Neil deGrasse Tyson—world-renowned astrophysicist, Emmy-nominated host, and author—is one of the most popular and influential figures in modern science. He joins to discuss his cosmic career and new book, “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.”
Debbie Millman:
We humans are a species that live on a tiny planet in a vast universe full of countless, billions of stars. I wouldn’t be able to say that if it weren’t for science. The rigorous process of observing, asking questions and seeking answers through verifiable experimentation has opened our minds to marvels. Yet a lot of people are still suspicious of science and don’t understand how it works. Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent much of his life explaining to the public what science is. Neil is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He’s worked for the President of the United States several times and led the reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary show, Cosmos. He’s the host of the popular podcast, Star Talk, and the author of more than a dozen bestselling books. His latest is titled Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And it is a full-throated, poetic invocation of the power of science and the beauty of the world it has revealed. Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to Design Matters.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, you sound like my mother talking about my life and my books. Thank you for-
Debbie Millman:
I’m not entirely sure how to take that, but I’ll take it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, moms always say nice things regardless. So that’s all. That’s all I’m saying.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. Okay.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. Well, thank you for that very warm introduction.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, my absolute pleasure. Neil, is it true that Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density less than water?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. But that doesn’t do justice to some of the other big bulbous planets. So if you look at Jupiter, which is by far the most massive planet in the solar system. In fact, if you cobble together all the other planets, they will not equal the massive Jupiter. Jupiter is big and bulbous the way Saturn is, and it has an average density just slightly more than water. All right. And so Saturn is slightly less than water. So I don’t want to single out Saturn as the guilty party here. Is that guilty if you’re less dense than water? I don’t know. I don’t want to single out Saturn when all of the gas giants are big and bulbous and low density, they’re like beach balls. But yes, Saturn happens to have a density less than water, which means if you scoop out an average part of it, it’ll float. And that’s kind of weird. So I don’t know if you knew this, but as a child, I knew this fact as a child.
Debbie Millman:
Well, that’s why I’m asking. And I’m asking you this question because it takes us all the way back to when you were asked the question.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Oh.
Debbie Millman:
Crafty, right?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. I see what you did there.
Debbie Millman:
You asked that question in 1973, and I’m wondering if you could share with our listeners when you were first asked that question.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, I knew it before others had asked me. All right. I just thought it was an intriguing fact. Who doesn’t love intriguing facts about everything? It’s like saying, did you know that [inaudible 00:03:28]. And no matter what it is, if it begins with a did you know, it’s usually because someone sifted through random information and found something that was particularly interesting. I just remember, as a child, seeing people playing with rubber duckies in the bathtub and other little floating devices. Of course, ducks float on purpose. That’s how they can just hang out on the water surface. And I thought to myself, if Saturn’s average density is less than water, they should make rubber Saturns.
The people who are thinking not just birds floating. And so it would not be until I was director of the Hayden Planetarium, and I made this fact public about my early life, and somebody sent me a rubber Saturn. So in my office, I have a tiny little rubber… I haven’t yet taken it into a bathtub, but I trust that it’s going to float. And I thought that was a very thoughtful gift.
Debbie Millman:
I think there needs to be a whole merchandising section in the Hayden planetarium of inflatable Saturn pool toys. Why haven’t you not done that yet?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
No, because I’m not that exploitive of the universe. Let’s put it that way.
Debbie Millman:
Fair enough, fair enough.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Commercially exploitive. No.
