October 17, 2025 • 50 mins
On this episode of The Middle, we're asking what role the government should play when it comes to science and scientific research. Jeremy is joined by astrophysicist, author and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson. DJ Tolliver joins as well, plus calls from around the country. #science #government #publiclife #Trump #RFKJr #HHS #innovation #research #funding
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Support for the Middle comes from the stations that air
the show and from you. Thanks for making a donation
at listen tooth the Middle dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Welcome to the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson, along with our
house DJ Tolliver and Taliver. We have a very special
guest this hour, the one and only astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson is with us to talk about the very important
role the US government plays in science. But I'm sure
that some of our listeners are going to want to
ask them about stuff like how fast the Earth spins,
so you can stockpile those questions for the end of
(00:36):
the hour toalvor.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
We're going to try to stay on topic before.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
That, and listen, we're taking questions from all over the galaxy. Okay,
that's right, getting me in quick, there's a line.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The farther away, the better. It turns out.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
The United States government is the largest funder of scientific
research on Earth, has been for decades, and much of
it goes out through grants to universities. Most scientific studies
at universities are funded at least in part directly or
indirect by the federal government, maybe the National Science Foundation
or the National Institute's of Health. But since President Trump
(01:07):
returned to the White House, he has been slashing scientific
research funding and has proposed cuts of more than fifty
percent at the National Science Foundation for next year, forty
percent at the NIH, almost twenty five percent at NASA.
Harvard's president Alan Garber says America's scientific edge is at risk.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but
it hurts the country because, after all, research funding is
given to carry out work that the federal government designates
his high priority work.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
President Trump has also placed noted skeptics of established science
in positions of power, like Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who
now leads the Department of Health and Human Services and
recently claimed that tail and all during pregnancy causes autism
and then claimed a link between circumcisions and autism.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Yeah, many many other confirmation studies. Oh one, there's two
studies that show children who are circumcised early have double
the red pologism. It's highly likely because they're given title.
So you know, none of this since it's positive of
all of it, stuff that we should be paying attention to.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now that's not what we're talking about this hour, but
do you trust him when he says that. So all
of this questions of trust in science, which took a
hit after the pandemic, and funding of science, brings us
to our question this hour, what should the government's role
be in science? Tolliver the number please.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
You can call us at eight four four four Middle,
that's eight four four four six four at three three
five three, or you can write to us at Listen
to the Middle dot com, or comment on our live
stream on YouTube. I'm checking them all, so get your
messages in four.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
For four and we are thrilled to be joined this
hour by Neil de Grass Tyson, astrophysicist and author of
the just about to be released book Just Visiting This Planet,
revised and updated for the twenty first century. Neil the
Grass Tyson, welcome back. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Yeah, thanks for having me. I very much embrace the
concept and mission of your show. Well, we appreciate that.
Keep checking.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Thank you so much. And let's start with the cuts.
The cuts to research have already been very big. They're
likely to get bigger next year if Trump gets his
way with the budget. What is at stake for ordinary
Americans who are listening right now. If there are big
cuts to scientific research in.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
The US, well, the scientific research that's getting cut is
of the kind that cannot, or rather would not be
done by corporations. Corporations have R and D, sure, but
that R and D has a very tight connection to
what might show up on their quarterly report or their
(03:45):
annual report. If not this year, then next year or
the year after. When you fund fundamental science, especially at
the university level, the return on that investment is many,
many years in the future, five, possibly ten or more.
And so when the government supports that level of research,
(04:05):
it is looking out for its long term interest, not
only as a scientific leader of the world. Maybe you
don't care about whether you lead in science, okay, but
I know everyone cares about our economic health. And investments
in science and technology, especially science at the foundational level,
are the engines of tomorrow's economy. So it's basically knocking
(04:31):
out the future economic health of the country at its kneecaps.
And you won't see that for a few more years.
Is the problem?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well, and how did the government become so dominant in
funding scientific research?
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And should it be that way?
Speaker 7 (04:47):
Well? I will never say what should or shouldn't be
where the democracy, or at least a republic, people vote
for who they want in office. So as an educator,
my task, I see is to educate and enlighten the
electorate so that when they do vote, they make an
informed decision about their president and future of their governance.
(05:09):
So I'm not going to ever say what shut or
should I'm going to tell you to fund NASA. If
you don't want to fund NASA, don't fund NASA, but
I will tell you the consequences of not funding it,
and then you make the decision. So the the uh,
these cuts are what I what I foresee is uh. Well,
(05:29):
holding aside the fact that I have colleagues, for example,
we've gotten phone calls from Europe saying, we understand you
just lost your funding. We'll create a lab for you
over here, We'll fund it. And so this is the
beginning of what could be a rather devastating brain drain
on the American scientific elite. And by the way, you know,
(05:54):
maybe what goes around comes around, because we spent decades,
decades attracted the brightest people from all the other countries
of the world. When I was in graduate school many
moons ago, half of my graduating class were foreign nationals,
and because people came here because, as you correctly noted,
we were leaders in science. As that fades and as
(06:17):
other countries rise up, especially China, take a look at
the growth of China's economy just in the last fifteen years,
what they have done to secure that, and what their
investments are to ensure that they maintain it. Point is
that this began basically after the Second World War. There
(06:37):
was a report to President Truman from vana Vera Bush.
I don't know if he's related to the Bushes that
came later, but he was basically the United States's first
science advisor, and he wrote an extraordinary document. I can't
overstate its importance and value. It should be in the
(06:57):
National Archives next to the Deck of Independence and the
Constitution because it is so fundamental to what we became
as a nation in the second half of of the
twentieth century. And it's called Science the Endless Frontier. You
can look it up online, Science the Endless Frontier. You
just look at line by line and it says science
(07:19):
in the interest of our health, Science as an engine
to grow the economy, science to you know, vaccines to
keep us health health security science in the role of security,
and it deeply understood that value to the extent that
the electorate does not, we will recede on the world stage.
(07:42):
It's not a cliff that you walk over and fall down.
It's this sort of slope. You know. The Europeans well.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And I just read by the way that China's spending
on scientific research and development is set to outpace the
United States by twenty twenty seven at the current rate.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Yeah, surprised that hasn't already happened. And twenty twenty seven
is not far into the future. So so again, you know,
is it a spending race? You know, I don't want
to have to think about it that way. Who spends
the most money wins, you know, it's in the end,
it's innovation, it's you know, So I want to keep
it broader than just who's spending the most money, although
(08:20):
that is the most blunt measure of all of this,
of course, so that that's the starter measure. So so
I'm concerned about the future of the United States. We
will just have to dance to the tune set by
other countries. But many people alive today that's not what
they're accustomed to. The accustomed to other people knocking on
(08:41):
our doors. Okay, well looking over our fence, what if
you guys up to now? You know? Can we have
some of that too well?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And Trump has explained these cuts by saying that things
so far in terms of federal government funding of scientific
research haven't been transparent. He cites, for example, that teachers,
you unions had an effect on masking guidance during the pandemic,
rather than it being a purely scientific recommendation. A lot
of what we're talking about here in the politics of
(09:10):
it has to do with COVID and how many Americans
reacted to scientific guidance during that What do you say
to that would would the scientific community have done anything
differently knowing now what the reaction has been.
Speaker 7 (09:22):
Well, those are two separable variables. We can all complain
about how COVID was handled by the government and mask
or no mask, or washer wash the surfaces or not.
And I can comment on that if you'd like. In fact,
I'm executive producer on a documentary called Shot in the Arm.
Who's the principal a director executive producer on that is
(09:45):
Scott Hamilton Kennedy. I think it's available on PBS channels
online if you can dig for it. But in there
it's actually a sensitive look at people who were duped
to becoming vaccine hesitant, and it's a very sincere and
honest look that whole world and how that unfolded and
(10:10):
what one would need to do about it so that
it doesn't happen again. So that's a separable variable from
cutting NASA Science by fifty percent or or cutting you know,
the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation was founded
based on the recommendations from the Endless Frontier document and
(10:30):
I forgot nineteen forty six, nineteen forty seven, and so
so it is that engine of funding. Knowing that universities
are the place where that would happen. You can't get
corporations to do research that will pay paid dividends in
ten years. That's not going to happen. And if the
federal government doesn't do it, nobody will do it. And
you can't expect to invent the future just on how
(10:54):
clever your tech tech bros are in their R and
D departments. Okay, they will get you only so far.
Only so far do you realize the entire it the
entire IT sector thrives No, it doesn't thrive. It exists
because of an because of their ability to exploit the quantum.
(11:17):
Quantum physics. We're in the centennial decade of the discovery
of quantum physics, discovered by physicists who had no idea
it would be the foundation of the right the creation, storage,
and retrieval of digital information.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
It's the basic science that the federal government funds. Toliver,
we talked about a vaccine hesitancy. The backlash to the
medical establishment and the COVID vaccine has spread to other
vaccines now in some places.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
Yeah, take Florida for example, whose Surgeon General Joseph Fladoppo
recently announced that the state is working to end all
vaccine mandates.
Speaker 8 (11:48):
The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governors,
is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates
in Florida.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Lack all of them, all of.
Speaker 8 (12:00):
Them, every last one of them, every last one of them,
every last one of them is wrong and drips with
disdain and and slavery.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Tolliver, your thoughts, Oh man, I'm dumbfounded.
Speaker 7 (12:19):
You don't have this happens. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We'll be right back with your calls. For Neil the
grass Tyson coming up on the Middle.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
This is the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
If you're just tuning in the Middle as a national
call in show, we're focused on elevating voices from the
middle geographically, politically, philosophically, or maybe you just want to
meet in the middle. This hour, we're asking you what
should the government's role be in science? Tolliver, what is
the number to call in?
