Can Neil DeGrasse Tyson Bring Reason to Late Night?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, well known as a science communicator in the mold of Carl Sagan, has a new television program, “StarTalk,” which premieres Sunday, October 25 at 11pm ET on National Geographic Channel. The show is based on a popular podcast, and will feature science-centric conversations with, not just scientists, but entertainers, celebs, and politicians.
Will this help turn public discussions to a more fact based approach?
Let’s pivot to politics if you don’t mind. Carl Sagan once said that a society that depends on science and technology needs a citizenry that understands science and technology, and it’s very dangerous if we don’t. He was clearly worried that Americans weren’t scientifically literate. Are you worried, too?
He said that long before he died and so a lot of that came out of a Cold War mentality – that you better understand what a nuclear weapon is, how it works and why, because we are voting on whether we have many of these or few of them and it is affecting policy and geopolitics. So, if you continue that posture, after the Cold War just before he died, we have other problems facing us where the solutions require a scientifically literate analysis and policy formation in order to have any connection to reality at all. I’d say we’re no more or less literate than we were when Carl uttered those words.
A lot of people tend to think of science and politics as separate, but they’re not. Questions about policy are often reducible to questions about facts, about cause and effect – isn’t that the domain of science?
I would say you’re right, but I would say it differently. It’s not a question of policy reducing to facts, it’s that enlightened policies are based on facts, but learned in whatever way the actual politics demands of it at the time. That’s what politics is or should be. It is the learning of how you legislate, how you establish the laws and rules of your country in the face of objectively verified information.
The conservative National Review doesn’t like people who are smart and science literate.
For example, we live in a time now where many on the conservative right continue to be in denial of anthropogenic climate change. The problem that I see is that if you remain in denial, then you are not at the table discussing reactions to anthropogenic climate change. So, we’re losing time here, which is to say we’re causing climate change. Now, let’s go back in the room and debate what we do about it. Because whether you have carbon credits or solar panels or you have a new trade relationship with the Far East, all of these factors matter.
What do you make of that anti-science demagoguery in our political discourse right now? Is that just ideological biases triumphing over good thinking?
The moment you start bringing your personal belief system into governance, then that’s the end of pluralistic democracy. We have words for governance like that and they’re called dictatorships. You have a belief system, you have a philosophy, and that philosophy has some adherence and others have their own philosophies. Those are your personal truths. One of them is, “Jesus is your Savior.” I’m not going to say that Jesus is not your savior. That is your personal truth. But, in a country where we have different religions, if the person who said: “Jesus is your Savior” is going to govern a pluralist country, then their legislations must be based on objective truths, not personal truths.
Sample of the “Startalk” podcast, focusing on guest Bill Nye, and touching on climate change, here.
And personal truths are not only religious. You can have political personal truths. You keep those to yourself or your political group. But, to impose them on others is to do away with the freedom that a free democracy gives you. Now, getting back to your point, we have people in Congress whose job is to pass laws. If they pass laws based on things that are not objectively true, that’s the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.
Last question: People quietly assumethat science will save us from ourselves, whether it is climate change or resource depletion or systemic poverty or any number of other problems. The hope is that we’ll always innovate our way out of crises. Do you think science and technology will solve all these problems for us?
Yes, but it requires enlightened governance for that opportunity to arise. Science doesn’t happen in the abstract. It pays to have science done. Frontier science, historically and in modern times, is generally paid by government-based sources – the NIH, the National Science Foundation, the research arms of the Department of Energy, even the science arms of the Department of Defense. Someone is paying for research. You can’t just say, “Well, the science will save us.” No, enlightened governance enabling the science will save us. Scientific solutions to society’s challenges, historically, have been the most potent ways to solve problems.