Debbie Millman:
Your fascination with the stars began way before that question was asked of you. And from what I understand, your fascination really was inspired by your first trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. You were nine years old and stated that visit made an indelible impression on you. And I had a somewhat similar experience at the same age. When I visited my first planetarium, I was in Miami with family, and we went to the planetarium. And it’s a palpable, visceral memory I often think about. You’ve said that that’s actually not unusual for many people. Their first planetarium visits are remembered for a lifetime. Why do you think that is?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah, I don’t, I wish I could say it was because the universe is so amazing, but no. Yes, that’s true, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the reason, after a lot of thinking about this, especially when we rebuilt the original Hayden Planetarium into what is today, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, containing the new Hayden Planetarium. What we learned as we visited many museums across the country, and in fact around the world, in trying to plan and design the new facility, what we learned is that you are much more likely to remember an immersive experience, no matter what that immersive experience is. So at the time, there was a prevailing scholarship among museum educators that exhibits had to be hands-on. And that meant you’d walk up to an exhibit box, let’s say, and they’d be buttons and levers and sounds. And then they test to see what you learned, what principle of science, science museums were talking about of course.
What you learned in this. And I thought to myself, maybe they learned something, maybe they didn’t. But how much time did they spend in front of it? Minutes? No one is spending a half hour in front of a museum exhibition box, especially kids. Then I thought they spent years in school learning and minutes in front of an exhibit. You can’t expect the exhibit to teach them testable things, a curriculum, a syllabus. It occurred to me that the goal of a museum, given these facts, is to inspire you to want to learn more. Not to teach you in the moment, it’s to flick switches that you might have that had never been turned on, or to fan the embers that had once been raging with curiosity and for whatever reason had gone dormant. That’s what needs to happen. And an immersive exhibit, it’s value to you, it’s advantage over other exhibits is you are consumed by it.
Typically all of your senses, maybe not smell, but maybe that too, you see it, you feel it, you hear it, you look all around you, you are consumed by it. And that’s what happens in a planetarium. And I tested this. I tested this. By the way, and to be immersive means the exhibit is bigger than you are. It has to be, otherwise you can’t immerse yourself in it. So let’s just take a couple of examples. I don’t have to have ever met you, but if you grew up in Philadelphia and went to the Franklin Institute, which is there obviously named after Ben Franklin, which is their science museum, I know what exhibit you remember the most. I know upfront. You know what it is?
Debbie Millman:
What?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
It’s the living heart. Why? Because you walked through it and you were in it and you felt the beat of the heart because the sound gave it to you. And you said, “Oh my gosh, I’m in the aorta, I’m in the left ventricle.” And everybody remembers that. Even when they don’t remember any other exhibit. In the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, I know what exhibits you’re going to remember. It’s the coal mine. Why? Because you got into this bucket or whatever and then you lowered into this coal mine. It’s an immersive experience. Everybody remembers that. So yeah, a planetarium is an immersive experience that happens to also bring you the universe. And it affected me and it affect many people. It happened to become my career I think because the universe chose me more than I chose it. But this might be a lesson to educators about how to influence the passions and the ambitions of people who they touch.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wondered what that show was that I actually saw in the planetarium. So it was in Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, 1970. If you happen to know what show I saw, I would be eternally grateful.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, what was common in the day was planetarium shows were live. They would have a live presenter. And typically you would get the sky tonight. All right? And so that you’d know what to look for when you went out. 1970, we are actively going to the moon.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, this was a history of the world, the cosmos as we knew it then. And I was enchanted.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
And we went to the moon from 1968 through 1972. So you were right there in the moment. So again, you didn’t have to remember what you saw, but you remembered feeling it. And I think that’s maybe there’s not enough things that we feel anymore in this world.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about your latest book. It is a really interesting, quite different book than so many of your others. But before we talk about Starry Messenger, I want to ask you one question about The Sky is Not the Limit. In your memoir, The Sky is Not the Limit, you have a chapter titled Dark Matters wherein you discussed the challenges that you faced because of the color of your skin. And in fact, when you graduated with your PhD from Columbia and astrophysics, you stated that there were now seven black astrophysicists in the world. And I’m wondering since that time, has it gotten any better?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
So I would later be corrected on that number. There were 12. I was way off.