Speaker 4 (12:44):
It's eight four four four Middle.
Speaker 7 (12:45):
That's eight four four four six four three three five three.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
You can also write to us at Listen to the
Middle dot com or on social media. And I got
to tell you they're coming in fast and hot, so
get yours in. I'll get you in the air.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
And we're joined by astrophysicist Neil de grass Tyson, and
there are some call waiting to talk to you, Neil,
But just before we do that, I want to ask
you it's not just the COVID vaccines that there have
been trust issues with. There's also artificial intelligence, green energy,
genetically modified foods. Is there anything different about some level
of mistrust in kind of new technologies and new scientific advancements? Now,
(13:20):
then it points in the past and human history when
there was always kind of a level of distrust of
the new.
Speaker 7 (13:26):
Yeah, I don't have a silver bullet answer for that.
What I do know that is online, if you post
a video that says the experts are wrong and they're
withholding this information from you, I have the actual answer.
And here it is. That's clickbait. So the revenue model
(13:50):
for producing content online thrives on conflict. And if everybody's
just agreed, people would be making less money because people
are less aggravated, they're less angered, they're less motivated to
keep clicking on things that make them angry. So that
could be a factor here about AI. Sure we would
(14:13):
need some guardrails, but AI has been around for quite
a while. It's been in the scientific field, certainly in
the physical sciences for quite some time. It only achieved
great visibility when it could write your term paper and
could do your art project. But prior to that, and
it's with us to stay so to say, AI as
(14:34):
though it's the thing that has to be controlled. At
some point, we need more nuanced vocabulary about the ways
in which AI is touching our lives and decide when
and where any guardrails are necessary and how to establish them.
But to say we've got to stop all AI, then
we can't analyze the data from our large the telescope
(14:58):
that's producing the largest quantity of data of any telescope
we've ever had, which just came online. So the Vera
Ruben telescope is taking movies of the nice guy to
watch for asteroids that could be hazardous to us. That
data is fully analyzed, process redoubled, something interesting is found.
All that's by AI. So I'm not going to say
(15:19):
stop AI. Let's have a more nuanced conversation about that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Let's go to Dan, who's in Kansas City, Missouri. Dan,
go ahead for Neil de Grasse Tyson.
Speaker 9 (15:30):
Good evening. I am totally in favor of a very
robust government front funding structure through government institutions and universities
for funding science and research, especially if it's in the
national interest, hard sciences with real world applications. It needs
(15:50):
to be efficient because we have seen, you know, every
time they're going through the budget there's these studies that
are just laughably absurd, and we know we really the
people really want to trust. We need to be able
to trust our public officials and credential scientists in universities
as well. But we have to admit that there's been
(16:12):
a lot of failures as well, like the food pyramid,
that's aldos. We should eat six servings of wonderbread today.
All of the drugs that have been approved and then
had to be recalled because they're dangerous. You still see
ads to this day, and many of the regulators, you know,
to go back and forth between the government working for
the pharmaceutical industry. There's been a lot of climate change
(16:35):
predictions that have come and went and didn't happen. Race
is a social construct. It's like, well popular you want
to call it population groups, that's fine, that's just a
you know, semantic thing.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, well, you've given a lot of examples there that
we get your point. Dan, Let me let me ask
Neil Degrassis and what do you think about that? How
do you respond to Dan that you know, in all
the funding that goes out there, there are some things
that a President Trump or whoever could point to and
say this is a ridiculous waste of money.
Speaker 7 (17:04):
Yeah, you can't do that. Well, so you can if
you choose. But because science on the frontier will have
app history has shown will have applications that are not
entirely obvious at the time the research is occurring. You
can't say that I'll only fund this if it has
it can if it can serve national interests. You do
(17:27):
not know that at the time the research is being conducted.
That's the example I gave with the research into quantum physics.
At a time no one is thinking about molecules or
atoms or nuclei, and an entire branch of physics unfolds funded.
But much of that was done by universities. But it
unfolds and has applications fifty years later. Okay, you cannot
(17:51):
pass that judgment if the project is exploring something on
a frontier that's not previously known or understood. That's the
whole point of pure science. To sit around and say, well,
let's put food on my plate. What's the relevance of that.
My physics professor in college, who studied nuclei in gas
(18:12):
clouds across the galaxy, you can say, how does that
relate to anything? He discovered a phenomenon in the nucleus
of atoms called nuclear magnetic resonance that would later be
turned into a magnetic resonance imager. The MRI arguably the
most potent tool in the arsenal of the medical community.
(18:33):
Without cutting you open first and so to stay you
can't pass that judgment. Okay, So that's my first point. Second,
science needs to be taught not as a satchel of
information that is unerring and unmovable. It needs to be
taught as a means of querying nature. And how do
(18:55):
you answer those queries that you pose upon nature? You
conduct research that then gets verified by others, okay, And
when it gets verified multiple times, ideally by a competitor,
then it becomes objective truths about how the world works.
And then you move on to the next problem. So
to say, the scientists set a food pyramid and then
(19:18):
there's no then that okay, what should have happened there?
Is they needed to say, is this food pyramid that
we're about to propose verified by other studies? Okay? And
if it is, but they still want to get it
out there, that's okay. Otherwise nothing would ever get released.
And so but you have to understand that it could vary,
(19:41):
it could be adjusted. That's the moving frontier of science.
And with a novel virus, the coronavirus, a novel virus.
There wasn't much data on it. When you have something
that's not much data, what do you go on? So
what they should have done was say, here's this week's
update on what how we think you should react to
(20:01):
this virus. Stay tuned because research is coming in weekly
and we will update that in that way. You're not
running around stay sciences, We're wrong. Why should I ever
believe anything you say. That's the wrong way to think
about the moving frontier.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Well, and by the way, right now, even the Trump
administration is saying one of the things they want to
do is release drugs faster from the FDA because maybe
it will help the person who has cancer right now
and wants to take the trial drug even if it
hasn't gone through the full process yet. Cynthia is calling
from Sartel, Minnesota. Cynthia, go ahead with your thoughts.
Speaker 10 (20:36):
Thank you. First of all, thank you for this show.
It's a wonderful format. I wanted to respond to the
comment on brain drain. It's not just all people who
already hold doctorates. I'm a molecular biologist. I would not
have received my training contributed to carte development and other
(20:58):
cancer treatments if I had not received funding from the
government to allow me to do that work. The academic
labs cannot survive in the current model without government funding,
So you have the double attack on the Department of
Education NSF ni H. I personally had a do D fellowship,
(21:23):
So I'm concerned at both ends. If you want to
do science, you may have to leave, But if you
want to do science, you might never get the opportunity.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
Cynthia, thank you for that, for that, Thanks for that
firsthand view on what's going on here. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, Brett is calling from to Tonia, Idaho. Brett, go
ahead with your thoughts.
Speaker 11 (21:50):
Well, my thoughts were just and this for doctor Tyson
is that in this time of partisanship, and the question
that I post was about the federal government, but would
this not be maybe a time where we asked that
the federal government isn't who is participating in this, and
(22:10):
would that we try to get the private sector to
help advance science more because the partisanship involved in politics
these days, nothing gets done, what goes forward gets reversed,
what goes forward gets reversed.
Speaker 7 (22:26):
Yeah, so the partisanship is odd because science had not
historically been partisan. Consider I have a whole series of
posts to social media between March and May. No sorry,
between March and the end of May that explored the
fact that Republican leadership in the twentieth century was responsible
(22:47):
for huge increases in the science budget. So this is
highly unusual for these reductions in science funding to come
out under Republican leadership. And I tried to give these
as examples and not even make it partisan in the
sense that well, Democrats did this, you should do No,
I said, your own party have supported science mightily in
(23:08):
the past. I tried to make that case. I don't
know who looked or who paid attention to it. The
private sector, you have the private sector when they're investors
in a capitalist system where there's shareholders, where there's a
return on investment that is expected or even required for
in the decisions they make. They're not going to get
(23:30):
a return on the investment for five or ten years.
We'd have to remodel what a corporate structure looks like
to have a time horizon that is not the quarterly
report of the annual report. And I don't see that
forthcoming right now. And by the way, when the federal
government makes these investments it pays dividends later because whole
(23:51):
industries get built, people get hired into those industries and
they pay taxes. So that's what keeps the government healthy
and the growth of our of our a GDP per
capita over the decades. Oh my gosh, just take a
plauted and that doesn't come from nothing, and it doesn't
come just from companies that are making more money than
(24:13):
have ever been made before. It comes from foundational research.
In a way, it's behind the curtain. You don't see
that because it's happening in universities and they don't have
PR campaigns, they don't have TV ads, they don't have
you know, you know, the CEO making speeches about the
fundamental research that just doesn't happen. So I worry the
(24:35):
fact that it's this hidden yet so fundamental that the
public thinks it's not relevant and we can get rid
of it and save money for having done so.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Tolliver, what is coming in online on social media and
at listen to the middle dot com.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
Yeah, I'll get a few of these in.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Mickey says, I can't begin to imagine the conversation between
the staff and NAH and patients chosen for clinical trials
finding out it has been shut down. Lousing Grand Rapids
says because of my parents' religion, I wasn't vaccinated and
had measles at twenty seven. It was the sickest I've
ever been in my life. I love science, which I
thought was an optumist to that. Colin and Boise says,
(25:12):
scientific research represents the greatest of our species coming together
and sharing the best part of our humanity. Star Trek
isn't just a fantasy. We've only seen the barest of
our vast potential as a species. Optimism.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Yes, the optimism is good.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
The lines are fully lit up. So let me get
to another caller here, Sarah, I was in Houston, Texas. Hi, Sarah,
go ahead, Hi.