You remember Thomas Malthus saying that the population growing exponentially will outstrip the food supply that is only growing linearly. This became a philosophy of governance for so long until people realized that they can apply scientific principles to farming and have the food supply go up exponentially just as the population is, and they won’t have a food problem. That’s exactly what happened. There is no shortage of food in the world. There are places where people are starving because the distribution channels are corrupt or inefficient. But, we are producing more food than ever before in the history of our species. So, science solved that problem. Now, enlightened governance has to move the food to where it needs to go. That’s another layering on top of this. The scientist can’t be the one who says, “I’ve invented this way to triple the output on the land. Now, I’ve got to figure out how to get it to where people are starving.” That’s what politicians are supposed to do. That’s what enlightened geopolitics does. But I still have huge confidence in the power and potency in innovations of science and technology to solve all these problems.
16 thoughts on “Can Neil DeGrasse Tyson Bring Reason to Late Night?”
There’s a misunderstanding here about population growth and resources.
“You remember Thomas Malthus saying that the population growing exponentially will outstrip the food supply that is only growing linearly. This became a philosophy of governance for so long until people realized that they can apply scientific principles to farming and have the food supply go up exponentially just as the population is, and they won’t have a food problem. That’s exactly what happened. There is no shortage of food in the world.”
Populations, whether they be people, plants, animals, etc., rarely grow past the resources that support them. They grow until outside events cause a smash-up. The potato famine in Ireland occurred because the ag revolution based on potatoes hit an iceberg in the form of a blight. This has happened in the past in other societies (possibly the Mayan civilization). Our mono ag culture could produce similar results.
Our “mono ag” culture WILL produce similar results if we wait long enough. And you say “populations RARELY grow beyond the resources that support them”? Populations NEVER grow beyond the resources that support them except for brief periods of “overshoot”. The “lead-lag” time is short.
The last few sentences of this post are all bright-sidedness and wishful thinking, and do a great disservice. Unfortunately, there is a perceived need among the “science communicators” to NOT throw grenades and get the unwashed all stirred up about the likelihood of an approaching doomsday. After all, it may be many decades or even centuries away, and program ratings ARE next month.
Speaking of ratings, how many people are going to switch away from Colbert, Kimmel, TMZ, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, The Survivor, Dancing With The Stars, and most important to the survival of civilization—-The Biggest Loser—-to watch pointyheads talk science. Will the Fox News and Rush Limbaugh junkies EVER look at it? Every little bit helps, but this is likely to reach few of the people that need reaching.
What I really should have said was that amount of resources are not what limits growth. The Irish population in the 1840s could have grown a lot bigger had not the potato blight come along. Those lab containers with fruit flies breeding in them still have plenty of food left when the population collapses.
“…COULD have grown a LOT bigger…?” Perhaps, but the amount of “resources” IS what limits growth for all living things, whether it be food, water, air, space, or an environment that is not contaminated with toxics or waste products. Fruit flies in a lab setting are a rather poor example—-take a look instead at the classic Canadian Lynx-Snowshoe Hare population dynamics for a more realistic scenario.
Our entire food system is fully reliant on the techniques of the ‘Green Revolution’, which in turn is fully reliant on fossil carbon for fertilizers, pesticides, transport, production, and packaging. The system is also fully reliant on large-scale land use (which is a carbon emitter instead of sink and creates species loss from simplification of ecosystems), over-use of groundwater supplies, coordinated transport of honey bees (which spreads disease in that population), and automated and intensive practices that erode precious topsoil while increasing its salinity, cause further species loss by pesticide use, and create fertilizer run-off issues like the toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes and massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
All of those issues are like ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our faces – not to mention the increasing effects of climate change and fossil carbon depletion (increased prices = increase food prices = instability in the food supply) on the food system. Expansion of this system increases the strain of all of these elements and causes the clock to tick faster.
However, NDGT is suggesting in his Malthus comment that we should continue to expand, and that if we just support science enough, it’ll be all good. This is full-on crazy posing as rationality, but then, most people would agree with him. It’s a matter of faith in the end. The mantra is, “it worked before, so it must work again”, while closing one’s eyes to the particular and unique historical phenomena that had to come together to make it work before.