Debbie Millman:
I stand corrected.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
So let me first stand publicly corrected. That number was all I could figure out at the time, but there were a couple of others. That was 12 out of many thousands at the time. So you wouldn’t ever speak of the percent of black astrophysicists because it was so low, it’s not a meaningful fraction to hear. You want to hear the number. Oh, that number’s way larger now. It’s at least in the hundreds. So I’m delighted to report that fact. And my field has done very well relative to other STEM fields. But yeah, there’s still room to go. Oh, my point is I saw the forces operating against me coming up and I needed a lot of restoring forces within me to overcome, to stay with it. I can’t tell you how many people said you should leave astrophysics. You’ll never be any good at this.
I feel like the person receiving their first academy award, oh, the people who believed in me and F you to all those who didn’t. That’s not an uncommon fact that there’s so many people who believe they know more about you and what you’ll accomplish than you do. And they’ll tell you. And I’m thinking, well, what are you gaining by that? Where’s that coming from? And so then I asked myself how many other people would have succeeded, but for lack of how large their fuel tank was to get through all of this. That’s why I can say that the numbers can still be improved. And it’s not simply that we have a field that is free from sexism or racism. I won’t say that. I will say there’s room for improvement, but we’ve come farther than others. That’s all.
Debbie Millman:
Race and color are just two of the topics that you explore in Starry Messenger.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
In one chapter.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. But there are ways in which you bring it up in other chapters that aren’t as specific. But you’ve said that the inspiration for the book came from a lifetime of observing how scientists view the world differently from everyone else. But suggest that you don’t have to be a scientist to be science literate. And I’m wondering if you can talk about what it means to be science literate.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
It sounds like you actually read the book.
Debbie Millman:
I did. I loved it. I loved it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
I don’t ever require that interviewers read the book, but thank you for digging into these subtle, and for me, important points. So the book is what the world looks like if you’re scientifically literate. And as you correctly recounted, you don’t have to be a scientist to be scientifically literate. Science literacy is about how do you receive information and then act on it. And what is your preparation in advance of having received that information. So for just as an example, as best as I can judge, our brains are not wired for thinking statistically about the world. Or probabilistically. And so we make all manner of decisions that we think are rational and sensible, but are simply not when analyzed with simple basic statistics that could be taught in middle school but is not. And so here’s someone maybe at the casino betting on the number seven in a roulette table, and they keep betting on it.
I say, “Why do you keep betting on seven?” “Well, it’s due!” I said, “What do you mean due?” “Well, look at the list of numbers, because they’ll show you the previous rolls, the last 10 rolls. It’s due!” And then I can tell them, “No, it’s not. It’s not due. Every roll has exactly the same probability of hitting on a seven as every other role.” And they will not believe it because they feel like it’s not true. Do I need a PhD in astrophysics to know the statistics of that? No. Once again, you can learn that in middle school. And so that’s why I say the world looks different when you are scientifically literate. And this statistics and probability, by the way, I think, like I said, because I don’t think our brain is wired to think natively that way, you have to be constantly taught it and all the nuances of it.
I was in school for 20 years, K through 12, and then four years of college and then six years of graduate school, 22 years. Oh my gosh. I would say for some part of half of all those years I was learning some new aspect of probability and statistics. So that now I feel the probability rather than feeling the emotion of my desired outcome. And so that helps me immediately go there. But like I said, you can learn it at a much earlier stage. But my people, the American Physical Society, was once invited to stay at the MGM Grand or it was the MGM Marina at the time, in Las Vegas because there was a hotel snafu in San Diego and they couldn’t hold the conference in San Diego, the annual conference, 4,000 physicists. So they say, fine. Thank you, MGM. So they all go to Vegas and a week later there’s a headline.
Debbie Millman:
I love this story.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. And it’s not like they were playing this machines and outwitted them. No, you’re knocking out with a casino by design, because casinos were invented to exploit this weakness of our thinking. That’s a very clear and clean and present example. But the book is full of examples such as that. And you noted it was different from my other books because this was long in the making. I remembered when I was 14, it was a new comet that had been discovered in the sky, Comet Kohoutek. And there’s high anticipation for it because it was discovered very far away from the sun. That meant it should get brighter and brighter and brighter as it got closer. It didn’t live up to that expectations. But regardless, we had discovered it with our telescopes.