Speaker 12 (25:36):
I wanted to talk about that from a perspective of
women's health and people feeling trust in science visi as
our doctors. Because I had a pretty rare condition called
hypoplemic amenerya. I had to go to multiple doctors, who
I think a lot of people again, that's their interaction
with science in a lot of cases, right is the
medical science that's being done. And I had an experienced
(25:57):
that kind of undermined my own trust, not science itself
because it was reading medical articles from experts on this
condition that helped me understand what was impacting me. But
I'll be sitting with my doctor, and more than one
doctor told me made statements that I knew were demonstrably false,
right because I had read the studies, I knew what
was actually out there. And I think there's this tension
(26:19):
sometimes that maybe has led to a loss of trust
with public health officials or doctors. They are thinking about
the population more as an aggregate, right, They're thinking about
kind of the average person and what kind of care
that they need. And I know why they're doing that
because doctors have so little time, they need more resources.
But I think that once someone had that experience, even
(26:39):
though again it was science that helped me find the
answer to the problem which is no longer affecting me.
Speaker 10 (26:45):
It did hurt my trust and it did make me question.
Speaker 12 (26:48):
Sometimes, okay, this skinis or doctor, are they dumbing this
down because they think that I don't have the capacity
to understand this problem. And again my issue was resolved
that it was only because I took things into my
own hand, And so I feel this tension where it
was the scientific journals I read that I was able
to access that that let me solve the problem. And
yet I have this skepticism now that I can't fully
(27:10):
trust what's being told to me by a scientific communicator
or I do extensive research myself.
Speaker 7 (27:15):
Yeah, did you call Did you call this article to
the attention of your doctor?
Speaker 12 (27:21):
You know, at the time, I doubted myself too much,
and it wasn't the kind of relationship I had with
my doctor where I felt that he wanted to I
tried to push back a little bit, and I was
kind of shut down.
Speaker 7 (27:35):
Mm hmmm, hmm. Yeah. The medical profession is notorious, at
least historically for for just you know, keeping their own
their own lexicon among themselves and not just dumbing it
down to you, but to just do what I say
because I know what I'm doing and you don't. So
there was a lot of that. I'd like to think
that there's a generation of doctors that don't suffer from that,
(27:59):
from that distance that they put themselves to their patients.
But so you are a case where you found a solution.
The question is how many people who maybe did the
same thing you did and believed they knew more than
their doctor, but they didn't yet still pulled away from
their doctor. And so you know, the testimonies that we
(28:23):
hear are from people where it has worked for them,
where it has not worked, or rather where the doctor's
advice was the right advice is surely the overwhelming majority
of all cases. And so at what point do you say,
my case makes me doubt all doctors, or my case
makes me doubt this person who is getting paid to
(28:46):
be a doctor in front of me. I guess that's
the point that that's the crux here. There's the individual case,
and there's whether you're now going to not trust anything
in your whole life. And that would be tragic if
that were a consequence of this one unfortanate ned incident.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I'm going to do something I shouldn't do, which I'm
going to try to sneak in one quick thought from
a caller, John, with very little time, John in Tallahassee, Florida,
Go ahead, very quickly.
Speaker 13 (29:12):
Okay. The current administration has been concerned about imbalance of trade,
but the US has had a huge intellectual imbalance in
the opposite direction for decades, where many of the world's smartest,
hardest working scientists and new graduate students have come into
the United States, almost none have left. That is, up
(29:32):
until recently, our economy has been heavily tech based. But
with this shutting down of research, charging one hundred thousand
dollars a year for an H one B visa, which
is for the highly skilled workers, it's shutting off this
flow of some of the world's best talent to charge
the US economy. And now there's even some flux going
(29:55):
out of the United States where they're seeking better opportunities.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
So you've got to you've got a trade deficit, but
a scientist surplus. We've got to just pause right there,
because Tolliver, we've been talking about some of the great
inventions that have come out of scientific research.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
GPS is one of them.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Listen here to this old Kgan Cedar Rapids news clip
from nineteen eighty seven about the early adoption of GPS.
Speaker 14 (30:18):
It's called the Global Positioning System or GPS. By using
satellites and this receiver system, the military and private users
will be able to know more precisely where they are.
Air Force Colonel Gaylor Green, who was in Coralville today
to accept the first unit, says it will be very
helpful for nighttime military maneuvers and in situations where position
(30:40):
is simply difficult to determine.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
The military When they had recent deployment to Egypt, the
maps didn't help.
Speaker 15 (30:47):
Them very much.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I have to say, I have a terrible sense of direction,
and therefore i need GPS all the time, whether I'm
in the Sahara Desert or just in a grid street situation.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Ringing in the Sahara Desert.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I mean, I'm not just that he was mentioning the
Shara Desert. Anyway, We'll be back with more of your
calls in a minute.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
On the Middle.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
This is the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This hour we're
asking you what should the government's role be in science?
You can call us at eight four four four Middle.
That's eight four four four six four three three five three.
You can also reach out at Listen to the Middle
dot com. I'm joined by astrophysicist Neil de grass Tyson
and in the final segment of the show here later on.
If you have just crazy questions about science for Neil
de grass Tyson, you may now commence those calls.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Let's go right back to Josh in Columbia, South Carolina Josh, Uh,
go ahead for another Grass Tyson.
Speaker 16 (31:38):
Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. What an honor
to speak to both of you, gentlemen. I just was
wanting to make a comment regarding what doctor Tyson talked
about earlier, with research being something that we don't necessarily
know in the time now of the value that we
(32:00):
may have later on.
Speaker 15 (32:01):
Uh.
Speaker 16 (32:02):
My my wife is a Seramesis. She does pottery and art,
and she's made this point to me regarding art the
same way, where you don't understand the value of it
until it's there, you know, until you actually have have
it there and you can you can appreciate it. And
I think that's something that our country is kind of
(32:23):
missing as well. And it's I've never seen the linkage
between science and art, but that's that's something that really
kind of sparked my imagination. The other point I was
going to make was, uh, the communications of the common man,
I think is one thing that that we've disenfranchised a
lot of our people here in this country.
Speaker 17 (32:43):
Uh.
Speaker 16 (32:44):
And in order for them to understanding and I, you know,
i'd like to hear what doctor Tyson has to to
say about that, or if he has any thoughts.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah, thanks Josh.
Speaker 7 (32:54):
Yeah. A first comment about art. So art, so much
of great art in the country and even in the
world has been sort of publicly supported, all right. Generally
the opera house in your hometown or the symphony is
not entirely funded by ticket sales, and so there's typically
some kind of resources that come from a tax base
(33:16):
to support it because a county, a region, estate values
the role of art in a cultured society. Another way
to say that, however, is you can imagine a country
that had no art in it. You can build such
a country and it could have a booming economy because
(33:39):
it's got its tech driven and farming or whatever, or
the big financial sectors. But is that a country you'd
want to live in. That's what you have to ask yourself.
And the art is what enables us to celebrate what
it is to be human. The creativity through the lens
of an artist is something that we have valued throughout time.
(34:02):
When people go to Europe, they don't just look at
the mountains, they go to the art museums, right, That's
that's the huge tourist attraction where people go to France
or London or any place where that has been a
cultural history in their in their nation. So so art
should be fully defensible on its own right if you
(34:23):
just pause and think about it. H Now, with regard
to people, I think I understood the second second half
of the question.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
I think communication to the common man of science maybe
that it's it's hard for some people to understand it.
Speaker 7 (34:38):
Yeah, so it so in science that to become to
get a PhD in science, you are not trained to
communicate with anybody other than colleagues in the language of
your field. So that's a problem. That's a real problem,
especially since shucksters who are out there have a charisma
that scienceists generally don't have. And so we're trying to
(35:01):
offer the science and people who are Charlottan's or peddlers
of anti science sentiment, they have huge platforms and they're
charismatic and they're saying, the scientists are telling you this,
but I have the truth. Again, that's huge clickbait. So
it's a problem. Yes, they have it, and it might
(35:22):
feel who laid a lot of groundwork for what it
was to reach out and bring that frontier of science
to the public. We have a long way to go.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Isaac is calling from Sandford, North Carolina. Isaac, what do
you think about the government's role in science.
Speaker 18 (35:41):
I believe that you should most definitely fund science because
it's necessary. I was doing research in artificial intelligence at
HBCU and it got stopped and my lead professor put
his foot down and basically said, no, we're not going
to go with this, and he got most of the
research funding is pretty instated, of like eighty percent of it,
(36:04):
but without that, we don't go forward.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
So yeah, so you but you had to stop it temporarily.
Speaker 18 (36:11):
Yeah, it's like, so a couple of projects got stopped
or the ones that could go forward they went forward,
but the ones that still need more money they didn't
go with those anymore.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
Yeah, and you're directly affected by this, and so you're
a voice that is a first hand account. So what
we need are people who are not whose funding was
not cut because they don't get any funding at all
because they're not scientists, still understand the importance of this.
It can't just be scientists, you know, begging for money,
because it is in the national interest that the country
(36:45):
does science and everybody needs to know and be behind that.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, let's get to another one. Uh, Eric is in Houston.
Speaker 19 (36:56):
Eric, go ahead, Hey, great, thanks for taking on my call.
I guess my opinion is a little bit different from
those that have been talking previously, But I think that
there should be a wall between science when it comes
to science driven by government and science driven by industry.
