Neil deGrasse Tyson on Understanding Our Current Reality (XPRIZE Visioneering) | EP #140

Our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it’s causing us a great deal of strife. This linear thinking prevents you from realizing a possible future that awaits you. This is a rich country; we can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it’s really not a matter of a budget; it’s a matter of what is motivating us.

In 1908, the quote was, “Man will never fly from New York to Paris.” Do you know who said that? Orville Wright. That’s my favorite request on stage: “Can you give us a prediction for 2050?” We will have designer drugs; they’ll analyze your genome and find drugs that will have no side effects for you. All cars on the road will be self-driving and electric. The entire solar system becomes our backyard, and the only thing we know about these predictions is they’re going to be wrong.

Before we get started, I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and longevity front. These technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live and how long we’re healthy. The truth is, a lot of the approaches are in fact cheap or even free, and I want to share this with you. I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook that outlines what I’ve been doing to reverse my biological age, increase my health, strength, and energy. I want to make this available to my community at cost, so longevityguidebook.com. You can get information or check out the link below. All right, let’s jump into this episode. This is going to be a joint StarTalk and Moonshots event here at XPRIZE Visioneering. I need to do an introduction, if you don’t mind. I know everybody knows you—I mean, who doesn’t? But do they know enough about you?

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an esteemed astrophysicist, celebrated science communicator, and passionate educator with a mission to ignite curiosity in minds worldwide. A graduate of Harvard University in physics, Dr. Tyson earned his master’s degree at Princeton and his PhD in astrophysics from Columbia. He now serves as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

Through his wildly popular show StarTalk, which reaches over 1 million listeners per episode, his reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series reached over 135 million viewers in 180 countries. I don’t know which countries weren’t watching, but they should have been. Neil has published over 15 books, including the New York Times bestselling book whose title I love, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which alone sold over 1 million copies.

Today, we are honored to have Dr. Tyson here to talk about humanity’s future, innovation, and discovery.

Thank you. There was only some exaggeration in that introduction. I just want to say, was it by the numbers? Am I the only one wearing a tie in this room?

Yes.

Apologies. I just thought, “Van Gogh’s Starry Night—I thought I’d get away with that.” Is that right? Okay, we’re good.

We are good. You and I have met a couple of times, and I want to go back to our XPRIZE history. But first, I know you were a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.

Yes, yeah.

We have one graduate over there, maybe. Actually, our vice chairman, Robert K. Weiss, who’s watching on our livestream, was also a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. I was born in the Bronx, at Mott Haven Hospital.

The Bronx High School of Science counts 8 Nobel laureates among its graduates, which is as many as the country of Spain, just to put some context around it.

That’s good. That’s very good.

Eight Nobel Prizes.

Thank you. Awesome. There you go.

I want to go back to our first meeting. We talked yesterday about the origin of the XPRIZE Foundation. I read this book, The Spirit of St. Louis, which Greg gave me, and came up with this crazy, harebrained idea about a spaceflight competition.

Of course, the very first thing that any entrepreneur has to do when they come up with a great idea is raise money. I had these Penguin pocketbook science-fiction books on my bookshelves, and I was reading them. In the back, there was this 1-page tear-out that said, “If you’d like to fly on a future flight to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto—you know, without regard to gravitational issues or so—please fill out this form and send it in.”

Send it in where? To the Hayden Planetarium.

It hits me: “Oh my God, the Hayden Planetarium must have millions of these forms from people interested in private spaceflight.” So I’m going to go track them down. I end up on your doorstep.

Just to be clear, that solicitation wasn’t just a few years ago. It was many, many, many decades ago. I think it dated back to the 1950s, and I’m pretty sure it was just a stunt. The planetarium was not going to launch people to Pluto.

But you were right in thinking that if you were going to have a core group of people who were thinking this way, then you wanted to link up with them in some way, any way you could.

So I show up: “Dr. Tyson, pleasure to meet you. My name is Peter. I’ve got this idea for the spaceflight prize. By the way, would you be willing to share the names and addresses of all the individuals who have signed up? I want to ask them for money.”

I’m thinking, “Crazy-man alert.” I said, “Let me just humor him. Maybe he’ll go away.”

I never told you that, right?

No, but I think what you do requires a little bit of crazy. You can’t just be normal and do any of this.

That’s a compliment.

I resemble those remarks.

So you bring out this shoebox, and there are these tear-outs. I’m amazed you had these shoeboxes. You then go on to explain to me that the probability these people actually still lived there—and were still alive—was diminishingly low.

These were addresses that predated ZIP codes. That’s how you know.

By the way, just because I’m an educator, who here is under 40? Don’t clap yet. You have no idea that the word “ZIP” is an acronym. ZIP stands for “Zone Improvement Plan,” to help mail get to its destination faster.

Now you 40-year-olds and younger can say, “We get ZIP.”

I think it had to get rolled in in the late ’60s, maybe the early ’70s—even the early ’60s.

Because you are 100 years old, sir.

I was there for the first ZIP code.

That began our friendship and relationship, and I’m grateful to have you here.