It was headline news. And what am I in eighth grade, barely ninth grade? And I go out in the street and there’s a full grown adult holding a placard saying the comet is coming, the end of the world is near. And I’m thinking, no, it’s not. And you’re a grownup. You’re a full grown man, and I’m a kid. And you’re thinking this way. Oh my gosh. And that was my window to the fact that there are people, maybe not in his case, but there might be other grownups who are in charge of things. Who control resources, and money, and opportunities, and laws in legislation that could be susceptible to thinking in ways that are not informed by science literacy. So this book, is it a celebration or is it a lament? Maybe it’s both of the things in society that we fall victim to because we’ve either never knew or lost the capacity to think rationally about it.
Debbie Millman:
You write in detail about the notion of truth in Starry Messenger. And in a day and age wherein fake news is part of our daily vernacular, you provided definition of scientific truths that I’d like to share for our listeners. And you state this. Objective truths of science aren’t founded in belief systems. Objective truth is applied to all people, places and things as well as all animals, vegetables and minerals. Some of these truths apply across all of space and time. They are true even when you don’t believe in them. They’re not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion, nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truth, this is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled. Neil, do you worry about how successful the scientifically illiterate are at communicating their belief systems?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah, so what you just asked me, I could take as an insult as though you said, “Neil, you’re failing at your job.”
But I won’t take it as an insult. I will take it with a positive outlook and say, with all of my efforts and the efforts of many others on the landscape, it may be, without all of us, it would’ve been much worse. Okay? So that’s my positive spin on what we all see going on in this world. It might have been worse. So I think like the song To Dream the Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha. It’s based on, of course, Don Quixote, the phrase tilting at windmills may actually come from that story where he’s a knight and he is got this jousting stick and he wants to fight a windmill. And that’s a weird concept. But no, you’re not going to win against a windmill. That’s not going to happen. But why does he do it? And so that song, if you read the lines of that song, the they’re very beautiful, they’re poetic and they’re inspirational.
Just because there’s an immovable object doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to move it. And there’s another line, I want to march into hell with a heavenly cause. There’s these beautiful phrases in there that celebrate the fight. How impossible was the fight for Martin Luther King in the 1960s, with water cannons and police, nightsticks and attack dogs when they’re protesting? By the way, last I checked, peaceful protest is in the First Amendment. Not the Tenth Amendment or the Twelfth or the Twentieth or the Fifth. No, the First Amendment, the right to peaceably protest. That’s why they were all holding the American flags with them.
And the American flag wasn’t held upside down, which would be a international distress call. It was, no, we know what the founding principles are of this country and we want to push that back on you. They at the time, surely felt like an immovable object and irresistible force, yet they kept fighting. And so yes, I have all of these thoughts and principles within me to continue this because without it, there is no civilization. There’s no society as we know it. We might as well all just move back into the cave and pretend like whatever we want to be true is what will become true. Yeah, I’ve seen that in our history books and I don’t want to relive that.
Debbie Millman:
One of the topics you returned to several times in the book is the notion of how humans might appear to space aliens who arrive on Earth with no preconceived notions of who we are and what we are or how we should be.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Love me some space aliens. Yep.
Debbie Millman:
And as somebody who’s endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of intelligent life in the universe outside of us, if we consider ourselves or if we would even be considered intelligent, what motivated the perspective to look at who we are from a completely objective perspective?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, there are many forces operating on that. The alien is the clear and present one, typically other than the film ET by Steven Spielberg, we imagine aliens as evil conquerors. And of course that’s not based on any actual data on the behavior of aliens. However, when you pause and think about it, these are beings with higher technology than us, encountering us and they want to enslave us, kill us, harrow us, whatever. So if you pause and think about that line of storytelling, then you realize it’s what we suppose the aliens would behave, but it’s really based on how we know we have behaved with one another. The history of colonization, the history of conquering, the history of all of this, is the retold story of one culture civilization with higher technology exploiting another culture or civilization that has lesser technology than they do. And in some cases completely slaughtering them. The greater the imbalance, the greater the injustice that has been lobbed upon our own species by ourselves.