(37:23):
I think industry plays a huge role in the direction
that science takes in government. And I guess when I
say government, I'm talking about our institutions, our educational institutions.
For the most part, three things have shaped that opinion
of mine over the last few years. One was the
(37:48):
COVID vaccine and the CDC's response in implementing it. My
family and I had previously gotten COVID recovered from it,
and I'm looking to see something educated come out from
the CDC.
Speaker 20 (38:06):
And what do I see? What they tell me about,
you know, the immunity that I acquired. They told me
that that I still needed to go get a shot.
And that works against decades and decades of precedents that
the CDC had previously. And I lost a lot of
(38:27):
respect for them because billions of dollars goes into the CDC.
That is an enormous organization, and for them to just
come out and say, oh, well, go get the shot
that told me that that they spent no time in researching,
(38:49):
despite the billions and despite all the people in their organization,
they spent no time thinking about, well, what kind of
immunity does this covid in part on those that have
gone through it.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Okay, so Eric, let let's let's let nil deGrasse Tyson
in here to respond to what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
Thank you so much for the call.
Speaker 7 (39:11):
Yeah, there's a lot going on there. For example, there
was a rate at which COVID was mutating in the population,
and to the extent to which it mutates into a
slightly different variant of itself will affect the potency of
your either naturally acquired immunity from having obtained from having
had COVID or from any previous vaccine. That's why there
(39:34):
have been multiple vaccines over the years. When we tracked
there was the Omega variant of COVID and some other
Greek letters in there as well, and we were able
to track where it came from, where it started. So
I think people, and it's not anyone's fault because no
one is trained to think about science this way, and
the CDC. I think could have done a better job
(39:56):
communicating what was going on and why. But when you
have a novel virus and you don't have decades of
prior data on how the thing behaves, then you want
to be cautious about it and lest you catch it
again and die and say, how come you didn't tell
(40:17):
me to take the vaccine. So this is the this
is the balancing act that occurs on that moving frontier.
But I think it could have been alleviated by wiser
communication between the agencies and the public. And I knew
that while it was happening. This is not just hindsight,
because I communicate science. It's what I do. So so
I was disappointed in what I saw as that unfolded.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, Tulliver, do you think it's time for the fun questions?
Speaker 17 (40:42):
Now?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, I'd say, Okay, Frank is calling in from Boston.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Frank, go ahead with a fun question.
Speaker 21 (40:51):
Hey, whoa whoa? Yeah, yes, so yes, Sir Nicholas Telsa,
he had an instance where he was experiment know something
and he said, they're doing that experiment experiment he was content, Well,
he heard voices coming from out of space, and anybody
tried to recreate and exactly find out what he was
(41:13):
doing and that maybe he wasn't crazy.
Speaker 20 (41:17):
Uh.
Speaker 7 (41:17):
Okay, So either he was hearing.
Speaker 21 (41:21):
A good one, right, Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 7 (41:24):
A couple of things, A couple of things. So either
he was hearing voices just in his own head and
thought they were from outer space. This has happened many
times in the history of our species. Uh. And there
are people in the street who having conversations without even
earplugs in, who having conversations with you don't know who,
(41:44):
voices in their head or aliens were talking to him. Okay,
that's what I'm confronted with here. So we all want
the alien, we love the aliens, but at some point
you have to say, what is the more likely explanation
for what's happening here now? Tesla, by the way, he's
got a huge fan base to this day because people
(42:06):
some think he was wronged, people think that you know
that he was suppressed or whatever. I want you to know.
He's fully known and honored in the field of physics.
There's even a unit of magnetic field density named after him.
It's called the Tesla. Okay, so he's not unrecognized in
our field. But we had to cherry pick what he
(42:27):
did that was helpful and useful versus the more fringy
things that he experimented with. And I all take nothing
against him on his fringy work. You know, it takes
a little bit of that to do the real stuff. Back, well,
I need a little bit of crazy to do something
that no one has done before. We're all fans of Tesla.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
I wonder what he thinks would think though of the
bumper stickers now that say my Tesla identifies as a prius.
Speaker 7 (42:58):
Yeah, the man predates the car.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yes, Claire is calling in from Madison, Wisconsin.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Claire, what do you think.
Speaker 17 (43:07):
Hi, Jeremy. I want to ask doctor Tyson. I know
two people that honestly believe the Earth is flat. What
would doctor Tyson say to them to convince them? Oh?
Speaker 7 (43:20):
Yes, thank you for that. And and you know, we
live in a free country and you can think, believe,
and say what you want provided it doesn't harm others.
And so so there's plenty of jobs for you if
you think the world is flat, okay, where where knowledge
that Earth is round won't matter to your earning credibilities.
(43:44):
Kyrie Irving an NBA basketball player, like a basketball player
I last Rememberies in Celtics got traded a couple of times.
He was a big supporter of flat Earth. Well, basketball
courts are flat, so round Earth will have no consequence
to his earning potential. I don't chase down such people.
Part of me thinks it's a conspiracy so that they
(44:06):
all get sent into space first without having to pay
for it because it's so annoying. We'll get them to
see Earth firsthand as a spear, and then they come back. Okay,
now I believe you, and they got a free ride
for having done so. But yeah, I can't. There's a
limit to how much time I can spend arguing with
them in a free country. Let them keep thinking it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
By the way, Jeff Bezos of Amazon recently said he
thinks there will be millions of people living in space
in the next couple decades.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 7 (44:34):
Not in the least. Not in the least. There has
to be motivation to do that, and space is so
hostile to human physiology that to save us ship a
million people there in any amount of time, it's just
not I don't see that. By the way, in nineteen
eighty five, there was a prediction in the year two thousand,
(44:54):
fifty thousand people will be living and working in space.
That was the prediction in nineteen eighty five, all right,
and you know how many people were living and working
in space in the year two thousand three on board.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
The space station.
Speaker 7 (45:07):
So the dream, I don't mind dream states, go ahead,
dream it. But at some point there's a reality check
on these expectations. And so I don't see that happening
because the motivation to do so other than we're explorers
and we're discoveries and it's the next thing to do.
Somebody's got to write the check and he could probably
do it, Bezos, But it would be like a vanity project.
(45:29):
It wouldn't be some native state of humanity going into
the future.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Nathan is calling from Berrier, Kentucky. Nathan, go ahead from
neither Grass Tyson hid.
Speaker 15 (45:40):
Doctor Tyson. You were mentioned in Kelly and Zach Wiener
Smith's new book A City on Mars as being your
proponent for settling space to decrease the existential risk of
humanity being wiped out, and they said it would bring
(46:02):
about it would be more likely to bring about war
on Earth than the cooperation we've seen on like the
iss or mirror. How do you how do you think
about what living off world would bring for us on
Earth if it were lots and lots of people.
Speaker 7 (46:22):
Great question. So first, thanks for telling me that I
didn't know I was in the novel a b. My
views are the opposite of that. So the notion that
we should be a multiplanet species to reduce the existential
risk of a killer virus or an asteroid or climate
(46:43):
change or whatever that makes a good headline. Carl Sagan
was a big fan of that. Elon Musk wants to
move to once half of us to be on Mars
for that to mitigate that risk. All I'm saying is,
but I want to be a multiplanet species as well,
but not for that reason. It would be fun to
be able to just visit Mars, but I'd want to
(47:05):
come back. I'd be fun to visit Mars or terraform
Mars and go and hang out there. I don't have
a problem with that. But I would do it because
that's cool, not because we will split the species so
that in act. Think about it. Whatever it takes. You
know what kind of geoengineering it takes to terraform Mars,
think about it. Whatever it takes to terraform Mars ship
(47:26):
a million people there, it's gotta be easier to deflect
the asteroid that's headed towards Earth. That's all I'm saying here. Okay,
whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a million people, Okay,
it's got to be easier to find the super serum
to cure any virus that arises, Okay in the medical community,
(47:49):
given what that investment would be. So I don't see
it as a thing to save the species. And even so,
even if you did have two species and an asteroid
were coming, you're just gonna let a whole half the
species die. Really no, you're going to try to stop it.
So it's it makes good bar talk and it's clickbait,
(48:10):
but I don't see it now. In terms of peace
on Earth, there are treaties about our conduct in space.
There's the original Our Space Treaty in nineteen sixty seven.
There's the Artemis Accord that is American and China didn't
sign it, by the way, they have their own treaty
that they have with Russia and Venezuela and other sort
of like minded national interests. But in that accord, It
(48:33):
says we're all going to go into space and live
peacefully and share data and all be friends. Okay, And
so I say to myself, if we can be friends
in space, to be.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
Friends, you should be able to be friends on Earth.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
A perfect, a perfect note to end the hour on
the Grass sites and we have to leave it there.
That's astrophysicist Neil the Grass Tyson is just about to
be released. Book is called Just Visiting This Planet, revised
and updated for the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Such a great pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 7 (49:00):
Thank you so much, Thanks, thanks for all that interest
in your and your supporters out there. It's great.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Yes, and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. We've
got extra episodes every week available on the Middle podcast feed.
Next week we're going to be talking about the Supreme
Court and whether you trust it as it makes very
important decisions for the country.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
You can reach us at eight four four four Middle
that's eight four four four sixty four three five three,
or you can reach out at Listen to the Middle
dot com. Or you can also sign.
Speaker 7 (49:26):
Up for our free weekly newsletter.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
And just want to make a note this hour of
the passing of an icon in public radio and incredible talent,
without whom we probably would not be here right now.
A founding mother of NPR, Susan Stamberg, who has died
at the age of eighty seven. She showed all of
us in public radio how to do great radio by
being the human beings that we are. I am Jeremy Hobson,
(49:50):
and I will talk to you next week.