Let’s fast-forward. There is a book you wrote called Star Messenger: A Cosmic Perspective on Civilization. When you and I met on one of your previous recordings of StarTalk, I mentioned to you that this is the 30th anniversary of XPRIZE. You said, “Wow, 30 years has a very special meaning” in a recent book you wrote. Do you want to riff on that?

Sure, I can do that.

The more precisely uttered title is Star Messenger: A Cosmic Perspective on Civilization. “Star Messenger” is the name of Galileo’s first book on the universe, Sidereus Nuncius in Latin, of course. It’s where he reported his first telescopic observations of the night sky.

In it were revelations that conflicted with what people were thinking at the time. He noticed that Venus went through phases, as the Moon does. He noticed the Moon was not a smooth surface; it was pitted and cratered. He noticed that the Sun had spots on it. This idea of a perfect, smooth set of heavenly bodies was shattered by that.

This was information that would ultimately show that Earth was not the center of the known universe. These are the starry messages. This is the universe talking to us, telling us that our understanding of how things are might not be correct. If the authorities are inflexible about what is or is not correct, it creates conflict.

In Galileo’s case, he ended up under house arrest and basically died under house arrest for views that conflicted with the biblical account of Genesis. Any rational reading of biblical Genesis would have Earth formed before everything else: the heavens and Earth, the Sun and Moon came later. You can’t square that.

One of his great quotes, which I will mangle, is, “Why would God give us these faculties of reason and then expect us to forgo their use?”

A cautionary tale for any disruptive thinker these days.

Yes. Watch out for who’s going to come after you for saying something.

They still do.

They still do, though there has been an improvement.

They don’t torture you in a dungeon.

That’s true.

That’s progress.

That’s progress. But they may discredit you.

I thought today there were so many things that permeate our society that could benefit from a rational analysis, a scientific analysis, with a dose of a cosmic perspective.

All the chapters in the book are paired words that have generally created conflict at holiday dinners: truth and beauty; exploration and discovery, which is the subject of this conversation; Earth and Moon; meat-eaters and vegetarians—I went there; color and race; gender and identity; law and order; risk and reward. Each of those is a chapter.

The power of scientific analysis is brought to each subject. When you do that, you discover that there are perspectives on so many things that divide us that sit above where you have formulated your opinions. If it sits above it, you say, “Wait a minute. Maybe both of us are wrong, or there’s a whole other way to look at this.”

That diffuses the conflict that would otherwise unfold.

The entire book is about all of those subjects. Your man here decided to acquire that book for everyone in this room.

You have a signed copy by Neil for all of you here, personally signed with my overpriced fountain pen.

Getting back to your 30 years, I want to hit one subject before then, if we could. We’re going to talk about the fact that XPRIZE being 30 years old this year happens to map against some interesting thinking and logic constructs that Neil discusses in Chapter 2.

Before we get there, I want to talk about something that’s important as a precedent to that: the fact that our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it’s causing us a great deal of strife.

It’s understandable that we have linear brains. Why would it be anything other than that? Think of how we evolved on the Serengeti or wherever. You just don’t want to be eaten by the lion. That’s not exponential thinking; that’s very linear thinking.

“Can I get to the tree before the lion gets to me?” That’s linear. The speed of the lion is not increasing.

I don’t want to fault us for thinking that way, but self-awareness can bring you great benefits. If you know in advance that you have linear thinking, you can work around it.

Probably the cleanest example of the failure of our brain to understand exponentials is the one that involves a lake. There’s algae growing on a lake, and you see it there. The area of the lake covered by algae is doubling every day. It starts out as a little patch, and you come back the next day and it’s twice as big. The next day, it’s twice as big again.

That’s kind of scary. That’s classic exponential growth: doubling, doubling, doubling.

Correct. Now, the question is: You’re there, and you go away for a month. You come back, and the lake is half covered with algae. It’s awful; it’s half covered.

How much more time do you have to wait for the entire lake to be covered? Most people say, “Another month.”

That’s linear thinking. The entire lake will be covered in 1 more day, with the doubling per day.

That’s perhaps the simplest example of this.

There’s another old story, from ancient China, about a chessboard with 64 squares. Someone did a favor for the king—or the emperor—and the emperor wanted to return the favor. The person said, “I want 1 grain of rice for every square on the board, doubled for every square.”

The king didn’t know exponentials. By the time you reach 64, there’s not enough rice in China. It’s a mound as big as Mount Everest.

It’s 2 to the 64th power.

My favorite example is with my kids. I did this with my 2 boys.

Are they okay now? They’re fine?

They’re fine.

Were you performing experiments on your children?

I said, “Would you rather have $1 million now, or a penny doubled every day for 30 days?” They actually got it correct.

Nice.

After 30 days, there’s more than $5 million. You definitely want the penny doubled, although you might not have the $5 million by the end of the month. You might take the $1 million now and run.

The $5 million is the payout on the 30th day.

Yes. If you accumulate it all, you’re up around $10 million.

It stays in the family, though.

This linear thinking doesn’t just get us into trouble. It prevents us from realizing a possible future that awaits us.