But getting back to your question, there was a recurring character in the 1990s in Saturday Night Live, I think it was played by Phil Hartman. And it was called Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. And I was like, “What?” So it was some caveman who the glacier retreated and he comes out, and he came from 30,000 years ago. But they teach him English and he gets a law degree and he’s in the courtroom and he wins every case. How does he win every case? Because somebody says, “Oh, the person called me up and they said they were going to do bad things and he did the thing, but he didn’t.” And whatever is the case, it doesn’t matter. He’ll come in and say, “I see your devices and your gadgets, and they mystify me. And I don’t know that they might have forces on us that we don’t really understand because I don’t understand them. And so maybe my client is not guilty because he was a victim of these mysterious [inaudible 00:25:53].” And I thought to myself, this is an alien view. The aliens will come and say, “What are you doing? Why? What? How? What?”
So the value of a complete stranger to your culture can reveal so many things about you. And by the way, it’s also a trope. It’s a storytelling trope in film. It’s the fish out of water trope. So the film Crocodile Dundee, you get this guy from the Outback coming to New York City. And you just watch that play out. And it reveals to you things about urban living that you might not have noticed for having been born within it. So yeah, practically every chapter an alien comes along and I bring the alien along and wonder what the alien will think.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it becomes this impartial observer revealing our inconsistencies and some of our hypocrisies and some of our idiocies. And you asked this question in Starry Messenger on a landscape of endless political strife, if a peace-loving space alien landed on Earth and walked up to you and requested, “Take me to your leader.” would you escort it to the White House or to the National Academy of Sciences? And I love that question. And when I read it, I thought of something that Michio Kaku is famous for saying. He states imagine walking down a country road and meeting an anthill. Do we go down to the ants and say, “I bring you trinkets, I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy and biotechnology. Take me to your leader.” Or do we have the urge to step on a few of them? And I’m wondering if a space alien came to visit us here on Earth, would they just think we were a bunch of ants?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. Well, it depends on how much smarter than us they were. It wouldn’t take much for smarts to land there. And I can give a very clear and clean example. The closest species to humans is of course the chimp.
Debbie Millman:
Chimpanzee.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah, it’s got 99%, something like that, identical DNA. Yet what’s the smartest thing a chimp does? It can stack boxes and reach a banana suspended from the ceiling perhaps. Or we can teach it some rudimentary sign language. Yet we have philosophy and culture and the arts and the James Webb telescope. And so typically religious people might say, “Well, what a difference that 1% makes. We’re special on this.” But that’s very close-minded, that’s very ego driven because why not ask the next obvious question, what would we look like to a species that was 1% beyond us on this intelligence vector that we’ve set up for this example. If the smartest chimp can do what our toddlers can do, then the smartest human would do what their toddlers can do.
And I joke about this. I say they’ll bring Stephen Hawking forward and say, “This is the smartest human we could find because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little alien Mary over here and Timmy, just come from preschool. Oh, you just derived the principles of calculus. That’s so cute.” And they put it with a magnet on their refrigerator door. That would be 1% different. Imagine 5%. 10%. The audacity of us to say, “Let’s find other intelligent lifeforms like us.” Oh my gosh. That is not invoking a cosmic perspective on what is possible. Consider that we define, just one other little fact here, I think this point was first made by Carl Sagan.
We measure the intelligence of other animals by their capacity to communicate with our tools, like the chimp using sign language, but we don’t measure our intelligence by our capacity to communicate with them. Because clearly they’re communicating. The ants on an anthill know what they’re doing. And so to get a bigger hill, you get the termites, the termite mounds. They know what they’re doing, they’re communicating. And it reminds me, was it a New Yorker comic? Must have been two dolphins are swimming together. And one says to the other, referencing the dolphin trainer on the deck, “Those trainers, they face each other and make noises, but it’s not clear they’re actually communicating with each other.”