Speaker 15 (50:02):
Schools,
Support for the Middle comes from the stations that air
the show and from you. Thanks for making a donation
at listen tooth the Middle dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Welcome to the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson, along with our
house DJ Tolliver and Taliver. We have a very special
guest this hour, the one and only astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson is with us to talk about the very important
role the US government plays in science. But I'm sure
that some of our listeners are going to want to
ask them about stuff like how fast the Earth spins,
so you can stockpile those questions for the end of
(00:36):
the hour toalvor.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
We're going to try to stay on topic before.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
That, and listen, we're taking questions from all over the galaxy. Okay,
that's right, getting me in quick, there's a line.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The farther away, the better. It turns out.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
The United States government is the largest funder of scientific
research on Earth, has been for decades, and much of
it goes out through grants to universities. Most scientific studies
at universities are funded at least in part directly or
indirect by the federal government, maybe the National Science Foundation
or the National Institute's of Health. But since President Trump
(01:07):
returned to the White House, he has been slashing scientific
research funding and has proposed cuts of more than fifty
percent at the National Science Foundation for next year, forty
percent at the NIH, almost twenty five percent at NASA.
Harvard's president Alan Garber says America's scientific edge is at risk.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but
it hurts the country because, after all, research funding is
given to carry out work that the federal government designates
his high priority work.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
President Trump has also placed noted skeptics of established science
in positions of power, like Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who
now leads the Department of Health and Human Services and
recently claimed that tail and all during pregnancy causes autism
and then claimed a link between circumcisions and autism.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Yeah, many many other confirmation studies. Oh one, there's two
studies that show children who are circumcised early have double
the red pologism. It's highly likely because they're given title.
So you know, none of this since it's positive of
all of it, stuff that we should be paying attention to.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now that's not what we're talking about this hour, but
do you trust him when he says that. So all
of this questions of trust in science, which took a
hit after the pandemic, and funding of science, brings us
to our question this hour, what should the government's role
be in science? Tolliver the number please.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
You can call us at eight four four four Middle,
that's eight four four four six four at three three
five three, or you can write to us at Listen
to the Middle dot com, or comment on our live
stream on YouTube. I'm checking them all, so get your
messages in four.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
For four and we are thrilled to be joined this
hour by Neil de Grass Tyson, astrophysicist and author of
the just about to be released book Just Visiting This Planet,
revised and updated for the twenty first century. Neil the
Grass Tyson, welcome back. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Yeah, thanks for having me. I very much embrace the
concept and mission of your show. Well, we appreciate that.
Keep checking.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Thank you so much. And let's start with the cuts.
The cuts to research have already been very big. They're
likely to get bigger next year if Trump gets his
way with the budget. What is at stake for ordinary
Americans who are listening right now. If there are big
cuts to scientific research in.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
The US, well, the scientific research that's getting cut is
of the kind that cannot, or rather would not be
done by corporations. Corporations have R and D, sure, but
that R and D has a very tight connection to
what might show up on their quarterly report or their
(03:45):
annual report. If not this year, then next year or
the year after. When you fund fundamental science, especially at
the university level, the return on that investment is many,
many years in the future, five, possibly ten or more.
And so when the government supports that level of research,
(04:05):
it is looking out for its long term interest, not
only as a scientific leader of the world. Maybe you
don't care about whether you lead in science, okay, but
I know everyone cares about our economic health. And investments
in science and technology, especially science at the foundational level,
are the engines of tomorrow's economy. So it's basically knocking
(04:31):
out the future economic health of the country at its kneecaps.
And you won't see that for a few more years.
Is the problem?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well, and how did the government become so dominant in
funding scientific research?
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And should it be that way?
Speaker 7 (04:47):
Well? I will never say what should or shouldn't be
where the democracy, or at least a republic, people vote
for who they want in office. So as an educator,
my task, I see is to educate and enlighten the
electorate so that when they do vote, they make an
informed decision about their president and future of their governance.
(05:09):
So I'm not going to ever say what shut or
should I'm going to tell you to fund NASA. If
you don't want to fund NASA, don't fund NASA, but
I will tell you the consequences of not funding it,
and then you make the decision. So the the uh,
these cuts are what I what I foresee is uh. Well,
(05:29):
holding aside the fact that I have colleagues, for example,
we've gotten phone calls from Europe saying, we understand you
just lost your funding. We'll create a lab for you
over here, We'll fund it. And so this is the
beginning of what could be a rather devastating brain drain
on the American scientific elite. And by the way, you know,
(05:54):
maybe what goes around comes around, because we spent decades,
decades attracted the brightest people from all the other countries
of the world. When I was in graduate school many
moons ago, half of my graduating class were foreign nationals,
and because people came here because, as you correctly noted,
we were leaders in science. As that fades and as
(06:17):
other countries rise up, especially China, take a look at
the growth of China's economy just in the last fifteen years,
what they have done to secure that, and what their
investments are to ensure that they maintain it. Point is
that this began basically after the Second World War. There
(06:37):
was a report to President Truman from vana Vera Bush.
I don't know if he's related to the Bushes that
came later, but he was basically the United States's first
science advisor, and he wrote an extraordinary document. I can't
overstate its importance and value. It should be in the
(06:57):
National Archives next to the Deck of Independence and the
Constitution because it is so fundamental to what we became
as a nation in the second half of of the
twentieth century. And it's called Science the Endless Frontier. You
can look it up online, Science the Endless Frontier. You
just look at line by line and it says science
(07:19):
in the interest of our health, Science as an engine
to grow the economy, science to you know, vaccines to
keep us health health security science in the role of security,
and it deeply understood that value to the extent that
the electorate does not, we will recede on the world stage.
(07:42):
It's not a cliff that you walk over and fall down.
It's this sort of slope. You know. The Europeans well.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And I just read by the way that China's spending
on scientific research and development is set to outpace the
United States by twenty twenty seven at the current rate.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Yeah, surprised that hasn't already happened. And twenty twenty seven
is not far into the future. So so again, you know,
is it a spending race? You know, I don't want
to have to think about it that way. Who spends
the most money wins, you know, it's in the end,
it's innovation, it's you know, So I want to keep
it broader than just who's spending the most money, although
(08:20):
that is the most blunt measure of all of this,
of course, so that that's the starter measure. So so
I'm concerned about the future of the United States. We
will just have to dance to the tune set by
other countries. But many people alive today that's not what
they're accustomed to. The accustomed to other people knocking on
(08:41):
our doors. Okay, well looking over our fence, what if
you guys up to now? You know? Can we have
some of that too well?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And Trump has explained these cuts by saying that things
so far in terms of federal government funding of scientific
research haven't been transparent. He cites, for example, that teachers,
you unions had an effect on masking guidance during the pandemic,
rather than it being a purely scientific recommendation. A lot
of what we're talking about here in the politics of
(09:10):
it has to do with COVID and how many Americans
reacted to scientific guidance during that What do you say
to that would would the scientific community have done anything
differently knowing now what the reaction has been.
Speaker 7 (09:22):
Well, those are two separable variables. We can all complain
about how COVID was handled by the government and mask
or no mask, or washer wash the surfaces or not.
And I can comment on that if you'd like. In fact,
I'm executive producer on a documentary called Shot in the Arm.
Who's the principal a director executive producer on that is
(09:45):
Scott Hamilton Kennedy. I think it's available on PBS channels
online if you can dig for it. But in there
it's actually a sensitive look at people who were duped
to becoming vaccine hesitant, and it's a very sincere and
honest look that whole world and how that unfolded and
(10:10):
what one would need to do about it so that
it doesn't happen again. So that's a separable variable from
cutting NASA Science by fifty percent or or cutting you know,
the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation was founded
based on the recommendations from the Endless Frontier document and
(10:30):
I forgot nineteen forty six, nineteen forty seven, and so
so it is that engine of funding. Knowing that universities
are the place where that would happen. You can't get
corporations to do research that will pay paid dividends in
ten years. That's not going to happen. And if the
federal government doesn't do it, nobody will do it. And
you can't expect to invent the future just on how
(10:54):
clever your tech tech bros are in their R and
D departments. Okay, they will get you only so far.
Only so far do you realize the entire it the
entire IT sector thrives No, it doesn't thrive. It exists
because of an because of their ability to exploit the quantum.
(11:17):
Quantum physics. We're in the centennial decade of the discovery
of quantum physics, discovered by physicists who had no idea
it would be the foundation of the right the creation, storage,
and retrieval of digital information.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
It's the basic science that the federal government funds. Toliver,
we talked about a vaccine hesitancy. The backlash to the
medical establishment and the COVID vaccine has spread to other
vaccines now in some places.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
Yeah, take Florida for example, whose Surgeon General Joseph Fladoppo
recently announced that the state is working to end all
vaccine mandates.
Speaker 8 (11:48):
The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governors,
is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates
in Florida.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Lack all of them, all of.
Speaker 8 (12:00):
Them, every last one of them, every last one of them,
every last one of them is wrong and drips with
disdain and and slavery.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Tolliver, your thoughts, Oh man, I'm dumbfounded.
Speaker 7 (12:19):
You don't have this happens. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We'll be right back with your calls. For Neil the
grass Tyson coming up on the Middle.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
This is the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
If you're just tuning in the Middle as a national
call in show, we're focused on elevating voices from the
middle geographically, politically, philosophically, or maybe you just want to
meet in the middle. This hour, we're asking you what
should the government's role be in science? Tolliver, what is
the number to call in?
Speaker 4 (12:44):
It's eight four four four Middle.