My best example of this is from New Year’s Eve in 1900. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which was a newspaper—Brooklyn was its own town at the time; Brooklyn is the origin of the Dodgers, just putting it out there—did what anybody does at the beginning of a century: They wanted to imagine what the next century would bring.

There was a whole pullout section where economists, politicians, scientists, and engineers all proclaimed their predictions for the future. Here’s the most interesting prediction. It was by the head of the New York Central Railroad, so he was in the transportation business at the time.

He said, and I quote, “We can scarcely imagine that advances in transportation of the 20th century will be as great as were those in the 19th century.”

That has got to be the most boneheaded statement ever made by anyone, especially someone in the business of transportation.

He could not imagine the airplane, which was 3 years away. He could not imagine that we’d be flying supersonically or going to the Moon.

By 1930, we had already crossed the Atlantic in an airplane. The airplane would be invented 3 years later.

I think it was 1927—Lindbergh.

Thank you, Charles Lindbergh.

We also have Erik Lindbergh someplace here in the audience. Erik, where are you? I know Erik; we met. He’s an artist, Lindbergh.

Is that the one I remember?

Yes. I have one of your pieces on my desk. It’s one of those beautiful retro-style rockets coming off a launchpad from our Rocket Racing League in the desert.

Pleased to see you. I hadn’t seen you in 25 years.

Good to see you again, Erik.

See you another 25.

You go from 1900 to 1930. That’s a 30-year period.

Life in 1930 would be wholly unrecognizable to anyone from 1900. That 30-year increment got me thinking.

I was sitting in the library at Princeton. I didn’t get my master’s there, but I was a postdoc there. I was sitting in the astrophysics library, which is like dying and going to heaven because here’s your favorite subject and an entire library just for that subject.

They decided to put our feature journal, The Astrophysical Journal, which was founded in 1895, on 1 wall rather than on multiple shelves. There they were, all the journals of The Astrophysical Journal.

When I did this experiment—it might have been 1994 or 1995; that’s how old I am—I found the middle of the wall. It was 1965.

Thirty years.

I said, “That’s interesting.” What’s the middle of that point before that? It was 1930. The middle of that was 1900.

It doubled every 30 years. Of course, you can argue whether every published paper is exploratory or a real discovery. That’s a detail. The fact is, we were doubling our output in astrophysics every 30 years.

That got me thinking: How can we measure society that way?

How would you even go about doing that?

You can go to the patent records. I looked that up and reported on it in the book. Patents have a doubling time. It might have been 20 years, but it’s not 100 years and it’s not 5 years. It’s some low number of decades.

What was incredible was the consistency of it—the consistency of the doubling, the exponential.

At the risk of stating the obvious to this crowd—even though half of you didn’t know what a ZIP code was—I’m an educator, so I have to say this. The word “acronym” is actually modern. It was created not much longer before the ZIP code was introduced.

An acronym is a series of letters that spell something you can pronounce. IBM is an initialism, not an acronym. CIA is an initialism, not an acronym. SCUBA is an acronym: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. NASA is an acronym because you can say it.

I looked this up. I keep historical dictionaries, and I found a dictionary from 1947. The word wasn’t there.

That was my exact reaction.

There were so many abbreviations that came out of the Second World War. All of those that spelled words needed a word to describe them, and that word was “acronym.”

Look at old dictionaries; it’s not there. I love words that come in and out of favor and their stock value.

I don’t mean to brag, but I have a word that was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

What might that be?

I was kind of bragging there, wasn’t I?

Yeah.

I named the phenomenon where the Sun sets exactly on the grid of Manhattan. Manhattan’s streets and avenues are on a grid, and that happens twice a year. It’s beautiful because the Sun is aligned exactly with the grid and the buildings frame it.

I called it Manhattanhenge, as a throwback to Stonehenge.

But you’re better than that.

Sorry. I’ll work harder.

Yes, work exponentially harder than getting your word into the Oxford English Dictionary.

I’ll keep at it. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory, they spent billions on biodefense weapons—the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA?

Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now Viome has a product that I’ve personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit, and stool and can tell you so much about your health. They’ve tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn’t eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just 6 months of following Viome’s recommendations, members reported a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I’ve been using Viome for 3 years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to vi.com/Peter. I’ve asked Naine Jane, a friend of mine who’s the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You’ll find it at vom.com/Peter. So I asked, “Is there a way to measure this?” I don’t know if there’s a way, so I picked 30 years because it divides cleanly into the time frames I was looking at.

I started in 1870. I researched what everybody was doing in 1870, and then I went in 30-year increments to 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, and 2020, when this book was published.

The book came out in 2022.

It was written in 2020.

Conceived throughout that period.

Exactly. I went into each time frame and looked at what everybody was talking about as their modern way of living and at their predictions, which they were absolutely accurate about.

They were not accurate.

Let’s go from 1870 to 1900.

We had steamships. We had the Golden Spike, so the railroad was finished. People said, “Yes, we can cross the country,” as a new thing to celebrate.

We had the Orient Express across Europe.

The internal-combustion engine.

The automobile.

