not immediately lucrative to do it.
So corporations, their R&D can't justify it.
There's this zone that can only be touched by the government dollar
if the government cares about its future.
Look at the problems in energy; and battery technology;
and nanotechnology; and biofuels; and maglev.
I want a country where you have a lab system where you walk by
and say, "Oh, they're working
on solving this problem that still befalls us."
That will feel good.
Then you created the country worth defending.
We're not waiting around for some other country
to come up with our solutions.
By the way, you can't require -- you can't say, "Okay,
I want a more efficient transportation system,
and I need it in a year and a half."   Okay. The engineers will work hard,
but somewhere in there you need the scientists doing the basic research,
the kind of research that a corporation can't really justify
because they've got the quarterly report,
they've got the shareholders, and they're looking for their return.
And if the return is forty years from now, they're not investing.
But the country is here forever,
or at least in our minds we want it to be here forever.
So somebody's got to make the investment that goes longer
than the time scale of the corporation.
So you have the engineers working on the new physics --
the new sciences -- but you need the science as well.
What are some examples of this?
In the 1700s we started to study the concept of heat, energy.
In the days of Isaac Newton -- my man, Isaac Newton, 1600s --
the concept of energy was not formulated scientifically.
It was not well-understood.   It would take another century.
Then you get, like, a steam engine and you start figuring out how
to convert energy from one form into another: Mechanical energy;
chemical energy; energy of gravity; gravitational potential energy --
all these forms of energy can be converted
into one another with the right machine.
Thus was born the Industrial Revolution.
And the nations that embraced the Industrial Revolution led the world
in every metric that mattered in civilization,
mattered to a civilization.   So what would next happen?
Middle 1800s, Michael Faraday playing
with electricity on a tabletop.
He takes a wire and moves it through a magnetic field, and a dial jumps
that the wire is connected to.
Well, if you do this over here and something else happens over here,
that's really intriguing to a physicist.
Almost like a cat, you know, looking at the laser beam on the floor.
You know, the physicist is, you know, it's kind of like --
and people said, "Michael," --
his name was Michael Faraday -- "what are you doing?
What are you wasting government money for?"
He has a famous reply to that.
He said, "Sir," -- because I think it was a member of Parliament
who came and asked, "Is this what we're paying you to do,
to make these tabletop toys?"
He says, "I don't know of what use this will one day be,
but I guarantee you, sir, one day you will tax it."
[Laughter] Passing the wire
through a magnetic field is how we generate electricity today.
It is the foundation of all generators.
Turbines. Anything that turns creates electricity
and something else makes it turn,
you're moving wires through magnetic fields.
That was in the mid-1800s.
We didn't electrify cities until turn
of the century, the early 1900s.
It took fifty years for his tabletop experiments in the hands
of clever engineers and technologists
to transform the world and how we lived.
Now, you just flick a switch on the wall and all the lights turn on.
What intrigues me is that so respectful of that error we are
that our lights even look like candles.
You see? So in the back, we still have -- look at that, right?
It's the 21st century.
And I know this is an old building but you can buy candelabras
with electric candle bulbs in them, right?
So. But it took about fifty years.
You know what happened in the 1920s, other than Hubble discovering the --
Hubble the man -- there was a guy
who came before the telescope just so we understand.
In the 1920s Hubble discovered that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy
in the universe; there are billions more
and that the universe is expanding.
Cool. But that's not why I'm telling you about the 1920s.
The 1920s was the birth of quantum physics.
You can't get crazier than quantum physics.
Oh my gosh.
Particles pop in and out of existence, you try to measure it
and it's not there anymore, but you saw it there a moment ago.
And it was intriguing.
Once again, it was the physicists following,
you know, the bouncing ball.
Weird, crazy things were going on inside the atom.
Weird things.   It's a curiosity.
Enlightened nations funded that research.
That's the 1920s.
Fifty years later we would see the birth
of the Information Technology Revolution.
Do you realize that, like, the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope
calculation it was something, like,
a third of the world economy is based on knowledge
of quantum physics
because information technology requires quantum physics
in the design; in the creation of data; in the acquisition;
the storage; the dissemination of information.
That's why it's the IT revolution.
It's not a computer revolution -- computer is there --
it's all about what we're doing with information.
It's no longer on a printed page, here's the information.
No. No. I was on the airplane yesterday, and I got a note
from a program installed on my father's computer
that he's running out of disk space.
I then sent an email to my sister's husband, said,
"Check out my father's computer; something's dumping data onto it."
He goes and checks it out.   "Oh, there's a program run awry.
We fixed it.   Everything's fine."
I said, "Fine."
And I did that while flying 200 miles in distance at 31,000 feet up.
That's information moving that requires quantum physics.
That was basic science, which at the time surely there were people
saying, "What are you doing?   I don't understand it.
Why? Is that putting food on my plate?
Is there some new weapon I can use to defend myself?"
People were surely asking these questions of quantum physics.
But we had people who were curious about the nature of the world,
and they pursued it and they were allowed
to by enlightened governments.
And now no part of the modern economy isn't touched by the fruits
of the investment that went into those discoveries.
This goes on and on and on and on.
By the way, that time delay was fifty years, not two years.
You know what I wonder?   Maybe this should be a new law.
I know we have too many laws.
But a new law where every Congressional session --
what do you call the unit of two years in Congress?
That's called something.
A session -- terms -- every Congressional term you've got
to pass a law that enriches, benefits the country
on a timescale longer than your reelection time scale.
You have to.   Wouldn't that be a great law?
And that will say, "Now, I'm thinking I'm not going to be
in office then, but I now have to care about tomorrow."
Imagine what effect that would have.   [ Pause ]
My physics professor in college, he liked gas clouds between stars.
Yeah. Okay?
Everybody likes gas clouds between stars.
He studied the behavior
of the nuclei among the atoms in those gas clouds.
And he hypothesized that in the presence of a strong magnetic field
that it would deflect radio waves that came by.
He discovered the principle
of physics called nuclear magnetic resonance
as applied to the universe.
Then a clever engineer said, "Wait a minute.