Debbie Millman:
Yep. We are unable to communicate with other species, and yet we wonder or try to consider how we would communicate with aliens that came to visit us.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. So the proper way to say that is we cannot meaningfully communicate with other species that even has very close DNA to us. So what confidence do we have that a smarter species will be able to communicate with us?
Debbie Millman:
Especially if they’re not DNA based?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Well, yeah. It may be that their simplest thoughts transcend the most brilliant humans who have ever lived. Just sleep on that for a bit.
Debbie Millman:
Neil, in your chapter on gender and identity, you write that skin pigments arose as a marvelously adaptive feature of human evolution that can in fact be achieved through several different genomic pathways. And yet people persist in willfully sorting our species into just a handful of colors and assign hierarchies to those colors. Yet when we think about color from a scientific perspective, there are no sharp boundaries in color. Can you talk about why our color categories as we create these hierarchies are actually lazy? That’s the word you use, lazy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. I don’t mind people sorting people. I don’t have no problems with that. But as you noted, if you sort people and then rank them, and usually the person doing the sorting, if they rank you whatever category there, and they put themselves at the top. That’s a very typical behavior of ego-driven sorters. So in the chapter’s gender and identity and color and race, I invest a fair number of paragraphs. I’m trying to get people to realize how lazy it is to categorize something that in fact exists on a spectrum. Taking the literal spectrum as an example, we say, oh, how many colors are in the spectrum? Well, there’s seven. Well, we say seven because Newton, there’s really six obvious colors. Newton threw in a seventh one. Had a mystical fascination with the number seven. That’s where we get indigo in the spectrum.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Get rid of indigo. All right, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Clean, I get that. But do you realize these are not discreet colors on the spectrum. There’s an unlimited variation as you go from red to violet. Unlimited. But what we do is we say, well, all right, let’s call it seven colors. Well, any interior designer knows there’s way more than seven colors out there. It’s not just how many colors there are. There are different shades of colors. There’s more than 100 shades of white, listed in the Benjamin Moore catalog, more than 50 shades of black. And what I mean by that, these are colors, shades, where the word black or the word white is in the name. And then there’s an adjective in front of it. And so autumn white or-
Debbie Millman:
Pearly.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Exactly. Cold black or whatever. So wait a minute, okay, interior designers, they’re still classifying. But the more categories you have, the closer you are to a continuum. You’re more prepared to admit that colors are on a continuum. And what happens if a crime is committed and the police officer asks you, “Can you describe the perpetrator?” After you give the height and what they’re wearing and maybe their weight, they say, “Were they Black or White or Brown or Asian?” Four categories. Four. Four. And so you must say, “Oh, there’s a Black person who did it.” And that means every person who’s been bend into the category of Black now gets looked at by the police, which may account for why the dozen times I’ve been stopped by the police minding my own business because someone said a Black person did something to them.
Now I don’t know it. Let’s say it was true that a “Black” person with a darker skinned than I am, and lighter skinned, this nuance is lost. So the example I give in the book is I know we have the ability to give more nuance than this. Want evidence for it? Not only Benjamin Moore’s catalog of paints, but something you’ve encountered weekly. Go into any pharmacy, go to the hair color aisle. There’s an entire aisle of women’s hair color. There’s 20 shades of blonde with different models on the cover modeling the hair color. So why is it that we have more precision in our labeling of hair color than we do in our ability to identify a perpetrator? There’s something wrong there. So for me, this would call for the police should come around with these charts that has maybe 50, 100 maybe too much. 50.
You say point to the shade of color that comes closest to the person’s skin if you’re trying to get an eyewitness account. Don’t just say Black or White. No. All right. And by White people, there are people who are more ruddy in their colors if they have some Irish influence or whatever. So pick that out. And that would help, I think. I would be picked up many fewer times by the police. All right? Because my skin color would not precisely match whatever the person saw. Plus eyewitness testimony is itself a problem that’s in the law and order chapter. Is [inaudible 00:36:33] law and order? Is that what I called it?
Debbie Millman:
Yes. You called it law and order.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Law and disorder. Eyewitness testimony is so revered in the court of law. I need a witness. And in science, nobody says that. Because a witness means the actual objective truth filtered through your brain. And anytime that happens, that’s bad. And we knew that since second grade. No, we knew that since kindergarten when we all played telephone. And you just watch information go through your brain. And it’s not because it messed up because they were kids. It messed up because our human brain was involved. And what happened with adults as well.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I think is so interesting, going back to the notion of hair coloring as opposed to hair color, is you make the point that if an alien came to this planet and saw how much we all do to change the way we look, they would think we are a planet of a species that loathe themselves.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. I don’t think we think enough about people with straight hair might make it curly, people with light hair will make it darker people. People with dark hair make it lighter. People with facial hair will remove it. People with their bodies are a little male, thin and wimpy, they’ll go to the gym to boost it. How many breast augmentation surgeries there are per year in the United States?
Debbie Millman:
In the hundreds of thousands.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
It’s hundreds of per year. And by the way, a lot of that is not just simply to change our view. A lot of that is to reinforce a gender that would otherwise be less… The binarity of gender is stoked and enhanced by the beauty industrial complex.
So if you have hair growing between your eyebrows, and you’re female and you want to reinforce that you’re a female, you’re going to remove that hair. You’re going to remove the hair above your lip. You’re going to grow your hair longer because that’s what girls are supposed to do. You’re going to enhance your breast, if not by surgery, then by broad design. And we know there’s a whole industry of broad designs just to do that. If you’re not tall enough, you’re going to wear heels. And the man, like I said, if they’re thin, they’ll get muscles. And you just go to the gym, get a gym membership, you’ll get muscles. All of this? You know what that does? It cloaks, the holding aside that we are hopelessly unsatisfied with our natural appearance. What it also does is cloak the full spectrum from being pure female to being pure male about how people naturally look.
And beyond that, how people want to look. Okay, so if today I feel female, and I’ll dawn some clothes that the beauty industrial complex says is more typically female. And I just feel that, do that. Okay. Or if you’re female and you wear some “male clothes” or you don’t shave above your lip or whatever, people say, “Whoa, what about the chromosomes?” Sure, you can look biologically at chromosomes, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the free expression of who you are to yourself. And somewhere I read, somewhere I read was it, that in the United States, we have the pursuit of happiness. I think that was a quote somewhere, yeah. The pursuit of happiness. And seems to me that ought include what I feel like dressing today. And for you to say I can’t or pass a law that prevents it to me is a violation of the founding principles of this country.
It’s none of your business if I want to wear dress or pants. It isn’t. And so the problem is, the more you realize that not only do people have the urge, it’s not everyone but enough of us to express ourselves on a gender spectrum. Those who don’t express themselves on a gender spectrum are otherwise reinforcing a gender that isn’t natively there in your body’s expression, that the binarity of it all, is hiding a deep reality within civilization. This is a point I make in the gender and identity chapter. And the science I’m bringing to it is in my field, we invest huge energy trying to understand all the things that vary on an entire spectrum. There’s not just big stars, small stars, there’s a whole range of stars.
There’s not just hot stars, cold stars, there’s a whole range of temperature. There’s not just near stars or far stars, there’s a whole range of differences. We have entire vocabulary birthed and developed to communicate about the variation of objects on a spectrum. And human beings on this earth have rejected, resisted or are blind to the actual variation that exists within us as a species. And when you have power over laws of legislation that then prevent it, I need a stronger word than mean-spirited. It is a violation of what we would hope and expect would prevail in a country that declares itself to be an exemplar of freedom.
Debbie Millman:
What would the aliens say?