Between 1870 and 1900, the internal-combustion engine and the bicycle emerged. The modern bicycle as we know it was perfected. It has somebody’s name associated with it, which we’ve long forgotten.

That’s another means of transportation that did not exist in 1870. It’s odd when you think about it: There’s no ancient painting of anybody riding a bicycle. That’s just kind of weird—a fundamental discovery that has persisted ever since.

One of the things you point out that I think is so important to say here is that every age thinks that now is the most incredible time ever.

Yes. That is one of the great delusions of it all.

You say, “All the great discoveries happen while I’m here.” No.

If you plot an exponential, time is on the x-axis and whatever you’re measuring is on the y-axis. You have to use a linear scale to see this effect.

If you plot it, it will look like it’s mostly horizontal, and then in the last time frame it goes up like this. You’re at the top of that because you’re in the modern day. You say, “Look at all the new advances that just happened. What a privilege it is to be alive today. We must be special.”

We must be special.

Now, truncate it anywhere. I don’t care where you truncate it. Replot it, and it will look exactly the same. The exponential growth of today has compressed everything else relative to it.

You cut it off midway, and that’s the exponential you’ll think is your special day. But where you were is now back down here. Ten years ago, you thought you were at the top, and now 10 years later that top is back down here and you’re at the top again.

Because it keeps ascending.

Yes. This is another delusion we live in.

People keep thinking that, with Starship, artificial intelligence, and humanoid robots, we’re living in a special time. It’s like, “My God, we must be in a simulation. Otherwise, why would we be alive right now?”

That urge is strong. I recognize it, and I fall victim to it every now and then.

Then I look back. I have many books that go back several centuries. One of them is a book from 1898 written by a professor of astronomy. He was reporting on discoveries about the Sun.

It was the second edition of his book on the Sun. When was the first edition? 1895. He said, “In the last 3 years, we’ve learned so much about the Sun that I have to put out a new edition.”

He had no idea what he didn’t yet know. We don’t know that there’s thermonuclear fusion in the core. He didn’t know how the Sun was making energy. As far as he knew, there was a lump of coal cooling off over the past 10,000 years.

They were idiots, but they didn’t know it. They were celebrating what they knew. Reading passages such as that keeps you humble in the present moment, and that’s important.

Everyone thinks we’re super-special living right now, but none of us says, “My God, we’re so backward and so insignificant compared to what we’re going to be.” No one says that.

That would be a completely legitimate sentence to utter.

What XPRIZE is doing, of course, is making that happen. We’re trying to accelerate the future into the present day.

If you get everyone to think to themselves, “Gosh, we’re such idiots compared to what we’ll be in 100 years,” that might be another engine of progress, because nobody wants to be an idiot.

Let’s move on a couple of periods: 1900 to 1930.

From 1900 to 1930, we have the invention of the airplane. We have a total world war. We have a pandemic that kills more people than the war.

Up to 1930.

We discover the structure of the atom. We finally learn about the atom. Quantum physics is discovered. We’re in the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics, in the 1920s.

There is no creation, storage, or retrieval of digital information without an exploitation of the quantum. We’re on the heels of another quantum advance with quantum computing, but computing itself can only exist as we know it because of the foundations laid in that decade.

The radio comes online. We have early cinema. It’s silent and black-and-white, but it’s a moving image.

One of the early movies was The Great Train Robbery. It has a scene with a train coming toward the camera. People in the cinema were like, “Ah!” If you’d never seen that before, how would you react?

I saw something like that in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. Someone sees a television and says, “Who’s that man in the box?” Then he tests his gun and shoots it.

Because that’s what we do in America. If you’re from overseas, you shoot and then ask questions.

We also saw the diminishment of horsepower in favor of the automobile.

We have the electrification of cities.

There are 2 photographs, one from 1905 and one from 1915, on Fifth Avenue in New York on Easter Sunday. In the 1905 photo, there’s nothing but horse-drawn carriages. Nothing. They’re horse taxis. Horses are the currency of urban transportation and farming.

Ten years later, in 1915, there are no more than 30 automobiles for every 1 horse-drawn carriage. We went from a civilization that was literally and figuratively built on the backs of horses to one where, within 10 years, you couldn’t give away a horse.

You couldn’t give away a horse.

Let’s listen to the visionaries. In 1900, there was fear of the great manure catastrophe. There was an article written tongue-in-cheek, but it was about Manhattan, which is not a large place. You access it by bridges and tunnels; it’s an island.

There were horses, and horses do what they do. You feed them, and they poop. The poop goes in the street. You don’t take them to the horse bathroom; it’s in the street.

People’s whole job was to clean up the manure. What do you do with it? You bring it to another place, and it makes a pile. Then somebody else comes in with multiple horse-drawn carriages to haul the manure out of the island.

But those horses hauling the manure are also pooping. People imagined the manure catastrophe. Manure attracted flies. There were no indoor supermarkets back then, at least in the inner cities. Most food was sold by street carts: fish, fruit, all of it.

The flies were everywhere, and the smell permeated the conversation. You read the descriptions, and the horse urine and horse poop were just in the air.