The thing with ‘experts’ like NDGT is that they are only experts in their particular fields. It’s impossible for anyone to have the time and ability to become fully fluent in all the scientific fields, especially today compared to 200 years ago. NDGT is stepping outside his expertise here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just regurgitating some happy answer that was fed to him and that satisfied his interest and desire for knowledge in that particular area. Everyone does this same thing on a regular basis, even geniuses, as we can’t know everything, and as we prefer answers that limit our own mental discomfort.
Thanks for this; now I don’t need to type it. Yep, I’m a big fan of the original green revolution kicked off by people like Norman Borlaug (a man who saved more than a billion lives and yet most do not know his name). I use this as an example that Malthus was correct; this green revolution enabled humanity to move one of the limits to human population then humanity responded by growing accordingly. I once attended a David Suzuki lecture where he stated that human population tripled over his life time. I was born about 20 years after him so did some quick projections where I noticed that it would triple in my life time as well. I do not need to point out that the only thing that grows at these rates are cancers.
Yes, we can count on jimbills to give us the “extended” answer, and he nailed it again here. I am shocked at NDGT’s lack of expertise. For a guy who did Cosmos, you would think he would be better versed in the science of population dynamics. It’s something that is taught in high school biology, and for a science spokesperson as prominent as NDGT is to display such ignorance is disappointing.
But then again, many Crockers don’t seem to understand human population dynamics either. A short and well illustrated primer can be found at:
Also, Google “images for human population growth” and view some of the most extreme “hockey stick” graphs you will ever see. I was born in 1940, and the world’s human population has tripled over my lifetime also. Some countries in Africa with the highest birth rates are projected to double every thirty-five years, which will result in a population increase of 4 to 5 times if birth rates don’t come down (and if death rates don’t go up). Ehrlich was right with The Population Bomb—only his timing was off.
Yeah the timing. People (even bankers) famously have difficulty comprehending the exponential curve. One more complicated aspect is to estimate timing (e.g. of blow up) of statistical phenomena with exponential trend. Such “estimates” are far less precise than with linear trend statistics.
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The best way to explain exponents remains the chess board.
Play a game with me, good King. If I win, you have my loyalty. If you win, just pay me a (thing) on this first square, and double that sum for each of the other squares.
(hope I’ve got that right.)
Anyone might be able to pay the first few, but after that even a king’s king couldn’t produce the sum of 50 doublings.
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The Potato blight happened because of an unfavourable combination of circumstances. The famine happened because the corrupt government in the UK made it happen.
There was no reason to allow those people to have starved. Which is much the same today, as people may still be left to die at the whim of those who have that unhappy power. For similar reasons too.
Yes, we should not confuse the crop failure brought on by potato blight with the famine. There may be hundreds of books about The Great Hunger, but Tim Pat Coogan’s “The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy” is a great one (and I say that not because it’s the only one I can remember reading—Coogan is a great writer).
To some extent, the potato blight may have been brought on or exacerbated by agricultural practices in Ireland, but it was still a “natural” occurrence of the “s**t happens” variety. The kind of thing that all living things face in their daily fight for survival.
As earlosatrun says, what caused the famine was not the potato crop failure but the the corrupt English government, which allowed the corrupt absentee landlords to abuse the Irish tenant farmers and continued the exports of beef, mutton, wheat, and other foodstuffs grown in Ireland so that profits could be made (and to feed the masses in England, who would have gone hungry otherwise). The Irish had little choice—-emigrate or die were the two biggest, as they will be when the famines brought on by CAGW strike us.
What happened is probably the first documented case of genocide in the modern world, with a deliberate effort to exterminate the population of one country to the benefit of another. No wonder the Irish hate the British.
“not just scientists, but entertainers, celebs, and politicians. Will this help turn public discussions to a more fact based approach?”
Yes, I’m sure the addition of entertainers, celebrities and politicians will take every discussion of science right into the world of facts and science the way no scientists could.
I get the sarcasm, but I think having conversations about science topics, which affect all of us, scientist or not – in a forum where Degrasse-Tyson is the referee, and bullshit or false balance is not likely to be well received – could be a good thing.