Speaker 7 (12:45):
That's eight four four four six four three three five three.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
You can also write to us at Listen to the
Middle dot com or on social media. And I got
to tell you they're coming in fast and hot, so
get yours in. I'll get you in the air.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
And we're joined by astrophysicist Neil de grass Tyson, and
there are some call waiting to talk to you, Neil,
But just before we do that, I want to ask
you it's not just the COVID vaccines that there have
been trust issues with. There's also artificial intelligence, green energy,
genetically modified foods. Is there anything different about some level
of mistrust in kind of new technologies and new scientific advancements? Now,
(13:20):
then it points in the past and human history when
there was always kind of a level of distrust of
the new.
Speaker 7 (13:26):
Yeah, I don't have a silver bullet answer for that.
What I do know that is online, if you post
a video that says the experts are wrong and they're
withholding this information from you, I have the actual answer.
And here it is. That's clickbait. So the revenue model
(13:50):
for producing content online thrives on conflict. And if everybody's
just agreed, people would be making less money because people
are less aggravated, they're less angered, they're less motivated to
keep clicking on things that make them angry. So that
could be a factor here about AI. Sure we would
(14:13):
need some guardrails, but AI has been around for quite
a while. It's been in the scientific field, certainly in
the physical sciences for quite some time. It only achieved
great visibility when it could write your term paper and
could do your art project. But prior to that, and
it's with us to stay so to say, AI as
(14:34):
though it's the thing that has to be controlled. At
some point, we need more nuanced vocabulary about the ways
in which AI is touching our lives and decide when
and where any guardrails are necessary and how to establish them.
But to say we've got to stop all AI, then
we can't analyze the data from our large the telescope
(14:58):
that's producing the largest quantity of data of any telescope
we've ever had, which just came online. So the Vera
Ruben telescope is taking movies of the nice guy to
watch for asteroids that could be hazardous to us. That
data is fully analyzed, process redoubled, something interesting is found.
All that's by AI. So I'm not going to say
(15:19):
stop AI. Let's have a more nuanced conversation about that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Let's go to Dan, who's in Kansas City, Missouri. Dan,
go ahead for Neil de Grasse Tyson.
Speaker 9 (15:30):
Good evening. I am totally in favor of a very
robust government front funding structure through government institutions and universities
for funding science and research, especially if it's in the
national interest, hard sciences with real world applications. It needs
(15:50):
to be efficient because we have seen, you know, every
time they're going through the budget there's these studies that
are just laughably absurd, and we know we really the
people really want to trust. We need to be able
to trust our public officials and credential scientists in universities
as well. But we have to admit that there's been
(16:12):
a lot of failures as well, like the food pyramid,
that's aldos. We should eat six servings of wonderbread today.
All of the drugs that have been approved and then
had to be recalled because they're dangerous. You still see
ads to this day, and many of the regulators, you know,
to go back and forth between the government working for
the pharmaceutical industry. There's been a lot of climate change
(16:35):
predictions that have come and went and didn't happen. Race
is a social construct. It's like, well popular you want
to call it population groups, that's fine, that's just a
you know, semantic thing.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, well, you've given a lot of examples there that
we get your point. Dan, Let me let me ask
Neil Degrassis and what do you think about that? How
do you respond to Dan that you know, in all
the funding that goes out there, there are some things
that a President Trump or whoever could point to and
say this is a ridiculous waste of money.
Speaker 7 (17:04):
Yeah, you can't do that. Well, so you can if
you choose. But because science on the frontier will have
app history has shown will have applications that are not
entirely obvious at the time the research is occurring. You
can't say that I'll only fund this if it has
it can if it can serve national interests. You do
(17:27):
not know that at the time the research is being conducted.
That's the example I gave with the research into quantum physics.
At a time no one is thinking about molecules or
atoms or nuclei, and an entire branch of physics unfolds funded.
But much of that was done by universities. But it
unfolds and has applications fifty years later. Okay, you cannot
(17:51):
pass that judgment if the project is exploring something on
a frontier that's not previously known or understood. That's the
whole point of pure science. To sit around and say, well,
let's put food on my plate. What's the relevance of that.
My physics professor in college, who studied nuclei in gas
(18:12):
clouds across the galaxy, you can say, how does that
relate to anything? He discovered a phenomenon in the nucleus
of atoms called nuclear magnetic resonance that would later be
turned into a magnetic resonance imager. The MRI arguably the
most potent tool in the arsenal of the medical community.
(18:33):
Without cutting you open first and so to stay you
can't pass that judgment. Okay, So that's my first point. Second,
science needs to be taught not as a satchel of
information that is unerring and unmovable. It needs to be
taught as a means of querying nature. And how do
(18:55):
you answer those queries that you pose upon nature? You
conduct research that then gets verified by others, okay, And
when it gets verified multiple times, ideally by a competitor,
then it becomes objective truths about how the world works.
And then you move on to the next problem. So
to say, the scientists set a food pyramid and then
(19:18):
there's no then that okay, what should have happened there?
Is they needed to say, is this food pyramid that
we're about to propose verified by other studies? Okay? And
if it is, but they still want to get it
out there, that's okay. Otherwise nothing would ever get released.
And so but you have to understand that it could vary,
(19:41):
it could be adjusted. That's the moving frontier of science.
And with a novel virus, the coronavirus, a novel virus.
There wasn't much data on it. When you have something
that's not much data, what do you go on? So
what they should have done was say, here's this week's
update on what how we think you should react to
(20:01):
this virus. Stay tuned because research is coming in weekly
and we will update that in that way. You're not
running around stay sciences, We're wrong. Why should I ever
believe anything you say. That's the wrong way to think
about the moving frontier.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Well, and by the way, right now, even the Trump
administration is saying one of the things they want to
do is release drugs faster from the FDA because maybe
it will help the person who has cancer right now
and wants to take the trial drug even if it
hasn't gone through the full process yet. Cynthia is calling
from Sartel, Minnesota. Cynthia, go ahead with your thoughts.
Speaker 10 (20:36):
Thank you. First of all, thank you for this show.
It's a wonderful format. I wanted to respond to the
comment on brain drain. It's not just all people who
already hold doctorates. I'm a molecular biologist. I would not
have received my training contributed to carte development and other
(20:58):
cancer treatments if I had not received funding from the
government to allow me to do that work. The academic
labs cannot survive in the current model without government funding,
So you have the double attack on the Department of
Education NSF ni H. I personally had a do D fellowship,
(21:23):
So I'm concerned at both ends. If you want to
do science, you may have to leave, But if you
want to do science, you might never get the opportunity.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
Cynthia, thank you for that, for that, Thanks for that
firsthand view on what's going on here. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, Brett is calling from to Tonia, Idaho. Brett, go
ahead with your thoughts.
Speaker 11 (21:50):
Well, my thoughts were just and this for doctor Tyson
is that in this time of partisanship, and the question
that I post was about the federal government, but would
this not be maybe a time where we asked that
the federal government isn't who is participating in this, and
(22:10):
would that we try to get the private sector to
help advance science more because the partisanship involved in politics
these days, nothing gets done, what goes forward gets reversed,
what goes forward gets reversed.
Speaker 7 (22:26):
Yeah, so the partisanship is odd because science had not
historically been partisan. Consider I have a whole series of
posts to social media between March and May. No sorry,
between March and the end of May that explored the
fact that Republican leadership in the twentieth century was responsible
(22:47):
for huge increases in the science budget. So this is
highly unusual for these reductions in science funding to come
out under Republican leadership. And I tried to give these
as examples and not even make it partisan in the
sense that well, Democrats did this, you should do No,
I said, your own party have supported science mightily in
(23:08):
the past. I tried to make that case. I don't
know who looked or who paid attention to it. The
private sector, you have the private sector when they're investors
in a capitalist system where there's shareholders, where there's a
return on investment that is expected or even required for
in the decisions they make. They're not going to get
(23:30):
a return on the investment for five or ten years.
We'd have to remodel what a corporate structure looks like
to have a time horizon that is not the quarterly
report of the annual report. And I don't see that
forthcoming right now. And by the way, when the federal
government makes these investments it pays dividends later because whole
(23:51):
industries get built, people get hired into those industries and
they pay taxes. So that's what keeps the government healthy
and the growth of our of our a GDP per
capita over the decades. Oh my gosh, just take a
plauted and that doesn't come from nothing, and it doesn't
come just from companies that are making more money than
(24:13):
have ever been made before. It comes from foundational research.
In a way, it's behind the curtain. You don't see
that because it's happening in universities and they don't have
PR campaigns, they don't have TV ads, they don't have
you know, you know, the CEO making speeches about the
fundamental research that just doesn't happen. So I worry the
(24:35):
fact that it's this hidden yet so fundamental that the
public thinks it's not relevant and we can get rid
of it and save money for having done so.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Tolliver, what is coming in online on social media and
at listen to the middle dot com.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
Yeah, I'll get a few of these in.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Mickey says, I can't begin to imagine the conversation between
the staff and NAH and patients chosen for clinical trials
finding out it has been shut down. Lousing Grand Rapids
says because of my parents' religion, I wasn't vaccinated and
had measles at twenty seven. It was the sickest I've
ever been in my life. I love science, which I
thought was an optumist to that. Colin and Boise says,
(25:12):
scientific research represents the greatest of our species coming together
and sharing the best part of our humanity. Star Trek
isn't just a fantasy. We've only seen the barest of
our vast potential as a species. Optimism.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Yes, the optimism is good.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
The lines are fully lit up. So let me get
to another caller here, Sarah, I was in Houston, Texas. Hi, Sarah,
go ahead, Hi.