There was a lot of discussion about what to do about the horse poop and the flies. They said, “Let’s put something in the feed so that when it comes out as poop, the flies won’t be attracted to it.” Another idea was, “What can we feed the horse to reduce the amount of poop that comes out the other side?”

NASA addressed this question over the Apollo era with its astronauts. They were sitting in a capsule and had to eat, but you didn’t want them to poop. You wanted to reduce the amount of poop. Why not feed them only things their bodies would use, with no waste at all?

The actual solution was the car.

Yes. That was the solution.

That’s a lesson to us all.

That happened within 10 years. Someone in 1900 coming back in 1930 would not recognize the landscape.

They would say, “Where’s the horse?”

“It’s a horse-drawn carriage without a horse.”

“How do you do that?”

“It has an engine.”

“What’s an engine?”

“You use fuel.”

“What’s fuel?”

“It’s gasoline.”

“Where do you get it?”

“From under the ground.”

Their heads would explode. That’s just 1900 to 1930.

Let’s not forget that Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic and that we electrify our cities.

I have another quote for you. In 1908, the quote was, “Man will never fly from New York to Paris.”

Do you know who said that?

Orville Wright.

Orville Wright.

Orville freaking Wright said that. He and his brother invent the airplane, but he cannot think exponentially. Getting to Paris is an exponential thought from flying a few yards in Kitty Hawk.

We go by meters, by the way.

You’re in America, Jack.

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The Boeing 707.

The 707. That was done in 1956?

1958.

Do you realize that in that 30-year period, from 1930 to 1960, the wingspan of the Boeing 707 was greater than the distance flown by the Wright brothers on their first flight?

That’s awesome.

That’s incredible.

Give it up for the Wright brothers.

And their sister.

Tell me about their sister.

We’ll find out. There’s a great documentary coming out that shows she actually did most of the work, as these things go.

Was she the one who took the picture of them? Somebody had to take the picture.

You left out that we also had an orbiting satellite.

What day and year was Sputnik?

October 4, 1957.

And 10 years before that, we broke the sound barrier.

If you had said to the Wright brothers, “One day, this will go faster than the speed of sound,” they would have laughed you out of Ohio.

In those 30 years, we get atomic power, a world war, and we crack the atom. We discover plutonium, named after the object formerly known as a planet.

Don’t get me started on Pluto. I want Pluto back.

What do you stand on that?

Yes or no?

It’s not a stance; it’s a matter of what is true.

What do you stand on whether Earth is round?

It’s not a stance. It’s just the truth.

It’s a definition.

Pluto had it coming.

Earth, Earth’s Moon, dwarf planet—my butt. Our Moon has 5 times the mass of Pluto. I bet they never told you that.

No.

More than half of Pluto’s volume is ice. If it were brought to where Earth is right now, heat from the Sun would evaporate that ice and it would have a tail. That is not the kind of behavior you expect from a planet.

Don’t get me started.

Before then, I love the periodic table, and I have to say this. When Herschel discovered the planet Uranus—and it was finally named Uranus, properly pronounced—within a few years, a brand-new element was discovered. It turned out to be unstable; we would use the term “radioactive” later on. They named it after the new planet: uranium, element 92.

Now watch. Some years after that, we discover another planet and name it Neptune. The next element in the periodic table, heavier than uranium, had not yet been named or discovered. It was element 93, and they named it after the next planet: neptunium.

Then there was element 94, not yet discovered and waiting its turn. The object formerly known as a planet, Pluto, was discovered in 1930. Shortly after that, we discovered element 94 and named it plutonium.

The periodic table preserves uranium, neptunium, and plutonium in sequence, with Pluto getting an element named on false pretenses.

We discovered plutonium in 1930. It was weaponized, turned into a bomb, and deployed 15 years later.

That is the pace of what was going on at the time. The 2 bombs were a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. We knew uranium would work; we were not sure about plutonium. It was the new boy on the block.

That’s what was tested, as famously portrayed in the film Oppenheimer. They tested the plutonium bomb, not the uranium bomb, and that’s the one that was later dropped on Nagasaki.

The point is, between 1930 and 1960, we crack the atom, weaponize the atom, break the sound barrier, and go into space.

Oh my gosh—was there anything about 1960 that would be recognizable to anyone from 1930?

I think not. Let’s keep going.

From 1960 to 1990, there’s a lot. Computers go from specialized, room-sized equipment serving the military and scientists to things you have on your desk—stand-alone computers.

This is something the movie *2001: A Space Odyssey* got wrong. When was the movie released?

1968.

He’s good.

He’s good.

In 1968, the movie presented a vision of life in the year 2001. We all saw it and thought, “Wow, that’s how we’ll be living in 2001.”

The main ship’s computer was 1 huge computer because, back then, if you wanted a more powerful computer, it had to be bigger. The idea that computers would get smaller and smaller and be carried on your hip wasn’t part of the thought process. They were linearly extrapolating.

They did get something like FaceTime on a tablet.

Correct. We can cherry-pick that and say, “Look how brilliant they were. They got this correct.”