If you can find out what kind of atom," --
because the nucleus is the identity of the atom --
"If you know what kind of atoms are out there by this method,
maybe I can make a machine down here and I could put you in the machine,
and I can find out what kind of atoms are moving around your body."
His discovery, which was award the Nobel Prize,
became the magnetic resonance imager
in every major hospital in the land today.
Was he thinking about health?
No. No. In fact, every machine in a hospital with an on/off switch
that is brought into the service of diagnosing the health
of your body is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist
[Laughter] The cross-pollination of the sciences is a fundamental part
of what it is to progress in society.
I hear people saying, "Oh, well, last century was the century
of the physicist, but this century is the century of the biologist."
Okay. Shut down all the physicists
and you'll be using the same machines today
as you'll be using one hundred years from now.
Because you're not inventing the machine.
You're not an engineer.
If you're the biologist, you're not an engineer.
You're not inventing a new principle of physics
on which you would base a new -- the design of a new machine.
All of this has to happen.
And you can't sit there and say, "How is that going to benefit me?"
We don't know in advance.
But every time discoveries have been made, it has benefited us.
We've got the track record to demonstrate it.
I'm screaming at you, I'm sorry.   I'm just get me started here.
October 4th 1957, what happened?
Sputnik gets launched and we freak out.
[Laughter] Some of you are old enough --
were, like, cognizant at the time.
We freaked out as a nation, perhaps justifiably
because it wasn't just a satellite.   Yes, it had the nice name "Sputnik."
You know what that means?   It means "fellow traveler."
Wasn't that nice?   Fellow traveler?
It's just like a -- it's just a basketball
with sticks sticking out of it.   Why should that matter?
Sputnik was a hollowed
out intercontinental ballistic missile shell.
That was a shot across our bow.
The Soviet Union had the new high ground.
They were flying over our heads and nothing we could do about it.
In came the "I don't want to die" driver.
We said, "We need me one of those.   Let's get one of those.
Let's start our," -- so we created, among other things,
NASA a year and a day later.
I'm born the same week that NASA was founded.
I feel NASA.
[Laughter] We're, like, together just moving through life.
We're conjoined.   Our souls are one.
NASA's a civilian space agency.   Sign into law by an act of Congress.
But who were the astronauts?   They were military pilots.
So wait a minute, if it's a civilian agency we got --
what's going on here?
Of course, NASA is created in reaction to a threat,
and money flows like rivers.   The war driver is in effect.
The war driver.   It's not how we remember it.
We say, "NASA.   We explored the moon.
We're discoverers.   We're Americans.
This is what Americans do.   We're explorers."
In the day?
Everyone said, "We're going to the moon.
Well, Mars is next.   Mars is next."
No, it's not next.
It would be next if you go into space because you're an explorer.
If that's why you went into space, Mars would be next.
Did I mention exploration as a driver?
No, it's not there.   It's way down the list of drivers.
It's an insignificant driver.   It's in the noise.
We go to the moon because we perceive a threat.
We go to the moon.
Then we find out Russia's not really getting there.
Soviet Union is not -- we stop going to the moon altogether.
And there are people saying, "Oh, we stopped going
because we need leaders and people with charisma like Kennedy."
And it's, like, no, that's delusional.
Well, look at Kennedy's speech: "We will put a man on the moon,
return him safely to the Earth before the decade is out."
Those were stirring words given in a joint session
of Congress May 25, 1961.   "He had charisma," you'll say.
Is charisma on the list of why we did things?
No. No. Go to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
There's a bust of Kennedy right at the front entrance
and a granite wall behind it.
And chiseled in the wall are those words: "We will put a man
on the moon and return him safely to Earth."
And you just feel -- your spine tingles when you read that.
You say, "Wow, that was an era where we really,"
-- go back to his speech.
Go back. Two paragraphs before he said, "Let's go to the moon,"
he comments on Yuri Gagarin, who had just come out of orbit safely --
the first human mammal in space.
He was the fifth living thing in space,
by the way, in case you wondered.   I tweeted this.
Just go back, you'll find it.
[Laughter] I say congratulations -- you know, Yuri Gagarin,
the anniversary of his orbit.
"The fifth mammal to achieve this feat," is what I said.
And people say, "Oh, I didn't know that."
Well, there's a dog, a couple of chimps,
there was some lab rats, this sort of thing.
And they all survived.
Then we sent up a human, and the human becomes the hero.
But like, how about Laika, the dog?
Right? Then -- wait, wait, I've got a quick aside.
There's all these, like, animal rights folks that say --
because Laika, there was no plans of bringing Laika back alive.
I don't know if you knew that.   Did you know that?
It's kind of sad, actually.
However, Laika was, like, a street mutt in Moscow.
He gets lifted up and gets put into space and dies there.
Then he's, like, the most famous dog ever since Lassie.
You know? And the dog was going to die anyway
at some point in its life.
So I'm thinking, it's the toast of dog heaven now.
[Laughter] No regrets there.   Sorry, that had nothing to do with.
So what was I saying before I interrupted myself?
Thank you.
So Kennedy is on the floor of a joint session of Congress.
And he says -- because six weeks earlier Yuri Gagarin had come in
and out of orbit -- he says in the same speech
where there is the granite words, he says, "If the events
of recent weeks," -- doesn't even mention the guy --
"If the events of recent weeks are any indication of impact
of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere,
then we need to show the world the path of freedom
over the path of tyranny."
That was the battle cry against Communism, that was the war driver.
A speech without that in it would have said, "Oh, that's nice,
but we got other real problems here on Earth."
We felt threatened; money flowed like rivers.
President George Herbert Walker Bush --
20th anniversary of the Apollo landing.
He said, "I want to give a speech."
I'm not in his head, but I'm imagining some of this was
in his head: "I want to give a speech like what Kennedy gave,
just to get everybody excited.   It's the 20th anniversary.
It's an auspicious day.
I'm going to give the speech on the steps the National Air
and Space Museum -- an auspicious day,
an auspicious place, an auspicious occasion."
He said, "Let's go back to the moon, onto Mars, and make a space station.
And we're going to take on space in a big way."
1989. Got costed out.   Johnson Space Center.
They said, "Well, let's see what this will cost."
Let's take about thirty years and it cost $500 billion.