I think it could be too. Why not do it just with scientists, scholars, poets, policy-makers other than the usual politicians?
Of course we know why not, it’s because not enough people would watch it. That’s a dilemma—continue to fuel the infotainment machine that’s helping to destroy humans and the rest of nature, or have people who actually know something say intelligent and meaningful things? I guess it remains to be seen what the balance will be—the profit-oriented people constantly pushing for more Paris Hilton interviews and NDGT maybe pushing for more James Hansen, Natalia Shakhova, Kevin Anderson, Chris Mooney, John Cook, Andy Fisher, Richard Wolff, Tyler Volk… and thousands of brilliant people no one’s ever seen on TV.
I’m afraid NDGT, although he is riding a wave of popularity right now, is NOT going to be the “referee” we need. Like Jeffy 4Z, he is perhaps too impressed with his own brilliance and narrow understandings (although he DOES have a lot more “brilliance” to be smug about than Jeffy).
I am reading a new book titled BEYOND: Our Future In Space, by Chris Impey. Top blurb on the back cover—-“In Beyond, Chris Impey manages to rejuvenate that ‘Space Is Our Future’ feeling that pervaded human culture a half century ago. A needed reminder that, today, not enough of us are looking up, and even fewer among us are doing anything about it”. NDGT
That is followed by several other endorsements from Ben Bova, David Levy, and Owen Gingerich, all of whom are up to their ears in promoting space travel for personal gain and aggrandizement. The book is newly published, and would appear to be part of the new wave of “man’s future lies in space” propaganda that Cruz’s NASA machinations, The Martian, the discovery of water on Mars, and Musk and the Dutch scam artists represent.
The blurb on the back inside flap ends with “BEYOND shows that space exploration is not just the domain of technocrats, but the BIRTHRIGHT of EVERYONE and the DESTINY OF GENERATIONS TO COME. To continue exploration is to ENSURE OUR SURVIVAL….” (emphasis added)
Pure unadulterated horseshit thrown in the face of the TRUTH that our survival depends solely on exploration and understanding of the Earth, and NOT on the “beyond”. We can say that any attempt to seek truth is good, but IMO, NDGT is not the one to lead the way.
There’s a misunderstanding here about population growth and resources.
“You remember Thomas Malthus saying that the population growing exponentially will outstrip the food supply that is only growing linearly. This became a philosophy of governance for so long until people realized that they can apply scientific principles to farming and have the food supply go up exponentially just as the population is, and they won’t have a food problem. That’s exactly what happened. There is no shortage of food in the world.”
Populations, whether they be people, plants, animals, etc., rarely grow past the resources that support them. They grow until outside events cause a smash-up. The potato famine in Ireland occurred because the ag revolution based on potatoes hit an iceberg in the form of a blight. This has happened in the past in other societies (possibly the Mayan civilization). Our mono ag culture could produce similar results.
Our “mono ag” culture WILL produce similar results if we wait long enough. And you say “populations RARELY grow beyond the resources that support them”? Populations NEVER grow beyond the resources that support them except for brief periods of “overshoot”. The “lead-lag” time is short.
The last few sentences of this post are all bright-sidedness and wishful thinking, and do a great disservice. Unfortunately, there is a perceived need among the “science communicators” to NOT throw grenades and get the unwashed all stirred up about the likelihood of an approaching doomsday. After all, it may be many decades or even centuries away, and program ratings ARE next month.
Speaking of ratings, how many people are going to switch away from Colbert, Kimmel, TMZ, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, The Survivor, Dancing With The Stars, and most important to the survival of civilization—-The Biggest Loser—-to watch pointyheads talk science. Will the Fox News and Rush Limbaugh junkies EVER look at it? Every little bit helps, but this is likely to reach few of the people that need reaching.
What I really should have said was that amount of resources are not what limits growth. The Irish population in the 1840s could have grown a lot bigger had not the potato blight come along. Those lab containers with fruit flies breeding in them still have plenty of food left when the population collapses.