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Ah, what would the aliens say? Yeah. So aliens, they come up to Earth and they’re looking in the tourist catalog. I’ve heard about Earth, got water and continents and let’s take a look. And they go down and visit and this Earth with oceans and land and clouds as nature, as the universe would see us. And then they go look in our classrooms, and there are these color coded globes, and they realize what? “These humans have divided up the land masses? And now you need papers to cross the land mass. Or they’ll fight wars if you’re born on one side of a… By the way, they’re all human.” “All right? And well, look. They have different skin color.” “Skin color? What you’re really distinguishing that? But no, you’re all humans.”
Debbie Millman:
They all look the same. By the way, oak trees would say all humans are identical to each other. They would not notice your hair or your skin. We all have just this big bulbous thing coming out between our shoulders. Two limbs, two legs. When you look at a robin flying, are you saying, oh, this one is slightly different because ornithologists know they’re variations within species, but we know it’s just a robin. When you see a snake, do you know if it’s male or female? No. From a distance or up close? No. The snakes know. All right. They know completely. And snake experts will know, but you typically don’t. In the same way, the alien wouldn’t know any of these things that we’ve used to divide us. And they see us fighting wars, killing one another. They would rush back home and declare there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Absolutely. Over an unprovable idea about how we were created. It’s insane to think about it in that way.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I know that we have just a couple of minutes left. Yesterday, granter reported that a group of astronomers pouring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope may have glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy, which would indicate the presence of the universe’s very first generation of stars looking all the way back in time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yeah. So first, that is an amazing fact. However, the telescope was designed for exactly that purpose. And ionized helium would mean there’s high energy light. When you ionize an atom, the energy to do that, it has to be high enough to make that happen. And if you ionize helium very early, it means somebody is giving you light to do that. And this would be the end of what we call the dark ages in the universe where the universe had the matter, but the matter hadn’t coalesced to make stars yet. And so we playfully call that the dark ages because it was the literal dark ages. So yeah, I expect discoveries to continue coming from our James Webb space telescope. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering and science.
Debbie Millman:
I want to close our interview today with a quote from Starry Messenger. And I know a lot of what we’ve talked about today point out some of the hypocrisies of the human species. But there’s many things that are quite wonderful. And you state this, the total number of people who have ever been born is about 100 billion. Yet the genetic code that generates viable versions of us is capable of at least 10 to the 30 variations. That astronomically huge number is a one followed by 30 zeros providing a million trillion trillion possible souls. So far, our branch of the tree of life has produced no more than 0.0000000000000001% at 16 zeros of all possible humans forcing the conclusion that most people who could ever exist will never even be conceived. So that means that each of us, for all practical purposes, is unique in the universe now and forever. It’s one of the most magical thoughts I think I’ve ever been encountered.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Yo, thank you for noticing that. And it also means you’re the lucky one to even be alive.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. We all are. And now in this moment in time when we can actually have data from the James Webb Space Telescope that can reveal that early light, how remarkable for all of us.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
And Richard Dawkins is also famous for saying, we’re lucky because we get to die. And I said, “What? What do you mean by that?” Well, following that same reasoning, most people won’t get to die because most people will never even exist. Most people who could exist will never exist. And so for that reason, I think to myself, you won the lottery. And why not use this occasion to make the world better today than it was yesterday? And to bring joy to the world. Life is precious. The very fact of being alive.
And all that’s in the chapter Life and Death. And I end that chapter with a quote from Horace Mann, which I want on my tombstone basically. My sister knows this in case no one else has it. It’s, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Excuse me. He gave that as part of his speech and it’s for early 1800s. So it has a little more flourish in it. So let me give the full quote because he is giving us a graduation speech. He was an academic educator and it was just one of his final speeches. He’s said, I beseech you. That’s a word I think we should bring back, beseech.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s a good one.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Not enough of it today. “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts, these, my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Debbie Millman:
Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Delighted. Thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest book is Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. You can read more about all things Neil up on his website, neildegrassetyson.com and see all his work up close and personal at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I beseech you to do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.