It was DOA.   Why was it DOA?
Wait a minute, do you know what NASA's budget is every year?
It's about $17 billion, $18 billion -- times 30, that's $500 billion.
NASA's getting that money anyway.
You can't now tell me you can't afford this plan; it was getting
that money anyway in the flow.   [Laughter] So why was it just DOA?
Something else happened in 1989 -- peace broke out in Europe.
So of course, we don't do it.
I'm going to appeal to you in a way that most people don't.
I'm going to tell you things other people are not telling you.
You get people who are space enthusiasts?
"Let's go into space, it's our destiny, great nations do it."
I look at history and I say, "No.
You don't know what you're talking about."
Here's what we got to do.
We've known since the Industrial Revolution and earlier
that innovation in science and technology, yes,
it will help defend a nation.
But when you're not at war, you know what else innovation
in science and technology does?
It is the engine of tomorrow's economy.
When Einstein wrote down his equation for the stimulated emission
of radiation, which is the foundation of the laser,
was he thinking to himself "bar codes"?
[Laughter] This is innovation in science: The applications
of his ideas into machines requires the clever engineer,
creative investors, and dynamic CEOs turn it into product.
Don't ever tell me, "Why are you studying this?
How is it helping me?"
You know, I don't know how it's going to help you.
I have no idea.
Neither did Faraday, he just knew you would tax it.
Neither did Einstein, neither did anybody who made great discoveries
about our understanding and our relationship to nature.
Do you know -- who here remembers statistics?
The method of least squares to solve, to put a line through points?
That was discovered by Gauss, a mathematician, who applied it
to the orbit of the first-ever discovered asteroid.
The asteroid went behind the sun.
It's in the glare, you can't find it.
He said, "Well, it did this over here.
Look over here in four weeks."
There was no methods to figure that out.
He invented a new kind of math to do that.
The stuff NASA does inspires people.
Have you looked at the NASA portfolio lately?
It's got biologists; chemists; physicists;
astrophysicists; structural engineers.
We build stuff in space.
The International Space Station, the size of a football field built
in zero G. The latest addition to the national labs:
The International Space Station I might add.
So if you have all these scientists -- so here's the task,
I stand up in front of a class of 8th-graders and I say,
"Who wants to be an aerospace engineer
so that you can design an airplane that's ten percent more fuel
efficient than the one your parents flew?"
There's some people who will require that of me as I stand
up in front of that class.
Instead, what I want to say is, "Who wants to be an aerospace engineer
so you can design the airfoil
that will navigate the rarified atmosphere of Mars?"
Everybody's standing up.   Everybody wants to do that.
We're a free country.
You can't require people to do anything.
But you can inspire them to completely rise
to their intellectual and academic potential.
Without that carrot, we will wither on the vine.
It's not good enough just to have a good science teacher;
you need something at the end of that pipeline.
When you're hatched out of the educational system,
now what do you do?
It's a noble goal to have high speed Internet in the future and,
you know, public transportation.
Sure. But are those the big dreams that get you running
to school each morning to want to accomplish?
Here's what happens.
When science is funded big -- all the sciences by the way,
all of them -- but there's one in particular that is an actual force
of nature, and that is the vision statement of our future in space.
That's a force of nature.   That stokes the pipeline.
It gets people interested in science, in all the sciences.
And you know something?
Even if you're not interested in science,
you're interested in science.
Let's say you want to become an attorney.
But you've been sort of baptized
in this grand quest to explore the cosmos.
Then you're going to say, "Hey, I want to study space law.
I want to find out who owns the materials
on an asteroid, on the moon.   Can you homestead there?"
It's a whole law frontier.   "Oh, I'm going to be screenwriter.
I like these -- I want to write a story on the mission to Mars
or a mission to the asteroid or killer asteroid."
When you do that big, everybody becomes a participant in it.
Everybody.
I brought with me Hune Collier's Magazine.
Who remembers that?
You'd have to be over sixty to remember it.
Can we get to Mars?   Is there life on Mars?
1954. There's already talk about going to the moon,
so it took a step further because it thought that this was going
on because we were just explorers.
The V2 rocket designed by Wernher von Braun in the Second World War,
used against London and other targets,
was the first intercontinental ballistic missile.
It was the first missile to leave the atmosphere and come back in.
Wait a minute, if you're going to go in space, you better study what
that technology -- after the war ends, if there's anyway you're going
to go into space, you better study that rocket.
That's why every rocket in science fiction stories
in the 1950s looked like the V2.   It had fins, it was bullet shaped --
did you just take a picture of me like this?
[Laughter] Okay.
[Laughter] So the influence was huge, people's visions of space.
The spaceship had fins, and you know what else had fins?
Our cars had fins.
If you go to the designers, they're not going to say, "Oh,
I did this because rocket have fins," it was in the air.
Exploration of space became part of our culture.
The first time we ever left Earth was Apollo 8.
It doesn't get the attention it deserves relative to Apollo 11.
These three astronauts were men of the year, 1968:
Anders, Borman, and Lovell.   They orbited the moon, Apollo 8.
They took this picture.   [ Pause ]
I'm almost done here, so I know you got to vote or something
If you have a healthy science program in your country,
you guarantee your economic future.   You're innovating.
Then you don't have to have arguments
about tariff regulations on products.
You don't have to worry about jobs going overseas
because they don't know how to do it yet because you just invented it.
I can't stand it when I hear these discussions about our job force.
I have to close my ears.   Yeah, you can put up some tariffs.
Yes, you can complain about they're paying their workers less.
Sure, okay.
But as long as you understand why you're in that situation.
It's because you've stopped innovating --
everyone else has caught up with you --
and it's if you have a global economy,
it's the job of the corporation to make it for as cheap as possible,
so they're going to make it overseas.
That's what they're going to do.   It's incumbent upon them to do so.
But if you keep innovating,
the stuff stays here, the job stays here.
You don't even have to have tariffs because there's nothing to tariff.
You assure the economic stability of your future.
So when I hear people say, "Oh, we can't afford NASA, [inaudible]."
It's, like, you can't afford not to.
Otherwise you're putting Band-Aids on all your problems.
Do I have this here?   This is my wallet.
Hang on. [Inaudible] I would do this,
but they wouldn't let me carry my scissors on the airplane.
You can take a dollar.
Okay? And cut off this edge, but don't get into the ink.
Okay? Then cut off the other edge, but don't get into the ink.
Those two amounts of this dollar, that's the R&D budget
of the United States, and the rest is everyone complaining
that our economy is losing ground in the world.
Your urge is to get the solution.
Your urge is almost never, "Let's invest in something
Do you know the culture that ensued in the 1960s?
The World's Fair was all about tomorrow.
We were going into space.
We knew we needed scientists and engineers and mathematicians --
they're the folks who dream up a new tomorrow.
That's how that works.
The World's Fair didn't create the 1960s,
the 1960s created the World's Fair.
And there's the 1960s, the most turbulent decade in American history
since the Civil War: Assassinations; the Civil Rights Movement;
a hot war in Southeast Asian; a cold war with Russia.
Yet we found time to go to the moon, motivated by war for sure,
but our economy was pumped.
The GDP per capita from 1950 to 1960 made the highest jump
across a decade than it has since then.
The change in GDP per capita has been dropping ever since the 1960s.
What? Nobody notices that?
GDP -- it's the "We got to fund this factory."
And everybody's trying to microanalyze it,
yet there's an elephant standing there in front of you.
Not only did it stoke our economy, there's something else that it did.
There's something else.   See this photograph?
It's the most recognizable photograph ever:
Earthrise over the lunar surface, taken in 1968 by Apollo 8.
1968 -- the bloodiest year in the most turbulent decade
since the Civil War this photo was published.
Do you realize that until that photo was published nobody thought
[Laughter] Every representation of the Earth before
that photo was just Earth.   That's kind of interesting.
We didn't think clouds were part of us.
That's not Earth.   Those are clouds.
[ Pause ]
In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which was a --
many environmentalists credit that book
for starting the environmentalist movement.
Plain and simple they're wrong.
You can do a Google search on words --
the frequency of words used in all published books
in any given interval of year.
And you can ask, "What's the frequency
of the word 'environment'?"
That's a word that would show up if you care about it.
And let's watch the frequency of that word across --
it was a best-selling book.
It makes a little bump, and then it comes back down again.
When that photo was published, the word "environment" --
the usage of the word "environment" --
triples in published literature when that photo was published.
By the way, Earth does not rise on the moon.
The moon always shows the same face to Earth,
so the Earth is just simply always there.
So it's misnamed Earthrise.
It's easy to want to believe that Earth rises
on the moon the way the moon rises on Earth; that's just false.
So it was rising because they're in orbit around the moon.
And when you orbit something stuff rises that wouldn't otherwise do so.
[Laughter] This gets published.
It's the first mission to leave low Earth orbit.
A year later Apollo 11, they land and walk on the moon.
Steve Jobs is 14 years old.   Bill Gates is 13 years old.
Just an FYI.   ARPANET begins 1969.
So what else happens now that we see this moon and Earth rising above it?
Here's the list.   You ready?
1970: A comprehensive Clean Air act is passed by Congress,
December 1970; the first Earth Day in San Francisco
on the spring equinox, 1970; the first national Earth Day,
April 1970; the Environmental Protection Agency is formed in 1970;
we are still at War in Vietnam;
students are getting shot on campuses.
There's no accounting for this except that photo.
You might remember The Hellstrom Chronicle.
It was a pseudo-documentary movie that talked about insects going
out of control from overuse of pesticides.
There's an organization founded in Switzerland
in 1971 called Doctors Without Borders.
Where'd they get that phrasing from?
When we saw this moon rising -- we saw Earth rising over the moon --
Earth revealed it to us as nature had intended.
Not as a color-coded map designating nations and states,
but of oceans and land and clouds.   There are no borders.
You look at that picture.
Without that picture they would have said, "Oh,
international doctors," referencing nations.
This picture references no nations at all.
By the way, if you asked any one of these people they'll just say, "Oh,
it just felt the like right word.   Oh, it just made sense."
Space was in our culture so deep that you just think stuff up
and you just think that you just thought it up.
DDT -- a big issue in Rachel Carson's book in 1962.
It was not banned until 1972.   We're still going to the moon.
The Whole Earth catalog uses this photo as its cover,
thinking of Earth as a whole, not Earth as an assembly of nations.
The comprehensive Endangered Species Act -- December 1973.
The first catalytic converter for cars -- 1973.
Unleaded emission standards were established 1973.
Why didn't all that happen ten years earlier?
Five years earlier?
It happened after that, and it started immediately.
[ Pause ]   Our culture transformed.
There we were saying, "We're going to explore the moon."
Yes, driven by military money.   It stoked our economy.
We're going to explore the moon.
We got to the moon and we looked at Earth for the first time.
It established a cosmic perspective that completely transformed
who we are, how we relate to one another,
and how we think about our future.
So I submit to you that what a lesson this was.
We embarked on an activity that was driven by military motives
and out the other side came economic gain and a new perspective
on who we are in this universe.
Turns out you don't need the military motives.
Once you know there's an economic driver,
that's a good driver, too, history shows.
So all it takes is a little bit of foresight.
Be a little less parochial, not only in region but in time,
and this nation can rise up and become again what I remembered it
to be and perhaps had taken for granted of what it was.
Because if we don't act, we're just standing still.
And the act of standing still is the same as moving backwards
when everyone else is in motion all around us, around the world.
So it's an economic battle cry if you will.
I don't doubt our military resolutions.
If China said they want to put military bases on Mars,
we're there ten months later.   We're so there.
All right?
They could probably pull that one off because Mars is already red,
you know, so the marketing of that would be easy for them.
But I want to go to China just to tell them to leak a memo
and then we just would go for it.   So it just takes a few extra steps
to see the economic drivers that are at work here.
You're pumping into your society people whose ingenuity creates
new economies.
That's got nothing to do with spin-offs.
Yeah, we all like the spin-off --
lasik surgery and cordless power tools all came from NASA,
grooved pavements in the road so you don't roll your car off
on a turn -- that all came from NASA.
But that's the not biggest thing that comes from research.
NASA is, like, the poster child for discovery
and what it can do for a nation.
Because no one ever stood up in school and said,
"When I grow up I want to be an NIH researcher."
They don't do that, right?
So you need the poster, explore, discover.
And then the lawmakers will know if you do that, you pump our economy.
The kids will do it because it's fun, they want to stay kids the rest
of their lives as I have.
And we will rejuvenate the nation with that ambition.
And we can enter the 21st century as the leaders we were coming into it.
And that's my message for you today.   Thank you, thank you.
[ Applause ]   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
I think I went a little long, and I'm sorry about that.
But I have a little bit of time if you --
I'll write you a hall pass if you have to get back to your job.
I want to take questions from you because that's my favorite part
because pretty much I already knew what I was going to say.
So just raise your hand.
But thanks for coming if you have to go and get back
to solving the problems of the world.
Question? Yes, sir?   I'll repeat it if you can't hear it.
Go. We got a microphone.   >> Thank you.
I was wondering how far away you think we are
from an industrial application of fusion power.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: How far are we
from an industrial application of fusion power?
You know, to -- fusion is the most common source
of produced energy in the universe.   We can make fusion, too.
We're really good at it.   It's called a bomb.
Right? And so the whole challenge here is to control the fusion,
not the simple act of getting fusion.
So applications of fusion, what you're really asking there is
"When we will have applications?"
-- not to put a question in your mouth.
But I don't care that fusion is the bringing together of atomic nuclei;
I care that fusion is a source of energy for us.
So the real question is: "What are the prospects for other sources
of energy in the world in the future?"
That's really the question there.   And fusion is a contender.
Solar power.
I tweeted yesterday, you know, I'd be embarrassed to show an alien
that we kill each other to extract energy sources beneath the sands
when the universe is full of limitless amounts of starlight.
And by the way, someone was -- reading my tweets someone asked:
"When I compose my tweets am I high?"
[Laughter] So one time I, like -- I was distracted by a doily
and I was concerned that not enough people paused to reflect
on the beauty and majesty of a doily.
Right? Just think about what a doily is,
and it's just to sit under your cup.
So I got to tweet something about that now.
Hang on a sec.   [Laughter] Let me do this.
Just be a moment.
That's right, because I already started.
So my response will be to those who ask "Am I high?"
knowing that the sky sits above the entire Earth, that should tell you
that the study of the universe is itself a state of natural high.
[Applause] There's no service here, so it will go out in an hour.
So another question.   Yes, sir on the corner, on the side?
>> [Inaudible] There's been a decrease in funding
in NASA progressively, and then other companies trying to --
private companies -- take up the slack in that;
do you think that will hinder or help NASA in the long run
that other private companies are trying to take the place of NASA?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Thanks.
There's, like, four different things going on in
that very simple question.
And I want to separate the variables, as we say in math,
and I'm going to hit them one at a time.
The relationship between NASA and private industry has been
around since the beginning.
Grumman on Long Island made the LEM -- the lunar excursion module.
It's still a point of pride.   You walk down the streets,
the engineers from that era are still talking about it.
Anybody who was a participant in that era,
forgetting that it was completely driven by war,
were nonetheless enchanted by the fact that we were going to the moon.
So there's always been private enterprise participating
in NASA's needs.   That's not a new thing.
The difference is: Will NASA have the private enterprise as a link
between where they are and where they need to go?
They got to get the space station.
Do you use a shuttle or let someone else take you there?
That should have been happening twenty years ago.
Does the post office have its own airplanes?
No. You rent space on the belly of commercial carrier,
put the mail on there, and it gets you there faster, cheaper,
better with the efficiencies of private enterprise.
NASA knows how to get to low Earth orbit.
It is not a space frontier.
Save NASA for frontier work, and by all means farm out the routine parts
of what it is you need to do.   By all means.
Should have happened long ago.   Here's the difference:
Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier.
And I've gotten into arguments with people about this,
and then they walked away because they didn't want that to be true --
except it is fundamentally true.   Space is large.
It's dangerous.
And if it's space we've never been before -- the frontier --
the risks are unquantified.   When those factors converge,
you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
There are no investors.
"Oh, let's go someplace you might die.
We don't know if you're going to come back,
we don't know how much it will cost, and we don't know the risk.
Give me your money now."
That's not how capitalism works, okay?
So the people who take the risks are governments.
Governments.
The first Europeans to the New World were government-funded.
Columbus drew the maps, checked the trade winds,
found out who were the nice Indians and the bad Indians?
And is there food over there?
And what are the safe routes and the harmful routes?
He brings that back, that gets disseminated,
then the Dutch East India Trading Company comes in behind them.
There is no case in the history of commerce where corporations --
capitalized by investors -- did something that was hugely expensive
and dangerous and unquantified risks.
So -- by the way.
there are a couple of companies, one recently announced,
that want to mine and exploit asteroids.
We've been to asteroids.   We know how to do that.
It's an engineering frontier to figure out how to scoop it up,
and bring it, and exploit it, and use it,
and take to the moon, bring it back to Earth.
Sure. That's within the investive latitude of a company
to attract interested venture capitalists.
Sure. But if we had never been to an asteroid before?
No. No. Newt Gingrich even made that mistake when he said,
"Give the money we've given to NASA to the private industry.
We would have had colonies on the moon -- on Mars by now."
No. Well, yeah, sure, if you pay someone
but then it's not a business model.   Yeah, it could be a vanity project.
Go get Bill Gates.   "Bill, take us to Mars."
He could do it.   It's private money.
It's not a business -- he's not making money doing that.
Sure, you can just spend the money and do it, but if we wanted
to turn a space program into a space industry,
there's got to be some return on that investment.
And that has historically been the role of governments.
You can't have one without the other.
More power to all these companies that want to participate.
I foresee the day when the entire solar system is just our backyard.
And whatever nobody's done before, that's what NASA's doing.
Yes, on the side.   >> [Inaudible]
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: That's what you think.
Did you hear what he just said?   No. He said, "I don't need a mic."
[Laughter]   >> It is on.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Now you can hear him.
Yes?
>> Among the things that I would think would be a leading driver
towards "I don't want to die" is being hit by an asteroid,
being hit by a comet, being hit by any number of things.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Being hit by an asteroid counts
as "I don't want to die."   Yes.
>> And yet.   >> Neil deGrasse Tyson: No, no.
That one -- "I don't want my species to go extinct."
Yeah, that's a good one.   Yeah.
>> And yet, somewhat inexplicably you keep seeing proposals
for asteroid defense research,
asteroid defense programs not getting the funding they want.
And I was wondering if you might have an idea as to why.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Because the election cycle is shorter
Why would you spend money in your electoral --
why would you spend your session's dollars on something
that doesn't affect your session?   So it's a cultural shortsightedness.
But I have a better solution.
Oh, by the way, there's a great comic where one dinosaur is saying
to the other, "Now is the time to invest
[Laughter] So I have a better solution.
Your space activities are not simply "What do we do now?
Oh, let's all go to Mars.   Okay, what next?
Let's go to Venus."
No. That's not an exploration program.
Those are one-offs.   The moon was a one-off.
What you need to do is have a suite of vehicle --
that's my suggestion here.
We've got the engineers to make this real.
You get a suite of launch vehicles that can be combined
in different ways, different strap-on solid booster liquid --
whatever is the combination so that I can walk up and say,
"Today I want to go to the backside of the moon."
"Oh, that's three of these rockets, two of those, four of these.
We'll launch in a week."   "I want to do science on Mars."
"Oh, that's these three rockets, and this,
and you need this life support system
because you're not coming back for three years and fine."
The military says, "Well, this new cis-lunar space is the new high
ground, the space between Earth and the moon's orbit.
We need to set up some laser tracking places in sort
of trailing orbit to the moon around the Earth."
"Okay, that's this satellite, this launch pad, and this."
"Oh, there's an asteroid coming."   "Oh, check with the mining guys.
They have ways of tugging an asteroid from one location
to the other because they've done it to bring the rare elements --
the rare Earth elements" -- by the way, elements that are called
"rare Earth" are common elsewhere.   Okay? They're just rare on Earth.
There are asteroids where they're common.
And so then you just phone up the guys and say,
"We got a new orbit on asteroid 2782.
It's going to hit Earth in 37 years.
Can you deflect it a few centimeters?
That will buy us another fifty years and we'll worry about it then."
That's the space-faring future that I foresee that we don't yet have.
And we're far from it.   Yes?
>> [Inaudible]
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, thank you.
I have a radio program called Star Talk.
It's kind of irreverent.   And we're just really having fun.
So thanks for the plug.
>> What direction would you personally
like to see the House Science and National Labs Caucus go
in the realms of physics?   >> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah.
So I think, you know, I'm partial to physics
because there is no understanding of chemistry without physics,
and there is no understanding of biology without chemistry.
So every century is a physics century as far as I see it
because the rest of the sciences derive their greatest discoveries
from it.   So you got to fund them all.
And I see the labs, which have historically been physics --
why not bring them to bear
on all the nation's grand challenges that befall us?
And when we're not at war that gives you the opportunity
to solve other kinds of problems.
But you need the cadre of scientists there just studying the limits
of our knowledge.
And you want to be able to transfer the freshly discovered knowledge
into product.
So you want to develop a community of technologists
who say, "Wait a minute."   You need those folk.
Plus, you need folks who visit one center to the next.
If I had an oven with coal like a Franklin stove that runs on wood,
and I say, "I give you a billion dollars," -- no, too much --
"I'll give you a million dollars, make me a better stove."
And you're an expert in heat transfer and thermodynamics,
and you know -- you're good, all right?
And so you design an oven that's insulated
and is temperature-controlled and self-regulating.
No matter how much time I give you
and no matter how much money I give you,
you will never invent a microwave oven because that came
from military research in communications with microwaves.
And we kind of stumbled on the effect of microwaves on food
because water is a major ingredient of food
and microwaves tickle the water molecule rendering it hot.
And then someone said, "Hey,
if it does that to water it will do that to my food.
Let's make a cavity and call it microwave oven."
Somebody's got to waltz among the camps, someone clever and ambition
and maybe has a nose for profit.
That always helps as well -- the second biggest driver ever --
the "I don't want to die poor" driver.
Oh. You have a question?   >> Hi.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Hello, how old are you?
>> Eight.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: You're eight?
That is such a cool age to be.
You know, when I was nine that's when I discovered the universe.
But you're here already, so you've already discovered something.
I like your shirt.   >> Thank you.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Okay.   So what's your question?
>> Well, the question before the last question answer gave me
a question.
So if the asteroids coming at us, why don't we try to fling it
into orbit around the Earth like the moon?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so you want to save the world.
That's really a good thing to want to do.
Well, there are people out there who --
see, here in America we're really good at blowing stuff up, okay?
And we're less good at knowing where the pieces land afterwards.
So yeah, we've got some leftover missiles and we could try
to destroy the asteroid, right?
So that would be, "Let's blow the sucker out of the sky."
You know, that's the macho --
you know, that's the testosterone way to do it.
But a kinder, gentler way would be exactly what you said,
to deflect it.
It's still there, it could harm you another day,
but to deflect it takes so much less energy.
And you could test it to see if you have succeeded.
There are plans on paper, which means we know how to do it --
we think -- but no one has given us money
to build the spacecraft to actually do it.
So here's what will happen: The asteroid will come;
it's too late to vote money to create the spacecraft;
and then we all go extinct holding the piece
of paper saying how we would have --
the paper is like sticking up above the ground.
And [laughter] I don't want to be the laughing stock of the galaxy
with all the aliens looking to Earth and say, "Those stupid humans.
They had opposable thumbs, they had a space program,
but they didn't deflect the asteroids," which makes us no better
than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs who came before us,
who themselves did not deflect that asteroid because,
of course, they had pea brains.
So it's a great idea and you're the right age so that
if one comes around, I want you to save the world.
Okay? And then they make movies about you and you'll be a hero.
You're already a hero for asking that question that no one else
in this room thought to ask.
You got to watch out when you ask questions around adults.
[Applause] Now you can embarrass some grownups that way.
But don't worry about it.
Okay? They need to be embarrassed much more often than they are.
Another question right here, sir.   >> Um, when you did the interview --
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Wait, you began the sentence with an "um"?
This is Washington, D.C. We are educated people.
>> I'm nervous, I apologize.   >> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Okay.
[Laughter] Okay.
>> You gave an interview with the New York Times a while ago
where you were asked about the most astounding fact;
is that still the most astounding fact,
or has Higgs boson changed that?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, thanks for asking about that.
A reporter came to my office in New York and asked me ten questions,
the last of which was: "What's the most astounding fact that I know?"
And so there it lived, you know, on the Internet for years.
And somebody took my answer --
then somebody decided they liked the answer --
and they took it and made a YouTube video of it
with some exciting visuals to match my words.
The video went viral.
It's, like, got -- you know, it's not as viral
as the kitten falling off the piano.
But it's as viral as any science video that I've seen has gotten.
And I invite you to check -- just look "Tyson" and "astounding."
That ought to land you right on it.
They asked, "What is the most astounding fact that I know?"
And I just went off on it.
And I will not tell you the answer now.
I know you -- so, many of you have seen it.
You must have because it went viral.
But yes, that's still my most astounding fact.
Sorry about the rest of you again.
[Laughter] Yes, I think it's rising through two million views.
Four million views.  So I'm very moved by that fact.
It means there is an untapped hunger that my activities serve.
Because that's what I am --
I'm a servant of the public appetite for the universe.
And occasionally I might awaken an appetite you didn't know you had,
but really I'm just a servant showing you the universe that's
already there.  Yes?
>> Hi. You are obviously exemplary in your ability
to communicate science and science stuff to nonscientists.
How, in your opinion, can we best inspire other scientists
to follow in your example?  >> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Wow.
The problem is our community is not rewarded by their ability
to communicate with people
who don't already know their vocabulary and their jargon.
There's no return to the community on that.
And for the longest while, you were looked down upon.
In fact, there's blood on the tracks from Carl Sagan's era
for the fact that he reached out to the public.
When he appeared on Johnny Carson -- what?
A scientist on TV?  On entertainment television?
Not just on a documentary and exchanging jokes with a comedian?
And so we've come a long way since then, especially my field --
astrophysics -- in no small measure
because of the efforts of Carl Sagan.
So I can stand here and do this.
And I can host a radio show with comedians
and we crack jokes all the time.
They're scientifically literate jokes but we're just slap --
and I can still be invited to Caltech and give a seminar,
go to MIT and meet with their advisors.
So my field has reached that level of --
I would call it "political and cultural maturity."
There are other fields that have not.
I've seen it.
Many branches of physics, that is not the case.
Geology, that's not the case.
And so more evidence that I think we're pretty good at this is go
to the bookstore and go to the Science section.
Most of the science books -- not including health and human health
and nutrition -- most of the science books are universe books.
And you can tell because all the bindings are dark
because it's some cosmic photo, some Hubble photo on the jacket.
So I think we're doing pretty good.  And I'm a cog in a very big wheel.
And by the way, the State University of New York
at Stonybrook Long Island just created a new branch of itself
to train science professionals to communicate science.
So the vectors are in the right direction
and have the right slope, I think.
But it's hard, and to change a culture always takes effort.
And so I'm not as pessimistic as you are, perhaps.
That was a two thumbs up.  Yes, back row there.
>> [Inaudible] how did you -- sorry -- Carl Sagan, how did you.
Sorry --
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Wait, start the question again.
>> So besides being clever enough to be born after Carl Sagan
and choose astrophysics that was culturally ready for your skills,
how did you develop those skills and what advice do you have
for other scientists who want to follow in your footsteps?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think being socialized matters.
You got to just know how to have a conversation with somebody
and many other academic branches do.
You know, literature majors and history majors and all the majors
that lead to you becoming an attorney, for example.
You need social skills to communicate your ideas, to argue,
to -- so I don't think it takes much.
You just have to be able to talk to somebody and not put them to sleep.
And then you grow that audience from one, to five, to ten.
And it's not a matter of "Are you afraid that someone
in the audience knows more than you do?"
If you come from academia, you know more than everybody in the audience.
That's a given.  All right?
So it's really a social force here, not some other kind of anxiety.
And I think I've been socialized my whole life.
My father was a sociologist, was active in the Civil Rights Movement
in New York under Mayor Lindsay.  My mother was a housewife,
went back to school, became a gerontologist.
So I was their like, nerd kid, their astro-nerd kid.
But every time I came home, I understood what it meant
to be sociable and to interact with other people.
So it's quite natural for me to take what I love --
the universe -- and just talk about it.
It's not an extra effort.  It's a natural effort.
It's like asking, "What does your living room look like?"
"Well, I got a couch here and a picture there and an area rug here."
What does the universe look like?
Well, it's big [inaudible] -- it's my living room and I'm sharing it.
So I don't think the challenge is as hard as people think.
Now, it is a little different.
I do some things that I don't expect anybody else --
like, my Twitter stream.
It's just completely weird stuff in there sometimes.
It's just weird.
Other things I do -- on my radio show I am cavorting with comedians.
That's because I happen
to be deeply respectful of the comedic arts.
Deeply. I think they carry the soul of our culture in their banter.
And so I'm very comfortable in the presence of witty comedians
who are sharp, clever, and even barbed.
I, when I give lectures, have a handheld microphone
because they have handheld microphones.
You know why?
Because, for example, if I were describing the next asteroid
that may render the west coast of the United States --
may obliterate the asteroid Apophis I get to say it like this:
"Apophis is named for the Egyptian God of death and darkness."
[Laughter] I get to do that with my microphone.
If it's a [inaudible] you can't.  Little things like that.
Yes, so you learn those and I developed those over the years.
And it allows me to have a radio show where I talk to comedians
and I have -- as guests -- actors, politicians, authors.
I don't have scientists on my radio show.
You know why?
Because there are people who will not listen to a radio show
if it has a scientist on it.
So I turn the table around and I say, "I'm the host
and I'm the scientist," and you're going
to follow your favorite person to that show.
You're a fan of that politician, of that actor,
of that writer, of that comedian.  And you know something?
That person is going to have a conversation about science with me.
Their fan base follows them to that program.
I don't expect everybody to do that.
That's a lot of effort for me to pull that off.
But just talking about your research that's tax base funded?
If you resist that, I don't know
that you even have a right to be a scientist.
It's your obligation, it's your duty.
And if you are not that fluent --
socially fluent -- then create a website.
Write an op-ed.
There are lots of ways to intersect the public, and right now hardly any
of them are rewarded in the field.
So yeah, I work at it when I'm called to,
otherwise I'd rather just stay home and watch the ball games.
I'm perfectly happy there, by the way.
Let me take one last question and then we'll wrap it, okay?
Right here, in the middle.  Yes?
>> [Inaudible]
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: You started with an "um" again.
>> One of the things that I'm aware that you're doing
that I think is great for getting the public interested
in science is working with the GZA on his album about space.
Can you tell us about what's going on with that?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Okay.
Actually, the Wall Street Journal got the story wrong.
I'm not collaborating with him at all.
Next question.
I do want another question because she was misinformed.
I had the GZA, who is a rap star, a hip-hop artist, on Star Talk radio.
Why? Because his next album,
the lyrics on his next album are inspired by cosmic themes.
He's rapping about the big bang, and the expanding universe, and gravity,
and dark matter, and dark energy.
You know a subject has been embraced by pop culture
when artists take ownership of it.
When that happens, you become in the mainstream
of thought; you're in the culture.
And so that was one of our more successful episodes
of Star Talk radio: A rap star.   What's the stereotype?
Oh, the gun shoot-outs at rap concerts, right?
And here's somebody who's actually making a difference
with his rap lyrics.
And I didn't let that go unnoticed on my show.
So no, but we're not collaborating.
But if he called me up and said, you know, "I need a word here."
You know, I got cosmic word, I can hook him up.
You know? We got vocabulary.   Good vocabulary, too.
None of this stuff like geologists.   "Oh, this is orthoclase feldspar."
No, I can't rhyme that.   I'm sorry.
"Oh, this is deoxyribonucleic acid."   Can't rhyme that either.
Big bang. Black hole.   Quasar. Pulsar.
[Laughter] Spots on the sun?   Sun spots.
Red spot on Jupiter?   Jupiter's red spot.
We got vocabulary to burn here.
I want to take one last question, and it better be awesome
because it's the last question.   Is it awesome?
We'll be the judge of that.
Go, sir. And the last question -- thank you all for coming after this.
Yeah?   >> I'm also a big fan of Star Talk.
And couple of months ago you had thrown a fact out there
about black holes and that a black hole the size
of a quarter could actually devour an Earth-sized planet?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, easily.
>> And I've heard you talk about black holes a lot.
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: Have you not slept well since then?
[Laughter]   >> No, it's not that.
It's not that.
I would like to know what that would look like.
Would our atmosphere be the first thing to go?
Would things become oblonged and sucked into it
like what you imagine, or would it break apart?
>> Neil deGrasse Tyson: How do you get something the size of the Earth
so fit into something the size of a quarter?
Yeah. So I recently tweet --
well, a year ago I tweeted we have these things called pulsars,
which are very dense matter.
It's like the densest matter there is before you collapse
into a black hole.
So to put that context -- how dense this material was --
I said, "Take a herd of 50 million elephants
and cram them into a thimble.
Then you get the density of the material on a pulsar."
So in other words, scoop up a thimble's worth of pulsar material,
put it on a scale -- on a balance scale --
and then I say, "What do I have to put on the other side here
to balance that thimble?"
I have to put 50 million elephants here.
So that's an extraordinary extreme of nature.
In fact, in my field we have to be parsimonious
with our descriptive adjectives.   I can't say, "Jupiter's gigantic."
Well, it is compared to Earth, but it's small compared to the sun.
I can't say, "The sun is gigantic."
Well, it can hold a million Earths if it were hollow,
but Betelgeuse can hold a million suns.
Okay? So when do you say something's big and huge?
So I just try -- but now we're at the limits and I get to say,
"This is an awesome number of elephants to fit into a thimble."
Okay? So now you go denser than that,
this thing collapses into a black hole.
And no matter the size of the black hole,
it's going to eat anything that comes near it.
So Earth would slowly sort of -- if you dropped the black hole,
Earth and the black hole will drop towards one another, okay?
And Earth will begin to funnel down towards it.
And so basically Earth will begin to crumble
as it gets ripped apart and it gets stretched.
Spaghettified.
It's the act of spaghettification that occurs
because the black hole is small and what it's eating is large.
That's what happens in a spaghetti machine.
There's a tiny hole and a big blob of dough,
and at the end it's a spaghetti stream.
So it would not be pleasant.
It would probably happen very fast --
faster than you can communicate this information
to the other side of the world.   So just enjoy it as it happens.
[Laughter] It's a one-way -- we're pretty sure we've got the inventory
of black holes figured that this is not the most likely way to die.
But it would be an awesome way to die.
By the way, this ripping apart into a strand --
the two things that are happening is ripping you head
to toe, Earth head to toe.
And the funneling is another interesting feature
because the space time
that it occupies is this tiny little narrow funnel, essentially,
and that's the concept of spaghettification.
And I wrote a book, Death by Black Hole.
Oh, she has the book right behind you, see?
Vanna White, thank you for showing, displaying.
And in there I describe in detail what would happen
if you personally fell into a black hole.
And yes, it's a one-way trip but it's awesome
and it's my choice of death.
Like, if I were on death row I'd say, "I want to die
by black hole," if I had the choice.
It's much better than getting hit a bus.
Right? It's a one-way trip and you get
to do experiments all the way down.   Thank you all for your attention.
Let's keep it going here.   [Applause] Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Randy Hultgren: Thank you so much.
Dr. Tyson, just phenomenal.   This was awesome.
Thank you all for being here.
We do want to encourage you to talk to your members
of Congress, people that you know.
We'd love to have their help the on caucus.
We'd love to have your help on the caucus, as well.
This is important in we've got to tell this story.
So thanks for being here.   Have a great afternoon.
Again, Dr. Tyson, thank you.
One more round of applause for Dr. Tyson.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.