“…COULD have grown a LOT bigger…?” Perhaps, but the amount of “resources” IS what limits growth for all living things, whether it be food, water, air, space, or an environment that is not contaminated with toxics or waste products. Fruit flies in a lab setting are a rather poor example—-take a look instead at the classic Canadian Lynx-Snowshoe Hare population dynamics for a more realistic scenario.
Malthus is wrong until he’s very right.
Our entire food system is fully reliant on the techniques of the ‘Green Revolution’, which in turn is fully reliant on fossil carbon for fertilizers, pesticides, transport, production, and packaging. The system is also fully reliant on large-scale land use (which is a carbon emitter instead of sink and creates species loss from simplification of ecosystems), over-use of groundwater supplies, coordinated transport of honey bees (which spreads disease in that population), and automated and intensive practices that erode precious topsoil while increasing its salinity, cause further species loss by pesticide use, and create fertilizer run-off issues like the toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes and massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
All of those issues are like ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our faces – not to mention the increasing effects of climate change and fossil carbon depletion (increased prices = increase food prices = instability in the food supply) on the food system. Expansion of this system increases the strain of all of these elements and causes the clock to tick faster.
However, NDGT is suggesting in his Malthus comment that we should continue to expand, and that if we just support science enough, it’ll be all good. This is full-on crazy posing as rationality, but then, most people would agree with him. It’s a matter of faith in the end. The mantra is, “it worked before, so it must work again”, while closing one’s eyes to the particular and unique historical phenomena that had to come together to make it work before.
The thing with ‘experts’ like NDGT is that they are only experts in their particular fields. It’s impossible for anyone to have the time and ability to become fully fluent in all the scientific fields, especially today compared to 200 years ago. NDGT is stepping outside his expertise here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just regurgitating some happy answer that was fed to him and that satisfied his interest and desire for knowledge in that particular area. Everyone does this same thing on a regular basis, even geniuses, as we can’t know everything, and as we prefer answers that limit our own mental discomfort.
Thanks for this; now I don’t need to type it. Yep, I’m a big fan of the original green revolution kicked off by people like Norman Borlaug (a man who saved more than a billion lives and yet most do not know his name). I use this as an example that Malthus was correct; this green revolution enabled humanity to move one of the limits to human population then humanity responded by growing accordingly. I once attended a David Suzuki lecture where he stated that human population tripled over his life time. I was born about 20 years after him so did some quick projections where I noticed that it would triple in my life time as well. I do not need to point out that the only thing that grows at these rates are cancers.
Yes, we can count on jimbills to give us the “extended” answer, and he nailed it again here. I am shocked at NDGT’s lack of expertise. For a guy who did Cosmos, you would think he would be better versed in the science of population dynamics. It’s something that is taught in high school biology, and for a science spokesperson as prominent as NDGT is to display such ignorance is disappointing.
But then again, many Crockers don’t seem to understand human population dynamics either. A short and well illustrated primer can be found at:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html
Also, Google “images for human population growth” and view some of the most extreme “hockey stick” graphs you will ever see. I was born in 1940, and the world’s human population has tripled over my lifetime also. Some countries in Africa with the highest birth rates are projected to double every thirty-five years, which will result in a population increase of 4 to 5 times if birth rates don’t come down (and if death rates don’t go up). Ehrlich was right with The Population Bomb—only his timing was off.
Yeah the timing. People (even bankers) famously have difficulty comprehending the exponential curve. One more complicated aspect is to estimate timing (e.g. of blow up) of statistical phenomena with exponential trend. Such “estimates” are far less precise than with linear trend statistics.
The best way to explain exponents remains the chess board.
Play a game with me, good King. If I win, you have my loyalty. If you win, just pay me a (thing) on this first square, and double that sum for each of the other squares.
(hope I’ve got that right.)
Anyone might be able to pay the first few, but after that even a king’s king couldn’t produce the sum of 50 doublings.
