DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson: A way to save America

This stems from an interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer and astrophysicist with the Hayden Planetarium. I'm not going to post the whole interview as it's a long read. This is a great interview of one of the worlds most important science spokespersons. Even if you've never heard of the man, I'd highly suggest reading the whole thing. You can find it here.

The part that I thought would make a good discussion I will post though The pertinent sections that caught my eye are the last few paragraphs. In it, he discusses with his interviewer a way to "stop America's slide."

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One of the few times that I was able to sit down with Tyson in New York was on a day when Barack Obama was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. Rather than deal with the hassle of security, Tyson decamped to Smith and Wollensky, a midtown steak house, to participate in a wine auction. The second floor of the restaurant was filled with tables of bidders. A broad flat-screen television hung behind the auctioneer, full of lot numbers and bids. Tyson had a table to himself in the middle of the room, where he was answering emails on his laptop. A miniature metal bridge served as a paperweight, holding the auction catalog open to the page of the lot he wanted to bid on, a modest collection of mixed bottles.

“I tend to be a bottom-feeder, and I’m proud of that,” he said.

We talked over a rib-eye about the future. From time to time, Tyson took a break to wave his auction paddle or shake a waiter’s hand. For the past few years, the future of astronomy has been a part-time job for Tyson, as he has served on the Committee on the Decadal Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey 2010. The committee, assembled by the National Academies of Sciences from American astronomy’s top ranks, had as its mission to rank a vast number of proposals for future projects. At the top of their list is $1.6-billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST.

The 1.5-meter-wide telescope would be delivered on a rocket 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where it would be able to peer far across the universe, picking up infrared radiation from distant sources. WFIRST may be able to detect signs of planets orbiting other stars that ground-based telescopes have missed.

It took two years for Tyson and his colleagues to draw up their final list, which they released in August 2009. “A lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, a lot of reports,” is how Tyson describes it. “This was an important reality check on people’s scientific ambitions.”

Astrophysics is entering a precarious phase in the United States. As scientists probe deeper into the universe, they need increasingly sophisticated tools to make more progress. And those tools are becoming hugely expensive.

“Let me give you an example,” Tyson said. “The entire Rose Center for Earth and Space cost $230 million. That was years of fundraising and three years of demolition and construction. If the shuttle can’t land in Florida because of a thunderstorm and has to land at Vandenberg Air Force base? That’s $250 million.”

At the moment, WFIRST and the other missions Tyson and his colleagues have endorsed are stuck in line behind the James Webb Space Telescope, which is slated to lift off in 2015. The JWST is going to be delivered into space essentially as a rolled-up ball; once it emerges from its rocket, it will unfurl into a 6.5 meter mirror, over twice as big as Hubble’s 2.4 meter mirror. It’s a magnificent concept, but it’s also turning into a budgetary nightmare. Its cost has leaped from $5 billion to $6.5 billion. Nature called it “the telescope that ate astronomy.” Last summer, as Congress tried to find ways to cut its budget, the JWST ended up on a list of projects under consideration for elimination.

Shortly after Congress raised this possibility, Tyson appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. He pointed out that the war in Afghanistan had already sucked up more money than NASA had in its entire fifty-year existence. “You are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow,” he warned.

The audience broke out in applause.

Tyson believes that the scientific community has to do its part to keep costs down, but he worries that politicians may not recognize that there is value to exploring the universe. The first exposure many people have to science is in a planetarium or on a NASA web site. By learning about black holes or dark energy, people become acquainted with science itself. Some of them go on to become scientists, and others become scientifically literate citizens. And that’s how to keep a country thriving.

“There’s no greater engine of economic growth than innovations in those fields,” Tyson said.

A truly galling sign of the times came in 2009, when Russia put together a space mission to the small asteroid Apophis. It has a small but genuine chance of hitting Earth in 2036. Recently Russia invited the United States to be a partner on the mission.

“Excuse me?” Tyson asked, setting down his fork. “Roll that tape back. Aren’t we the ones who propose missions and then bring other partners in with us? Aren’t we the leaders in this?”

The tale of Apophis speaks of a broader decline for Tyson--in America’s science education and its skills in science and engineering. “Katrina didn’t destroy New Orleans--the levees did,” he said. “What, we can’t hold back water? This is the twenty-first century? What is our problem?”

I asked Tyson if he thought something could stop America’s slide.

“Space exploration,” he said without missing a beat.

When the United States was sending men to the moon, science thrived. “You had to beat people back at the door who wanted to major in science and physics and become science teachers,” said Tyson. “You had people making the space program the measure of what is possible.”

But Tyson does not simply want to turn back the clock. As he explains in his upcoming book, Space Chronicles, the Cold War that made the Kennedy-era space program possible is long over. Tyson has been pondering a plan to take its place. “You multiply NASA’s budget a factor of two or three and you give it a grand vision,” he said. “You say, ‘We’re going back to the moon, we’re going to Mars. Oh, by the way, we’re going to be on Mars on this date, and right now we are looking at the elementary school children of the nation to see who has the right stuff, because by the time we’re ready to go to Mars, they will be the right age to be astronauts.’ You attract an entire generation of people into these epic projects. And to solve those problems that have never been solved before, they have to invent things. They have to have new ideas. New branches of mathematics get discovered. This feeds into society, into our culture. It’s a difficult sell, but I think it’s our only hope.”

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His sentiments in the last paragraph here, that we can use NASA and science as an investment to bolster America's future and stop its decline globally, is one possibility that I've brought up on this forum. I'm interested in people's thoughts on this topic.

what an original idea. he wants to do what kennedy did for the moon but for mars. wait, this idea has been around since we landed on the moon.

and i don't think that pouring money into it is the right idea either. honestly, i don't think we are ready for space exploration at this point and it definitely won't be financially prudent.

no, what we need is to find sectors of science that the government can help fund the research and then take a bit of the prize when it succeeds like they did in the BJT/CMOS days of Bell Laboratories.

if they do it correctly, the Lithium battery research funding that was speculated awhile back was a good idea.

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what an original idea. he wants to do what kennedy did for the moon but for mars. wait, this idea has been around since we landed on the moon.

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He didn't say it was novel. I believe he brings it up because we know that it works, since our whole current infrastructure is based on this time period of massive R&D.

yeah, i didn't need to be that sarcastic in my first line.

still, i don't believe it's the right approach. if we want to stay ahead of the game, then there are plenty of areas where we can put $$$ in and get $$$ out.

batteries - lithium, environmental friendly options, other?

fabrication technologies - Cal has their own fab now, which is huge. the possibility of expanding the thoughts on how we develop silicon is the next step into our digital expansion.

software utilization - we haven't had a major step forward in software development since RISC became popular in the early 90s (or object-oriented design in the mid-90s, but I'm thinking of what it breaks down into). i'd love to have people rethink how we develop SW as it's the most cumbersome portion of the design cycle for most companies.

and that's just the digital tech field (which I am in, making it easier to point out obvious areas of need)

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“Katrina didn’t destroy New Orleans--the levees did,” he said. “What, we can’t hold back water? This is the twenty-first century? What is our problem?”

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This is not the focus of where you want this conversation to go but.. this speaks to the arrogance of scientists (not that there is anything wrong with a little arrogance) but NO, we cannot completely harness and insulate ourselves from nature. Sorry, ain't going to happen, not even with an infinite budget... and we've always had a finite budget which has the basic premise of "We are going to protect you up to this amount, if anything over that happens, you are on your own." That's the premise of the bridges and skyscrapers built in San Fran, the levees in New Orleans, the Hoover Dam, etc... none of them are infallable given the right confluence of natural events.

But it is the arrogant determination to overcome those obstacles that has been one of our leading sources of success in the past.. so I'm not totally against a bit of arrogance.. it was totally arrogant to say we would get to the moon when we did.. but we did it... the Manhattan project was an extremely aggressive and somewhat arrogant ambition that worked...

So let's see, the parts of this that I agree with.. we definitely need less global intervention into the affairs of other countries. We definitely need to be more frugal with our money putting it into things that actually have a chance to pay for themselves. But we don't need to triple the budget of NASA, we need to get private firms involved that will reap the reward of the advances they make toward the program... We definitely need to get kids interested in science again because it seems like every kid that I've seen in the last 15 years that was interested in "science" only wanted to focus on the computer technology side of it.. and that's only one small part.