On April 27, Memorial Hall hosted a NC Science Festival event titled “An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson.” Tickets to the show, which ranged from $18 to $125, were sold out. In this Q&A, Tyson, a renowned astrophysicist who regularly appears on the The Daily Show and Colbert Report, talked with The Daily Tar Heel and Reesenews about promoting an innovating culture and his recent appearance on The Daily Show.

Paula Seligson, The Daily Tar Heel: Do you think encouraging innovation at the university level is sufficient, or is it something that should start earlier on in a person’s education?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: If you go back to the 1960s there was the World’s Fair in New York City, 1964, and that was all about tomorrow. It’s easy to think to yourself that it was things like the World’s Fair that created the attitude that we should dream about tomorrow. However, I think it’s the opposite of that. I think it was the decade of discovery, because we were headed to the moon, that created the culture out of which the World’s Fair arose.

So for you to ask what should we do to promote innovation implies that innovation is something that we need to convince people that it is a good thing to do, with some kind of program or possibly even arm-twisting. And I claim, if the government as we did in the 1960s… takes on a huge mission statement… then great discoveries will be writ large on the daily papers and people will see what that is and what it means and the kinds of professions that drive it. And they will feel compelled from within to want to innovate, to want to study in the STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and math.

That’s the climate that I look forward to creating. Not that I can create it, but it takes a nation to do that.

Kelsey Tsipis, Reesenews: I was wondering if you had any advice or what you think the media can do to make science topics more engaging for viewers?

Tyson: If we are going into space in a big way, discoveries will write their own headlines … 85 percent of the time (I’m interviewed on TV by the media), it’s because the universe flinched and they came to me for a soundbite. It’s not because I force anybody to try to have to care. They actually do care.

I used to think I was biased that the universe was a cool place. I’m not biased, it actually is cool. And if you just show that to people, they will realize how cool it is themselves. And in fact, the future I long for is not one where everybody is a scientist or an engineer. That would be a boring future. I want the artists, the journalists. I want the comedians, the actors, the lawyers. I want everybody who fleshes out society. But in an innovation culture, those other professions, not directly derived from the STEM fields, they then embrace those discoveries … That would be a space faring culture.

Seligson: What should we do now to get to the point that we’re at a space faring culture?

Tyson: Right now NASA comes to Congress every year with a hat in hand, waiting for the handout. You know, it’s like the breadline, here’s your ration. And I’m thinking, “Excuse me, this is NASA here you’re talking about.” And NASA, embodied within this agency, are the space faring dreams of a nation. So what needs to happen is our future in space has to be a fundamental part of what the electorate cares about and when that happens it is no longer a handout in the budget cycle. It is no longer a function of the political whims of one candidate or another because we the people have compelled our elected officials to do this.

Tsipis: Can you elaborate on what the social and cultural implications of billionaires starting asteroid drilling?

Tyson: I think that’s cool. That’s a headline that should have been around 20 years ago, as an extension of the fact that we’d gone into space and visited the moon.

If you look at Columbus, he was a discoverer of course, but the people who wrote the checks were not discoverers. Queen Isabella, she didn’t say, “Oh, uh, Chris, when you come back just tell us the things you saw and draw pictures of the plants and flowers that you noticed and report that to the academic halls of our land.” No, she said, “Here’s a satchel of Spanish flags, plant them at any land you hit and, by the way, find a shorter trade route to the far East.”

There were whole other priorities that were going on there that actually had nothing or very little to do with exploration. And I’ve come to accept that. I don’t like it, but I recognize that what drives major expenditures of nations is the help and the survival of that nation. We shouldn’t sweep that fact under the rug, this is just a conduct of states in the interest of their own survival.

Listen to the interview:

Watch Dr. Tyson on The Daily Show the day before he came to UNC:

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