Here’s some more anthropology: men design rockets. Even stuff that isn’t rockets is designed to look like rockets. Phalluses, all of them. And I’m told that when you’re testing rockets and they fail on the launchpad, euphemisms like “It was an experiment high in learning opportunities” are deployed in your press conferences. But really it’s just rockets suffering from projectile dysfunction. That’s what it should be called: projectile dysfunction.
So I asked myself, Would rockets look this way if women designed them? It’s just a question. I don’t know. But I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, They have to be designed this way because phalluses are aerodynamic. Now, rockets in the vacuum of space don’t have to be aerodynamic at all, because there’s no air. So for that phase of any rocket’s journey, it does not need to look like a rocket. We’re together on that point.
But how about when the rocket traverses the atmosphere? I wondered whether you could have a flying object that’s aerodynamic yet does not derive from a phallic fixation. After exploring the problem a little further, I found a design by Philip W. Swift that he entered in a Scientific American paper airplane contest in the 1960s—and here it is. Nothing phallic about it. You could even say it has an opposite design. Now watch it fly!
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, there’s ten minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
So let’s talk politics. I’m an academic; I lord over nothing on the landscape of people, place, or thing. But we academics, we scientists, like to argue, because that’s how the fresh ideas surface. We hash things out, find a way to do the experiment better, see what works, what doesn’t. So scientists are good at looking at different points of view—which, to some people, makes us look like hypocrites. We can take one point of view one day, and another point of view the next day. But what we do is, we take the Hypocritic Oath. We take our multiple points of view, but—and this is something scientists all know as we argue—in the end there’s not more than one truth. So, in fact, the conversation converges. Something you don’t often get in politics.
Let me give you some examples. I was born and raised in New York City. Politically, I’m left of liberal. That makes me really rare at this moment in the state of Colorado, perhaps as rare as a conservative Republican in New York City. In a crowd this large in New York, you’d say, “See that fellow in the bow tie over in the corner? That’s the Republican in the room.”
Have you noticed how the talk shows invite one liberal and one conservative, and they always just fight? I don’t remember ever seeing a talk show where both sides declared at the end, “Hey, we’re in full agreement,” and walked out hand in hand. It never happens. So it makes me wonder about the utility of those confrontations, which forces me to look in the middle. I’ve been looking in the middle ever since I began serving on presidential commissions. Those commissions are bipartisan. You have to solve problems, even though there’s hot air over here and hot air over there. Put those together, and it’s a combustible mixture. So you make them combust, let the effluent gases dissipate, and look at what remains in the middle. What remains in the middle—that’s America.
Recently I visited Disney World in Florida with my family, and we went to see the full-size, animatronic presidents of the United States. My kids, then ages ten and six, went in with me and we relearned the names of every president, from George W. right on up to George W. They’re all there. While I was watching the puppets move and speak onstage, I thought to myself, These aren’t Republicans or Democrats; these are presidents of the United States. While every one of them was in office, something interesting happened in America. And after they were out of office, in nearly every case, something important and lasting remained.
When you look at all the accusations people make nowadays—like, “Oh, you’re just a peace-loving, liberal, antiwar Democrat”—you start to wonder what it means to put all those words together in the same phrase. We fought all of World War II under a Democratic president, and a Democratic president dropped the atom bombs. Being a liberal Democrat is not synonymous with being antiwar. Circumstances change over time. Decisions have to be made independent of your political party, decisions that affect the health and wealth of the nation. The polls tell us that George W. Bush has not historically been popular with the black community. Yet who’s to say that, fifty or a hundred years from now, he won’t be remembered for having appointed American blacks to the highest ranks of the cabinet? No previous president placed a black person into the ascension sequence for the presidency; it was a Republican president who did it. Then there’s the perennial accusation that Republicans are anti-environment. But when was the Environmental Protection Agency started? Under President Nixon, a Republican.
So I see intersections across time. I see interplay. People are quick to criticize, and there are many reasons to do so—I understand that—but in the end, there at Disney World are all the presidents standing onstage, collectively defining our country.
I’ve got one more intersection for you—and this one isn’t about presidents. In my professional community of astrophysicists, about 90 percent of us, plus or minus, are liberal, antiwar Democrats. Yet practically all of our detection hardware flows out of historical relationships with military hardware. And that connection goes back centuries. In the early 1600s Galileo heard about the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands—which they used for looking in people’s windows—and he built one himself. Almost no one had thought to look up with the telescope, but Galileo did, and there he found the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots. Then he realized, Hey, this would be good for our defense system. So he demonstrated his instrument to the doges of Venice, and they ordered a supply of telescopes right then and there. Of course, they probably doubled their order when Galileo brought out the Snickers.
By the way, when I talk about looking in the middle, I don’t mean compromising principles. I’m talking about finding principles that are fundamental to the identity of the nation and then rallying around them. Our presence in space embodies one of those principles.
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: Regardless of what the situation occasionally looks like, space is not fundamentally partisan. It is not even bipartisan. It is nonpartisan. Kennedy said, “Let’s go to the Moon,” but Nixon’s signature is on the plaques our astronauts left there. The urge to explore space (or not) is historically decoupled from whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, left-wing or right-wing. And that’s a good thing. It’s a sign of what’s left over in the middle after all the hot air cools down.
As Americans, we’ve taken certain things for granted. You don’t notice this until you go somewhere else. We’re always dreaming. Sometimes that’s bad, because we dream unrealizable things. But most of the time it’s been good. It has allowed us to think about tomorrow. Entire generations of Americans have thought about living a different future—a modern future—as no culture had done before. Computers were invented in America. Skyscrapers were born in America. It was America that not only envisioned but also invented the new and modern Tomorrow, driven by designs and innovations in science and technology.
A poor nation can’t be expected to dream, because it doesn’t have the resources to enable the realization of dreams. For the poor, dreaming just becomes an exercise in frustration, an unaffordable luxury. But many wealthy nations don’t spend enough time looking at tomorrow either—and America needs to guard against becoming one of those. Although we still want to think about the future, we are in danger of becoming ill-equipped to make it happen.
In 2007 I gave a talk at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, at the celebration of Sputnik’s fiftieth anniversary. There were four keynote speakers: one from Russia, one from India, one from the European Union, and me, from America. Naturally the Russian spoke first, because Sputnik went up first. What he talked about was what Sputnik had meant to the country—the pride, the privilege, the excitement. He talked about
how that achievement infused what it was to be Russian.
Then came the representatives of India and the European Union, which don’t have the historical space legacy that Russia and America do. Today, however, they’re getting into space big time. What did their spokespeople talk about? Earth monitoring. India wants to learn more about the monsoons, which is completely understandable. But not once did either speaker discuss anything beyond Earth, and I thought to myself, Okay, we all love Earth, we all care about Earth. But do you want to do that to the exclusion of the rest of the universe?
Space Tweet #60
If Earth were size of a schoolroom globe, our atmosphere wouldn’t be much thicker than the coat of lacquer on its surface
Apr 19, 2010 6:13 AM
The problem is, here you are looking at Earth—here’s a cloud, there’s a storm front—and meanwhile, there’s an asteroid on the way. So you think Earth is safe until somebody else, somebody who had the foresight to look up, tells you that the asteroid’s ready to take out your country, at which point you’ll never have to worry again about whether a storm front is coming through.
And it’s not just that asteroid we should be thinking about. We are flanked by planets that are experiments gone bad. To our left is the planet Venus, named for the goddess of love and beauty because it’s so beautiful in the evening sky, the brightest thing up there. (By the way, Venus is likely to appear right after sunset, before the stars. So, just between you and me, if your wishes have not been coming true, it’s because you’ve been wishing on a planet rather than a star.) Now, Venus is certainly beautiful in the evening sky, but it’s fallen victim to a runaway greenhouse effect. It is 900° Fahrenheit on the surface of Venus, which is sometimes called our sister planet because it is about the same size and mass as Earth and has about the same surface gravity. Nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. If you took a sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza and put it on your Venusian windowsill, it would cook in nine seconds. That’s how hot it is now on Venus—a greenhouse experiment gone bad.
To our right is Mars, at one time drenched with running water. We know this because it has dry riverbeds, dry river deltas, dry meandering floodplains, dry lakebeds. Today the surface water is gone. We think it may have seeped down into permafrost, but in any case it’s gone. So something bad happened on Mars, too.
And so you can’t only monitor Earth to understand Earth. You can’t claim to understand a sample of one. That is not science. In science, you need other things to compare with your sample; otherwise, you end up paying attention to the wrong parameters because you think they’re relevant when they may actually not be. I’m not saying you shouldn’t study Earth. I’m saying that if you study Earth believing it’s some isolated island in the middle of the cosmos, you are wrong. Possibly dead wrong. Fact is, we already know of an asteroid headed our way.
You know all the people out there who ask why we’re spending so much money on NASA? Every time I personally hear someone say that, I ask them, “How much do you think NASA’s getting? What fraction of your tax dollar do you think goes to NASA?” “Oh,” they say, “ten cents, twenty cents.” Sometimes they even say thirty or forty cents. And when I tell them it’s not even a dime, not even a nickel, not even a penny, they say, “I didn’t know that. I guess that’s okay.” When I tell them their half penny funded the beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the space shuttles, the International Space Station, all the scientific data from the inner and outer solar system and the research on the asteroid headed our way, they change their tune. But ignorance works its way up to people who perhaps should know better.
A principal task of Congress is to levy and spend our money. Occasionally, people muse that some or all of NASA’s budget should go to heal the sick, feed the homeless, train the teachers, or engage whatever social programs beckon. Of course, we already spend money on all these things, and on countless other needs. It’s this entire portfolio of spending that defines a nation’s identity. I, for one, want to live in a nation that values dreaming as a dimension of that spending. Most, if not all, of those dreams spring from the premise that our discoveries will transform how we live.