Arthur C. Clarke said that in the year 2000 there would be 50,000 people living and working in space. He might have been trying to think exponentially, but he definitely got that wrong.

In the year 2003, people were living and working in space.

Space has a unique problem. Up until Sputnik launched, space was an inaccessible domain. People imagined it would be centuries before we landed on the Moon. When Sputnik was launched, everyone went into exponential mode, but they erred in the wrong direction.

Kennedy announced that we were going to the Moon before the decade was out. He said that at a time when we didn’t yet have a vessel capable of carrying people that could launch without blowing up.

It was prophetic. “Before the decade is out”—that was a bold prediction. Everyone trying to predict the future said, “We’ll be on the Moon by 1969, on Mars by 1980 or 1985.” The Space Task Group was predicting that by 1984 we would be going to Mars.

They were clueless.

On budgets.

No, the budget is irrelevant here, for the reason I’m about to explain.

The problem is that everyone naively presumed, “We’re Americans and we’re explorers. That’s why we’re going to the Moon.” They assumed it was a natural progression of exploration. At no time did anyone ask themselves why we were doing it.

They presumed it was because it was in our DNA. It may be in our DNA, but it doesn’t happen unless somebody pays for it. Who’s going to pay for it? Not just anybody. Not just the National Science Foundation. Not just NASA. Somebody has to write the check. Who’s going to write the check?

Congress.

When Kennedy says, “We’ll put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth,” we think that’s the stirring rhetoric of a future-thinking young president.

Go back to that same speech, delivered on May 25, 1961, to a joint session of Congress. What happened just 6 weeks before that?

Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space and come back safely.

What was the date?

April 12, 1961.

Six weeks later, a joint session of Congress is called.

I have to put a pin in that and come back to it: Why did we lose our minds when Sputnik launched? Sputnik was a radio transmitter launched in the hollowed-out shell of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

If that could be deployed over our country, it meant Russia could deliver a nuclear warhead over our airspace. Back then, there were international restrictions on access to your airspace. You couldn’t just fly anywhere unless you had permission.

But there was no treaty about outer space—the space above your airspace. We lost our minds. Within a year, NASA was founded, and this became a military priority.

Thank you.

It does go back to budgets.

No, it’s not just a budget. It’s not just adding a number here or a number there. I’m talking about motivation.

In that speech, Kennedy said, “If the events of recent weeks”—he couldn’t even utter Yuri Gagarin’s name—“are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to know whether the world will follow the path of freedom or the path of tyranny.”

That was the battle cry against communism that dislodged the money to go to the Moon. That’s what did it. It’s not just, “Let’s add the budget.” It’s, “What is your motivation?”

I agree with you. It was the—I don’t want to die—but it was, you know—

What I’m saying is that this is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. It’s really not a matter of a budget; it’s a matter of what is motivating us.

The motivation for our guy to fly across the Atlantic was that there was a paycheck at the other end of it. That wasn’t about a budget. It was about motivation.

I wrote an essay in the late 1990s for *The Columbia History of the 20th Century*. It was called “Paths to Discovery.” I wanted to assess the drivers—not the budgets, the drivers—of people undertaking major projects and civilizations committing to major projects.

If I could find out what motivated people over the centuries and millennia, maybe I could find a way to motivate people to go to Mars, because it’s really expensive.

I set up a table, and at the end there were only 3 motivators, not 5.

Fear, curiosity, and greed.

Curiosity is not one of the motivators. Are you going to let me tell you what the 3 are? I did the work.

Fine. But a motivator—

Listen to me.

Number 1 is the “I don’t want to die” motivator. That’s fear.

We’ll give you that.

Next is, “I don’t want to die poor.” That’s the money one.

That’s great.

The third is the perceived or real will of royalty or deity, much less in operation today than it was in past centuries.

List the most expensive things humans have ever done. There are the Great Pyramids, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, the Human Genome Project, and the cathedral building of Europe. If you list them, we can quibble over the sequence, but all of them will be drawn from one of those 3 drivers.

In modern times, remove royalty and deity. What remains is economics and war. Everyone thinks we went to the Moon for curiosity’s sake and that we would keep going.

The moment we got to the Moon, looked over our shoulder, and saw that the Russians weren’t there, we ended the Apollo program. We had Apollo 18. There were 6 years more to go.

There is a scientific ratio of the motivator of fear to curiosity. It’s the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget.

That ratio is infinite.

Unfortunately.

Real quick, I’ve been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by 4 PhD women who determined a 10-amino-acid sequence that is senolytic, that kills senescent cells in your skin, and this literally reverses the age of your skin. I think it’s one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you’re interested, check out the show notes. I’ve asked my team to link to it below. Let’s finish up the 1990s by saying that we had the desktop computer, women entering the workforce, transistors creating the entire chip revolution, and we went to the Moon 9 times. It was a pretty good period.

From 1990 to 2020, let’s take it to this last 30-year segment. A lot has occurred there.

From 1960 to 1990, the Cold War explains much of this. From 1990 to 2020, that’s within the lifetime of most of us in this room. I remember 1990, with the dial-up modem, trying to connect back to my computer at my office. The internet wasn’t really a thing yet.