Speaker 12 (25:36):
I wanted to talk about that from a perspective of
women's health and people feeling trust in science visi as
our doctors. Because I had a pretty rare condition called
hypoplemic amenerya. I had to go to multiple doctors, who
I think a lot of people again, that's their interaction
with science in a lot of cases, right is the
medical science that's being done. And I had an experienced
(25:57):
that kind of undermined my own trust, not science itself
because it was reading medical articles from experts on this
condition that helped me understand what was impacting me. But
I'll be sitting with my doctor, and more than one
doctor told me made statements that I knew were demonstrably false,
right because I had read the studies, I knew what
was actually out there. And I think there's this tension
(26:19):
sometimes that maybe has led to a loss of trust
with public health officials or doctors. They are thinking about
the population more as an aggregate, right, They're thinking about
kind of the average person and what kind of care
that they need. And I know why they're doing that
because doctors have so little time, they need more resources.
But I think that once someone had that experience, even
(26:39):
though again it was science that helped me find the
answer to the problem which is no longer affecting me.
Speaker 10 (26:45):
It did hurt my trust and it did make me question.
Speaker 12 (26:48):
Sometimes, okay, this skinis or doctor, are they dumbing this
down because they think that I don't have the capacity
to understand this problem. And again my issue was resolved
that it was only because I took things into my
own hand, And so I feel this tension where it
was the scientific journals I read that I was able
to access that that let me solve the problem. And
yet I have this skepticism now that I can't fully
(27:10):
trust what's being told to me by a scientific communicator
or I do extensive research myself.
Speaker 7 (27:15):
Yeah, did you call Did you call this article to
the attention of your doctor?
Speaker 12 (27:21):
You know, at the time, I doubted myself too much,
and it wasn't the kind of relationship I had with
my doctor where I felt that he wanted to I
tried to push back a little bit, and I was
kind of shut down.
Speaker 7 (27:35):
Mm hmmm, hmm. Yeah. The medical profession is notorious, at
least historically for for just you know, keeping their own
their own lexicon among themselves and not just dumbing it
down to you, but to just do what I say
because I know what I'm doing and you don't. So
there was a lot of that. I'd like to think
that there's a generation of doctors that don't suffer from that,
(27:59):
from that distance that they put themselves to their patients.
But so you are a case where you found a solution.
The question is how many people who maybe did the
same thing you did and believed they knew more than
their doctor, but they didn't yet still pulled away from
their doctor. And so you know, the testimonies that we
(28:23):
hear are from people where it has worked for them,
where it has not worked, or rather where the doctor's
advice was the right advice is surely the overwhelming majority
of all cases. And so at what point do you say,
my case makes me doubt all doctors, or my case
makes me doubt this person who is getting paid to
(28:46):
be a doctor in front of me. I guess that's
the point that that's the crux here. There's the individual case,
and there's whether you're now going to not trust anything
in your whole life. And that would be tragic if
that were a consequence of this one unfortanate ned incident.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I'm going to do something I shouldn't do, which I'm
going to try to sneak in one quick thought from
a caller, John, with very little time, John in Tallahassee, Florida,
Go ahead, very quickly.
Speaker 13 (29:12):
Okay. The current administration has been concerned about imbalance of trade,
but the US has had a huge intellectual imbalance in
the opposite direction for decades, where many of the world's smartest,
hardest working scientists and new graduate students have come into
the United States, almost none have left. That is, up
(29:32):
until recently, our economy has been heavily tech based. But
with this shutting down of research, charging one hundred thousand
dollars a year for an H one B visa, which
is for the highly skilled workers, it's shutting off this
flow of some of the world's best talent to charge
the US economy. And now there's even some flux going
(29:55):
out of the United States where they're seeking better opportunities.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
So you've got to you've got a trade deficit, but
a scientist surplus. We've got to just pause right there,
because Tolliver, we've been talking about some of the great
inventions that have come out of scientific research.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
GPS is one of them.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Listen here to this old Kgan Cedar Rapids news clip
from nineteen eighty seven about the early adoption of GPS.
Speaker 14 (30:18):
It's called the Global Positioning System or GPS. By using
satellites and this receiver system, the military and private users
will be able to know more precisely where they are.
Air Force Colonel Gaylor Green, who was in Coralville today
to accept the first unit, says it will be very
helpful for nighttime military maneuvers and in situations where position
(30:40):
is simply difficult to determine.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
The military When they had recent deployment to Egypt, the
maps didn't help.
Speaker 15 (30:47):
Them very much.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I have to say, I have a terrible sense of direction,
and therefore i need GPS all the time, whether I'm
in the Sahara Desert or just in a grid street situation.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Ringing in the Sahara Desert.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I mean, I'm not just that he was mentioning the
Shara Desert. Anyway, We'll be back with more of your
calls in a minute.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
On the Middle.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
This is the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This hour we're
asking you what should the government's role be in science?
You can call us at eight four four four Middle.
That's eight four four four six four three three five three.
You can also reach out at Listen to the Middle
dot com. I'm joined by astrophysicist Neil de grass Tyson
and in the final segment of the show here later on.
If you have just crazy questions about science for Neil
de grass Tyson, you may now commence those calls.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Let's go right back to Josh in Columbia, South Carolina Josh, Uh,
go ahead for another Grass Tyson.
Speaker 16 (31:38):
Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. What an honor
to speak to both of you, gentlemen. I just was
wanting to make a comment regarding what doctor Tyson talked
about earlier, with research being something that we don't necessarily
know in the time now of the value that we
(32:00):
may have later on.
Speaker 15 (32:01):
Uh.
Speaker 16 (32:02):
My my wife is a Seramesis. She does pottery and art,
and she's made this point to me regarding art the
same way, where you don't understand the value of it
until it's there, you know, until you actually have have
it there and you can you can appreciate it. And
I think that's something that our country is kind of
(32:23):
missing as well. And it's I've never seen the linkage
between science and art, but that's that's something that really
kind of sparked my imagination. The other point I was
going to make was, uh, the communications of the common man,
I think is one thing that that we've disenfranchised a
lot of our people here in this country.
Speaker 17 (32:43):
Uh.
Speaker 16 (32:44):
And in order for them to understanding and I, you know,
i'd like to hear what doctor Tyson has to to
say about that, or if he has any thoughts.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah, thanks Josh.
Speaker 7 (32:54):
Yeah. A first comment about art. So art, so much
of great art in the country and even in the
world has been sort of publicly supported, all right. Generally
the opera house in your hometown or the symphony is
not entirely funded by ticket sales, and so there's typically
some kind of resources that come from a tax base
(33:16):
to support it because a county, a region, estate values
the role of art in a cultured society. Another way
to say that, however, is you can imagine a country
that had no art in it. You can build such
a country and it could have a booming economy because
(33:39):
it's got its tech driven and farming or whatever, or
the big financial sectors. But is that a country you'd
want to live in. That's what you have to ask yourself.
And the art is what enables us to celebrate what
it is to be human. The creativity through the lens
of an artist is something that we have valued throughout time.
(34:02):
When people go to Europe, they don't just look at
the mountains, they go to the art museums, right, That's
that's the huge tourist attraction where people go to France
or London or any place where that has been a
cultural history in their in their nation. So so art
should be fully defensible on its own right if you
(34:23):
just pause and think about it. H Now, with regard
to people, I think I understood the second second half
of the question.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
I think communication to the common man of science maybe
that it's it's hard for some people to understand it.
Speaker 7 (34:38):
Yeah, so it so in science that to become to
get a PhD in science, you are not trained to
communicate with anybody other than colleagues in the language of
your field. So that's a problem. That's a real problem,
especially since shucksters who are out there have a charisma
that scienceists generally don't have. And so we're trying to
(35:01):
offer the science and people who are Charlottan's or peddlers
of anti science sentiment, they have huge platforms and they're
charismatic and they're saying, the scientists are telling you this,
but I have the truth. Again, that's huge clickbait. So
it's a problem. Yes, they have it, and it might
(35:22):
feel who laid a lot of groundwork for what it
was to reach out and bring that frontier of science
to the public. We have a long way to go.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Isaac is calling from Sandford, North Carolina. Isaac, what do
you think about the government's role in science.
Speaker 18 (35:41):
I believe that you should most definitely fund science because
it's necessary. I was doing research in artificial intelligence at
HBCU and it got stopped and my lead professor put
his foot down and basically said, no, we're not going
to go with this, and he got most of the
research funding is pretty instated, of like eighty percent of it,
(36:04):
but without that, we don't go forward.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
So yeah, so you but you had to stop it temporarily.
Speaker 18 (36:11):
Yeah, it's like, so a couple of projects got stopped
or the ones that could go forward they went forward,
but the ones that still need more money they didn't
go with those anymore.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
Yeah, and you're directly affected by this, and so you're
a voice that is a first hand account. So what
we need are people who are not whose funding was
not cut because they don't get any funding at all
because they're not scientists, still understand the importance of this.
It can't just be scientists, you know, begging for money,
because it is in the national interest that the country
(36:45):
does science and everybody needs to know and be behind that.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, let's get to another one. Uh, Eric is in Houston.
Speaker 19 (36:56):
Eric, go ahead, Hey, great, thanks for taking on my call.
I guess my opinion is a little bit different from
those that have been talking previously, But I think that
there should be a wall between science when it comes
to science driven by government and science driven by industry.
(37:23):
I think industry plays a huge role in the direction
that science takes in government. And I guess when I
say government, I'm talking about our institutions, our educational institutions.
For the most part, three things have shaped that opinion
of mine over the last few years. One was the
(37:48):
COVID vaccine and the CDC's response in implementing it. My
family and I had previously gotten COVID recovered from it,
and I'm looking to see something educated come out from
the CDC.
Speaker 20 (38:06):
And what do I see? What they tell me about,
you know, the immunity that I acquired. They told me
that that I still needed to go get a shot.
And that works against decades and decades of precedents that
the CDC had previously. And I lost a lot of
(38:27):
respect for them because billions of dollars goes into the CDC.
That is an enormous organization, and for them to just
come out and say, oh, well, go get the shot
that told me that that they spent no time in researching,
(38:49):
despite the billions and despite all the people in their organization,
they spent no time thinking about, well, what kind of
immunity does this covid in part on those that have
gone through it.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Okay, so Eric, let let's let's let nil deGrasse Tyson
in here to respond to what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
Thank you so much for the call.
Speaker 7 (39:11):
Yeah, there's a lot going on there. For example, there
was a rate at which COVID was mutating in the population,
and to the extent to which it mutates into a
slightly different variant of itself will affect the potency of
your either naturally acquired immunity from having obtained from having
had COVID or from any previous vaccine. That's why there
(39:34):
have been multiple vaccines over the years. When we tracked
there was the Omega variant of COVID and some other
Greek letters in there as well, and we were able
to track where it came from, where it started. So
I think people, and it's not anyone's fault because no
one is trained to think about science this way, and
the CDC. I think could have done a better job
(39:56):
communicating what was going on and why. But when you
have a novel virus and you don't have decades of
prior data on how the thing behaves, then you want
to be cautious about it and lest you catch it
again and die and say, how come you didn't tell
(40:17):
me to take the vaccine. So this is the this
is the balancing act that occurs on that moving frontier.
But I think it could have been alleviated by wiser
communication between the agencies and the public. And I knew
that while it was happening. This is not just hindsight,
because I communicate science. It's what I do. So so
I was disappointed in what I saw as that unfolded.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, Tulliver, do you think it's time for the fun questions?
Speaker 17 (40:42):
Now?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, I'd say, Okay, Frank is calling in from Boston.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Frank, go ahead with a fun question.
Speaker 21 (40:51):
Hey, whoa whoa? Yeah, yes, so yes, Sir Nicholas Telsa,
he had an instance where he was experiment know something
and he said, they're doing that experiment experiment he was content, Well,
he heard voices coming from out of space, and anybody
tried to recreate and exactly find out what he was
(41:13):
doing and that maybe he wasn't crazy.
Speaker 20 (41:17):
Uh.
Speaker 7 (41:17):
Okay, So either he was hearing.
Speaker 21 (41:21):
A good one, right, Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 7 (41:24):
A couple of things, A couple of things. So either
he was hearing voices just in his own head and
thought they were from outer space. This has happened many
times in the history of our species. Uh. And there
are people in the street who having conversations without even
earplugs in, who having conversations with you don't know who,
(41:44):
voices in their head or aliens were talking to him. Okay,
that's what I'm confronted with here. So we all want
the alien, we love the aliens, but at some point
you have to say, what is the more likely explanation
for what's happening here now? Tesla, by the way, he's
got a huge fan base to this day because people
(42:06):
some think he was wronged, people think that you know
that he was suppressed or whatever. I want you to know.
He's fully known and honored in the field of physics.
There's even a unit of magnetic field density named after him.
It's called the Tesla. Okay, so he's not unrecognized in
our field. But we had to cherry pick what he
(42:27):
did that was helpful and useful versus the more fringy
things that he experimented with. And I all take nothing
against him on his fringy work. You know, it takes
a little bit of that to do the real stuff. Back, well,
I need a little bit of crazy to do something
that no one has done before. We're all fans of Tesla.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
I wonder what he thinks would think though of the
bumper stickers now that say my Tesla identifies as a prius.
Speaker 7 (42:58):
Yeah, the man predates the car.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yes, Claire is calling in from Madison, Wisconsin.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Claire, what do you think.
Speaker 17 (43:07):
Hi, Jeremy. I want to ask doctor Tyson. I know
two people that honestly believe the Earth is flat. What
would doctor Tyson say to them to convince them? Oh?
Speaker 7 (43:20):
Yes, thank you for that. And and you know, we
live in a free country and you can think, believe,
and say what you want provided it doesn't harm others.
And so so there's plenty of jobs for you if
you think the world is flat, okay, where where knowledge
that Earth is round won't matter to your earning credibilities.
(43:44):
Kyrie Irving an NBA basketball player, like a basketball player
I last Rememberies in Celtics got traded a couple of times.
He was a big supporter of flat Earth. Well, basketball
courts are flat, so round Earth will have no consequence
to his earning potential. I don't chase down such people.
Part of me thinks it's a conspiracy so that they
(44:06):
all get sent into space first without having to pay
for it because it's so annoying. We'll get them to
see Earth firsthand as a spear, and then they come back. Okay,
now I believe you, and they got a free ride
for having done so. But yeah, I can't. There's a
limit to how much time I can spend arguing with
them in a free country. Let them keep thinking it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
By the way, Jeff Bezos of Amazon recently said he
thinks there will be millions of people living in space
in the next couple decades.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 7 (44:34):
Not in the least. Not in the least. There has
to be motivation to do that, and space is so
hostile to human physiology that to save us ship a
million people there in any amount of time, it's just
not I don't see that. By the way, in nineteen
eighty five, there was a prediction in the year two thousand,
(44:54):
fifty thousand people will be living and working in space.
That was the prediction in nineteen eighty five, all right,
and you know how many people were living and working
in space in the year two thousand three on board.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
The space station.
Speaker 7 (45:07):
So the dream, I don't mind dream states, go ahead,
dream it. But at some point there's a reality check
on these expectations. And so I don't see that happening
because the motivation to do so other than we're explorers
and we're discoveries and it's the next thing to do.
Somebody's got to write the check and he could probably
do it, Bezos, But it would be like a vanity project.
(45:29):
It wouldn't be some native state of humanity going into
the future.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Nathan is calling from Berrier, Kentucky. Nathan, go ahead from
neither Grass Tyson hid.
Speaker 15 (45:40):
Doctor Tyson. You were mentioned in Kelly and Zach Wiener
Smith's new book A City on Mars as being your
proponent for settling space to decrease the existential risk of
humanity being wiped out, and they said it would bring
(46:02):
about it would be more likely to bring about war
on Earth than the cooperation we've seen on like the
iss or mirror. How do you how do you think
about what living off world would bring for us on
Earth if it were lots and lots of people.
Speaker 7 (46:22):
Great question. So first, thanks for telling me that I
didn't know I was in the novel a b. My
views are the opposite of that. So the notion that
we should be a multiplanet species to reduce the existential
risk of a killer virus or an asteroid or climate
(46:43):
change or whatever that makes a good headline. Carl Sagan
was a big fan of that. Elon Musk wants to
move to once half of us to be on Mars
for that to mitigate that risk. All I'm saying is,
but I want to be a multiplanet species as well,
but not for that reason. It would be fun to
be able to just visit Mars, but I'd want to
(47:05):
come back. I'd be fun to visit Mars or terraform
Mars and go and hang out there. I don't have
a problem with that. But I would do it because
that's cool, not because we will split the species so
that in act. Think about it. Whatever it takes. You
know what kind of geoengineering it takes to terraform Mars,
think about it. Whatever it takes to terraform Mars ship
(47:26):
a million people there, it's gotta be easier to deflect
the asteroid that's headed towards Earth. That's all I'm saying here. Okay,
whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a million people, Okay,
it's got to be easier to find the super serum
to cure any virus that arises, Okay in the medical community,
(47:49):
given what that investment would be. So I don't see
it as a thing to save the species. And even so,
even if you did have two species and an asteroid
were coming, you're just gonna let a whole half the
species die. Really no, you're going to try to stop it.
So it's it makes good bar talk and it's clickbait,
(48:10):
but I don't see it now. In terms of peace
on Earth, there are treaties about our conduct in space.
There's the original Our Space Treaty in nineteen sixty seven.
There's the Artemis Accord that is American and China didn't
sign it, by the way, they have their own treaty
that they have with Russia and Venezuela and other sort
of like minded national interests. But in that accord, It
(48:33):
says we're all going to go into space and live
peacefully and share data and all be friends. Okay, And
so I say to myself, if we can be friends
in space, to be.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
Friends, you should be able to be friends on Earth.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
A perfect, a perfect note to end the hour on
the Grass sites and we have to leave it there.
That's astrophysicist Neil the Grass Tyson is just about to
be released. Book is called Just Visiting This Planet, revised
and updated for the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Such a great pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 7 (49:00):
Thank you so much, Thanks, thanks for all that interest
in your and your supporters out there. It's great.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Yes, and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. We've
got extra episodes every week available on the Middle podcast feed.
Next week we're going to be talking about the Supreme
Court and whether you trust it as it makes very
important decisions for the country.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
You can reach us at eight four four four Middle
that's eight four four four sixty four three five three,
or you can reach out at Listen to the Middle
dot com. Or you can also sign.
Speaker 7 (49:26):
Up for our free weekly newsletter.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
And just want to make a note this hour of
the passing of an icon in public radio and incredible talent,
without whom we probably would not be here right now.
A founding mother of NPR, Susan Stamberg, who has died
at the age of eighty seven. She showed all of
us in public radio how to do great radio by
being the human beings that we are. I am Jeremy Hobson,
(49:50):
and I will talk to you next week.
Speaker 15 (50:02):
Schools,
Host
Jeremy Hobson
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