The Potato blight happened because of an unfavourable combination of circumstances. The famine happened because the corrupt government in the UK made it happen.
There was no reason to allow those people to have starved. Which is much the same today, as people may still be left to die at the whim of those who have that unhappy power. For similar reasons too.
Yes, we should not confuse the crop failure brought on by potato blight with the famine. There may be hundreds of books about The Great Hunger, but Tim Pat Coogan’s “The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy” is a great one (and I say that not because it’s the only one I can remember reading—Coogan is a great writer).
To some extent, the potato blight may have been brought on or exacerbated by agricultural practices in Ireland, but it was still a “natural” occurrence of the “s**t happens” variety. The kind of thing that all living things face in their daily fight for survival.
As earlosatrun says, what caused the famine was not the potato crop failure but the the corrupt English government, which allowed the corrupt absentee landlords to abuse the Irish tenant farmers and continued the exports of beef, mutton, wheat, and other foodstuffs grown in Ireland so that profits could be made (and to feed the masses in England, who would have gone hungry otherwise). The Irish had little choice—-emigrate or die were the two biggest, as they will be when the famines brought on by CAGW strike us.
What happened is probably the first documented case of genocide in the modern world, with a deliberate effort to exterminate the population of one country to the benefit of another. No wonder the Irish hate the British.
“not just scientists, but entertainers, celebs, and politicians. Will this help turn public discussions to a more fact based approach?”
Yes, I’m sure the addition of entertainers, celebrities and politicians will take every discussion of science right into the world of facts and science the way no scientists could.
Give Jeffy the perfumed sleeve hanky!
I get the sarcasm, but I think having conversations about science topics, which affect all of us, scientist or not – in a forum where Degrasse-Tyson is the referee, and bullshit or false balance is not likely to be well received – could be a good thing.
I think it could be too. Why not do it just with scientists, scholars, poets, policy-makers other than the usual politicians?
Of course we know why not, it’s because not enough people would watch it. That’s a dilemma—continue to fuel the infotainment machine that’s helping to destroy humans and the rest of nature, or have people who actually know something say intelligent and meaningful things? I guess it remains to be seen what the balance will be—the profit-oriented people constantly pushing for more Paris Hilton interviews and NDGT maybe pushing for more James Hansen, Natalia Shakhova, Kevin Anderson, Chris Mooney, John Cook, Andy Fisher, Richard Wolff, Tyler Volk… and thousands of brilliant people no one’s ever seen on TV.
I’m afraid NDGT, although he is riding a wave of popularity right now, is NOT going to be the “referee” we need. Like Jeffy 4Z, he is perhaps too impressed with his own brilliance and narrow understandings (although he DOES have a lot more “brilliance” to be smug about than Jeffy).
I am reading a new book titled BEYOND: Our Future In Space, by Chris Impey. Top blurb on the back cover—-“In Beyond, Chris Impey manages to rejuvenate that ‘Space Is Our Future’ feeling that pervaded human culture a half century ago. A needed reminder that, today, not enough of us are looking up, and even fewer among us are doing anything about it”. NDGT
That is followed by several other endorsements from Ben Bova, David Levy, and Owen Gingerich, all of whom are up to their ears in promoting space travel for personal gain and aggrandizement. The book is newly published, and would appear to be part of the new wave of “man’s future lies in space” propaganda that Cruz’s NASA machinations, The Martian, the discovery of water on Mars, and Musk and the Dutch scam artists represent.
The blurb on the back inside flap ends with “BEYOND shows that space exploration is not just the domain of technocrats, but the BIRTHRIGHT of EVERYONE and the DESTINY OF GENERATIONS TO COME. To continue exploration is to ENSURE OUR SURVIVAL….” (emphasis added)
Pure unadulterated horseshit thrown in the face of the TRUTH that our survival depends solely on exploration and understanding of the Earth, and NOT on the “beyond”. We can say that any attempt to seek truth is good, but IMO, NDGT is not the one to lead the way.