The Babbling Bee

There are very few people on this earth whom I can honestly say that I hold a great deal of deep respect and intense admiration of. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of those individuals who has managed to captivate me ever since I discovered his talks on the internet some time ago. Yesterday I had the pleasure and honor of being able to attend one of his talks at the Colorado University Macky's Auditorium in Boulder, Colorado. 

When I saw the event posted about a month and a half ago in my Skeptics Meetup group, I was giddy! Quickly I snapped up the tickets, knowing that this opportunity would probably never present itself again unless I traveled to see him out of state. I suppose if it wasn't far, I would definitely do so especially after last nights experience. But you can't go wrong only being about two hours away from the event itself!

I ended up carpooling with my boyfriend and another woman who was attending the skeptic event for the first time. The drive was passed with excited talks about ourselves, history with religion, and general banter regarding the upcoming event. Overall the excitement was rather high.

After arriving in Boulder and lucking out on getting a parking spot, we poured out of the car and walked a short bit to the event hall. It was cold, but that was to be expected given our location and it is, after all, February. We had to wait outside just a wee bit before getting ushered indoors. After getting tickets scanned, we quickly found our way to our seats.  The event started about 25 minutes after.   

Once basic introductions were out of way, Dr. Tyson came out on the stage and was greeted by a thunderous applause with whoops and whistles scattered among the audience members. After a few moments of fiddling with the laptop and getting his presentation on the big screen, he sent out the following tweet:

"Whenever the Twitterverse calls, and the Spirit of Science moves me, I feel compelled to Textify."

After that, he proceed to slip out of his shoes and remove his suit jacket as he gave us the introduction to the talk: America's Past Present and Future in Space. I had to giggle a little when the shoes were kicked off. I just had this image in my head like he had just entered a house, pulled off the shoes, and was about to get comfortable even though the house was filled with a huge audience. 

The talk consisted of Dr. Tysons thoughts of space; how far we have come from our past and where we are going in terms of the future. He touched briefly about the American perception that we were the pioneers of space. That much of our society has forgotten that many discoveries have been made by scientists outside our country. There were lists put together detailing the accomplishments of the Soviets vs the US when the space race was on. I knew that the Soviet Union had done a lot in terms of research, but I had no idea the number of achievements they saw during that time. I was aware of them putting the first man and woman in space. It was news to me they sent up the first black man too. This is just only one example, there were many others that I sadly never knew about. 

Another point that was stressed was the importance of letting go of old ideas in order to generate new ones. Technology drastically changes today even within a two year time frame. Dr. Tyson showed several old technological devices as a means to illustrate where we started with that tech, then showed what we have today as that tech advanced. Personal computers, cell phones, commercial aviation, inline skates, to name a few, all underwent massive advancement.  One of the things he was frustrated with, was this attachment to old ideas within the space program. Apollo worship, or as he coined it Apollo Necrophilia, has been holding back the further development to get us into space. As none of us would be caught dead using a cellphone from 1975 today, why do we persist using the shuttles that are just as outdated?

He also spoke about rekindling the fire of exploration within society again. Part of the problem we face is that war is the biggest driver of change so unless we have an identified competitor working towards a goal, there is no need to push to obtain this knowledge on our own accord. Which is a very fair point. I seriously wish that natural curiosity would be the motivating factor for space exploration or any kind of research or discovery for that matter. Why does humanity need a 'competitor' to drive it to excel in science?   

One of the more troubling things that was shown was a graph that showed science progress over the years. It first showed the continents, in their relative size, then the following slide showed these continents either increased or decreased in size based off their research and tech developments. America, Europe, and Japan are currently the world's top contributors. However, there was a slide following this that projected what the next ten years might look like should the US continue in its trend of research which has slowly been on the decline. This model projected that we would drop by nearly a half, and that China would replace us as the lead in research. Scary thought, that we would fall that quick in a short period of time.

During Q & A there were some interesting questions asked. I'll break down the ones I thought were interesting/ fun.

What future technology would you really like to have?

A: He said that while he could give a list of things he'd like to see become reality, he's more interested in technology that we haven't thought of that would be beneficial. These achievements would be brought from a culmination of various sciences rather than a single one. In this, he gave the example off the MRI and how it's technology was something that spanned a variety of different sciences. That we also will need people who are proficient in communicating between two different sciences.

One thing he did mention that he would love to see humanity accomplish was being able to harness earth nature energy sources like volcanoes and hurricanes, and be able to use that to power our cites. (I think he mentioned this earlier on the talk but my memory is faulty here)

If you could visit an alien culture, what question would you ask them?

A: Why are you still maintaining this zoo?

He based this answer on if we were visited by a far superior species capable of intergalactic travel. Dr. Tyson speculates that it would not be us who defines ourselves because any species that is vastly superior would define us as they see fit, just like we do with other species on our planet.

If you could travel anywhere in the universe, where would you go?

A: The center of a black hole.

Overall the event was amazing and if I have the opportunity to see him in person again, I will do so. This talk was very captivating and opened up the opportunity for dialog on idea generation for the future. It's one of the charms about Dr. Tyson that I really love. That his method of presenting his  ideas are done with a mix of humor and seriousness that can stimulate discussion among all types of people. I wish he could have spoke longer.

Admittedly, I was slightly disappointed that he wasn't signing because I would have loved to get his signature on the DVD I worked on that Richard Dawkins also signed. 

By the way, if you don't follow him on twitter, this is his account: http://twitter.com/#!/neiltyson