In the movie *You’ve Got Mail*, people looked forward to their email. “Oh my gosh, I’ve got mail. Let me stop everything and go read it.”

One of my favorites is 1989. If you had a fax machine, you were a badass.

*Back to the Future Part II* was released in 1989 and took place in 2015. The filmmakers imagined what the future would look like.

Our lead character, Marty, irritates his bosses and gets fired. He’s living in a home of the future. Any home in 1989 has 1 fax machine; that home has 4 fax machines because it’s the home of the future.

His boss alerts him that he’s fired through the fax, and you see this montage of fax machines showing, “You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired.” The fax machine is dot-matrix—in the future.

We sequenced the human genome during this period of time. That was pretty extraordinary.

At the beginning of the 1990s, AT&T had a series of advertisements called “You Will.” They asked, “Have you ever wanted to do whatever?” Then they said, “You will. AT&T will bring it to you.”

They got a lot right; I don’t want to take that away from them. But one of the things they showed was somebody on a beach chair, in the surf, working on a tablet. That was a good prediction.

The voice-over said, “Have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You will.”

That’s linear thinking about the future.

If I were to leave people with a lesson, it would be: Try to break out of your linear thinking and imagine what other technologies might come from the side—things you’re not even thinking about.

Think about convergence. That’s what the smartphone is. The smartphone didn’t invent GPS. It didn’t invent digital storage. It didn’t even invent touchscreens or the digital camera.

The touchscreen was invented by an NSF grant to the U.S. archives because they didn’t want people typing on keyboards to get information. They developed a screen that could respond to you as you moved through the facility as a tourist.

That was the innovation, just for that purpose. Then it transformed our lives in almost every way.

If you show someone from 1990 a restaurant today and they ask, “Where’s the menu?” you say, “It’s that little pattern of dots in the middle of the table.” They won’t be able to relate.

“Can we get a taxi?”

“No, I’ll just pull out my smartphone.”

“What’s a smartphone?”

How many years was it from 1990 before the smartphone arrived?

Seventeen years?

This whole thing about, “I have a cell phone,” and imagining that was the future—I remember seeing the movie Wall Street and seeing Gordon Gekko on the beach with his shoulder-mounted cell phone. I thought, “Wow, I wish I were rich so I could have a phone like that and talk without any wires.”

That was my imagining of the future. I had no idea what the future would bring.

One last thing. You have kids. Have your kids said to you, “Dad, one day I want to grow up and be a YouTube influencer, and I want to earn more money than you’ve ever made in your life doing it”?

These are conversations we don’t even know how to have.

You’re here in Los Angeles. I’m driving down the street, and there’s a car with no driver going by. It’s making left turns.

“Where’s the driver?”

People in Los Angeles have seen these. The driverless cars are just in the middle of traffic. You don’t know where they’re going, but they know how to belong there. They have all the sensors and cameras.

I don’t know if you know this, but when people say, “Let’s imagine 2050,” you can’t.

That’s my favorite request on stage: “Can you give us a prediction for 2050?”

I can barely give a prediction for 2030.

I still do it, but I’m doing it in the spirit of how humbled I’ll be when the actual 2050 arrives, based on what I’ve researched over the past 150 years.

I’m going to make 3 predictions.

First, we will have designer drugs. They’ll analyze your genome and find drugs that will have no side effects for you. Why do we have to be a statistic in the reported side effects? I’m not very prone to side effects, so I generally ignore that, but many people are.

The medicine should do only what it’s supposed to do. It shouldn’t make you throw up, give you diarrhea, cause depressive thoughts, or produce rashes. Fix that, medical community. That’s 1.

Second, I think in the not-too-distant future all cars on the road will be self-driving and electric.

You say no.

That’s why it can’t be?

No.

We went from horses to cars in 10 years. I’m talking about going from cars to another kind of car. Surely that can take less time than going from horses to cars.

Self-driving and electric.

You start with only self-driving cars in the HOV lane. Then those cars know where all the other cars are. You want to change lanes? It tells the other car, “I’m changing lanes now.” They part, it changes lanes, and they come back together.

The cars can even text and drive at the same time, with no loss of acuity on the road, because they’re electric computers. They can drive 120 miles per hour with 2 car lengths between them because there won’t be anything they don’t anticipate.

Once you see that cutting down your travel time, I think it will happen quickly.

Suppose you’re a car enthusiast. What do you do?

You like your classic car. There will be car parks where you can drive them.

Is that any different from people who like riding horses? You go to the stables and ride horses. It’s a quaint memory of a bucolic past.

You’ve got your Ferrari or whatever. You take an electric car to the car park, and you can do your thing, just as people now ride horses.

The last thing: I’d like to see space. People ask, “Where should we go next in space?”

All of space. Why does it have to be a next destination? When we built the interstate system, which cost about $100 billion—about the same as going to the Moon—what drove that?

War drove that.

What’s the other name for the interstate system?

The Eisenhower Interstate System.

He went to Europe in the Second World War and saw the autobahn survive rain and snow. Tanks could roll over it without falling off the side of the road. He said, “I want that in my country as a defense project.”