Recently I had a depressing revelation. It was about firsts. The first cell phone looked like a large brick. You see it and you think, Did people actually hold this up to their ear? Remember the 1987 movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko, the rich guy, at his beach house in the Hamptons, talking on one of those phones? I remember thinking, Wow, that’s cool! He can walk on the beach and speak to somebody on a portable phone! But now when I look back, all I can think is, How could anybody have ever used such a thing?
This is the evidence that we’ve moved on: you look at the first thing—the brick-size cell phone, the car with the little crank, the airplane that looks like a cloth-wrapped insect—and you say, “Put it in a museum. Keep that first internal-combustion-engine car behind a rope, and let me drive my Maserati down the freeway.” You look at what came first, you comment on how cute and quaint it is, and you move on. That’s how we should be reacting to everything that happened first. That’s the guarantee and the knowledge that we have moved past it.
So why is it that every time I go to the Kennedy Space Center and walk up to the Saturn V rocket, I am still impressed by it? I look at it and touch it the way the apes touched the monolith in 2001. And I’m not alone there, looking apelike as I stand there gawking. It’s as though we’re all thinking, How was this possible? How did we manage to go to the Moon? Now, if you haven’t been near a Saturn V rocket lately, go check it out. It is awesome. But why am I looking at something from the 1960s and saying it’s awesome? I want to be able to glance at the Saturn V rocket and say, “Isn’t that quaint? Look what they did back in the 1960s. But now we’ve got something better.”
Yes, we’re now working on that problem. It’s a little late, though. It should have happened back in the 1970s. But we all know it stopped; I don’t have to retell that story. So if you want evidence that we’re not innovating, it’s when you start looking at the past, at the firsts, and start wishing we could be that good again. The day you find yourself saying, “Gosh, how did they do that?” the race is over. If we don’t move things forward, the rest of the world will, leaving us to run after them, playing catch-up.
By the way, who moves things forward? The engineers, the scientists, the geeks. The people who, for most of the twentieth century, all the cool people mocked. But times have changed. Now the patron saint of geeks is the richest person in the world: Bill Gates. Do you know how rich Bill Gates is? I don’t think you know, so I’m going to tell you.
I happen to have enough money so that if there’s a dime lying on the sidewalk and I’m in a hurry, I won’t bend down to pick it up. But if I see a quarter, I stop and get it. You can do laundry with quarters, you can put them in parking meters, plus they’re big. So, even given my net worth, I’m still picking up quarters—but not dimes. So let’s do a ratio of my net worth and what I don’t pick up to Bill Gates’s net worth and what he won’t pick up. How little would have to be lying in the street for Bill Gates to feel it wasn’t worth bothering to pick up? Forty-five thousand dollars.
You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondered if that was mistranslated. Perhaps it actually says, “And the geek shall inherit the Earth.”
I want to get back to what it means to dream, to have a vision. To study space, you have to ask certain questions that require new kinds of cross-pollination among multiple fields. Right now I’m looking for life on Mars. I need a biologist to help me. If there’s some kind of odd life on the surface, I might step on it, so bring in the biologist. If the life exists below the soils, bring in the geologist. If there’s an issue with the pH of the soil, bring in the chemist. If I want to build a structure in orbit, I need to bring in the mechanical and aerospace engineers.
Today we’re all under the same tent, and we’re all speaking to one another. Today we realize
that space is not simply an emotional frontier; it is the frontier of all the sciences. So when I stand in front of a middle-school class, I have to be able to say, “Become an aerospace engineer because we’re doing amazing science out here on the frontier.”
You already know this. I’m preaching to the choir here. That’s why I’m proud to be part of this Space Technology Hall of Fame family. If you’re going to attract the next generation, you need and want to be working on something big, something worth dreaming about, because it’s what defines who we are.
Space Tweet #61
If the surviving Chilean miners are heroes (rather than victims) then what do you call the NASA & Chilean engineers who saved them?
Oct 17, 2010 7:47 AM
Maybe you’re worried about scientific literacy. China has more scientifically literate people than America has college graduates. What can be done about that? How do you attract people? I don’t know a bigger force of attraction than the universe magnet. I don’t twist newscasters’ arms or tell them, “Do thus-and-such story on the universe tonight.” I sit in my office, minding my own business, and the phone rings—because the universe flinched the day before, and they want a sound bite on it. I’m responding to an appetite that’s already there. So the issue is, do we have the drive and the will to feed that appetite?
Wherever I travel, if strangers recognize me in the street, seven in ten of them are working-class. I think of them as blue-collar intellectuals. These are the people who, owing to whatever circumstance or turn of luck, could not or did not go to college. Yet they have stayed intellectually curious their entire lives. So they watch the Discovery Channel; they watch National Geographic, they watch NOVA; they want to know the answers. And we need to harness their desire for answers so that it helps transform the nation.
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Page 24