The initial money for that came from defense. The interstate system was informed by our posture as a country that didn’t want to get invaded and wanted to keep its military ready.

You may know that the interstate system doesn’t go over mountains; it goes through them. After every distance, there’s a certain stretch that’s straight so you can land an airplane on it if you have to. It’s built to military specifications.

That’s how the money got dislodged.

When you build the interstate, you don’t say, “Let’s just go from New York to Los Angeles.” You give people choices. You send the interstate everywhere and let people’s creativity take them wherever they want—to start whatever businesses they want or lead whatever free life they want in a country we still think is free.

When I think of space, I don’t think of a rocket going here or there. I think of a warehouse of strap-on boosters. Somebody says, “I want to do science on the backside of this comet that’s coming through. We need these 3 boosters in this rocket, and we’ll schedule the launch in 3 months.”

Think about that. Then the entire solar system becomes our backyard. It’s not this other place; it’s a place we’ll have a relationship with.

Let’s mine some asteroids. We have wars on Earth over limited access to resources that are plentiful in the universe, in our own backyard.

The future of space is one where an entire category of warfare will be rendered obsolete because access to resources will be unlimited. We’ll still fight over which gods you worship or what your skin color is, probably, but this category of war could be gone forever if the entire solar system had lanes that you could take. You would decide where you wanted to go, rather than having a single national destination.

The only thing we know about these predictions is that they’re going to be wrong.

Let’s give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We are woefully overscheduled, but I cannot not take a few questions. Let me take a few questions. Kids first.

We’ve got microphones. Raise your hand.

Yes, go ahead.

When you were mentioning all of the innovations in the different periods, you didn’t list contraception. There are 1,000 things we didn’t list, but I think contraception is a really specific and important one, particularly where we are at this time.

There are advances that are very important in our culture, especially in health and well-being. There’s the discovery of vaccines, although that goes even farther back, and the discovery of sanitation. These contributed to our life expectancy.

It’s not just the discovery of contraception; it’s how widely available it became and how inexpensive it was. Women entered the workforce, women gained the right to vote, and all of these things occurred during the last century at the exact same time.

That was a huge social change: women in the workforce, women being able to vote, and population growth.

I tried to keep the advances international, and voting rights came to different people at different times.

People say it’s the worst ever for women, Black people, trans people, or gay people. It’s not the worst ever. If I had a time machine and said, “You can go to any time you want, in the past or the future,” and you were a female, a person of color, or on the gender spectrum, there is no time in the past that you would choose as much better.

In 1960, the Sunday paper had a section called the women’s section. It had the recipes and everything else. That was the women’s place. All of that is different and gone.

I’m saying that if you’re not a white male, go to the future, not the past, in this time machine.

Fantastic. Let’s go over here, and then we’ll come here.

I’m an undergraduate student. I think I’m the only one here. You were a big portion of my childhood and why science was cool in the late ’90s and early 2000s. My question is: What would your 12-year-old self say to you now?

I don’t know. If my 12-year-old self showed up right here, maybe he would say, “You’re pretty cool.”

What would you tell your 12-year-old self now?

You did not ask that question. Everybody asks that one. I’m saying you’re not answering it.

When I was 12, I wasn’t certain. I knew at age 9 that I was interested in the universe. By age 11, when adults asked that annoying question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would say, “An astrophysicist.”

By age 12, I wasn’t entirely certain I could make a career of being an astrophysicist. So I made sure that when I went into college, I majored in physics, which has many more pathways than just astrophysics.

My college degree is in physics. I even considered engineering, just to broaden my job spectrum. I would be delightfully surprised that my deep interest at age 12 could be pursued all the way into adulthood.

Excellent. Yes, one last question.

First, I want to thank you for carrying the torch of Carl Sagan, for the love of science, and for bringing it to the present.

Thank you. Carl famously said, “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

If you had to create an XPRIZE for astrophysics, what would you choose?

What I would choose would be the same as what would get a Nobel Prize.

No, I’m asking what you would want the world to work on—a 10x, bold problem, a moonshot, something that people don’t think is possible but that might happen if enough people worked on it.

Scour the solar system for life that has a genesis other than what occurred on Earth.

If that happened, it would get a Nobel Prize.

We don’t need an XPRIZE for the science because we already have a reward system. The Nobel Prize is retrospective; it rewards something done in the past. An XPRIZE is about incentivizing new people to take on something worth doing that people feel is too limited.

You mean a single goal.

How about this? I have my own personal XPRIZE. I want suborbital flight so that I can go to Tokyo, have lunch, and come back to New York for dinner. If you’re suborbital, any 2 places on Earth are within 45 minutes of each other.

It’s pitched every other year here at Visioneering.

Where is it?

Asteroid detection.

We’ve got that.

I like asteroid mining: the first person or group that can send a lander to an asteroid, dig material from it, and bring it back to Earth—or take it to the Moon, where it might be useful for colonies that would be set up there.

How’s that for an XPRIZE?

That sounds great: an asteroid XPRIZE.

Less than the cost of getting to the Moon.

Again, let’s give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson.