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Alan White 0:05
Good evening. My name is Alan White, and I'm the Dean of Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences here at East Carolina University. On behalf of Harriot College and its generous supporters, I'm pleased to welcome you to the premiere lecture in our fourth series of the Voyages of Discovery lecture series. This evenings lecture is presented in honor of the late Dr. W. Keats Sparrow, Dean Emeritus, who led the college from 1990 to 2005. Tragically for the college and the community, Dr. Sparrow passed away last November. In many respects, the Voyages of Discovery lecture series was Dr. Sparrow's brainchild. Launched in 2007, the Voyages of Discovery lecture series has advanced the spirit of exploration and discovery that Dr. Sparrow recognizes the very hallmark of the liberal arts. Much as Dr. Sparrow would have had it, this series honors the rich intellectual life of Thomas Harriot, an English Renaissance man whose remarkable and diverse accomplishments in the arts and sciences are a model for our own voyages of discovery. Throughout the academic year, Harriot College partners with members of its Advancement Council, and other generous supporters, to offer a program of distinguished speakers whose pioneering work, in their many fields, continues to shape our appreciation and understanding of the world around us. In addition for this lecture, we're happy to recognize a new partner, GoScience, for its generous support for tonight's lecture. We're proud to offer a diverse group of distinguished professors for the 2010, 2011 season. Our previous lecture addressed slavery during the Ottoman Empire, and during the final two lectures of the season, topics will include the reinvention of Christianity, and the history of an exceptionally popular outdoor dramatic production about The Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. Was such an outstanding slate of presentations, the Voyages of Discovery lecture series continues to maintain its standing as the premiere intellectual event of eastern North Carolina. This evening, we're honored to have Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, renowned astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. As the presenter of the premiere lecture on your program, it says to discuss on the origins of the universe, but I think he's going to tell you something different. Immediately following this evening's presentation, you'll have the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session with Dr. Tyson. Microphones will be at the front of either of the central aisles here, and if you have a question for Dr. Tyson- Tyson, please come down. Following that question and answer session, Dr. Tyson has generously agreed to sign any books that you have, so please bring the books up to the table that we have here on the stage for signing. Special thanks goes to ECU's Dowdy Student Stores for handling the sale of Dr. Tyson's books in the lobby of Wright Auditorium. Now I'll turn the podium over to Dr. John Meredith, Program Director for Global Health at ECU's Brody School of Medicine who will introduce our speaker this evening, thank you.

Dr. John Meredith 3:35
Well, thank you Dean White, that was- that was great. Very, very impressed, very pleased. Your hard work and efforts have really made this lecture series the high quality- superb quality lecture series that it has become to be known. You've really furthered the development of the Voyage of Discoveries lecture series, and it's been a tremendous asset to East Carolina University into the Greenville area. We have an outstanding gentleman and scholar educator, researcher tonight, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Dr. Tyson was born and raised in New York City. He was educated in public schools. He went on to earn his BA in physics from Harvard University, and his PhD for- in astrophysics from Columbia University. His professional research interests are extraordinarily broad. They include things such as star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, the structure of our own Milky Way, and even how to raise science-literate children. He has served on two presidential commissions regarding the future of space exploration and we'll talk more about that subject tonight. In addition to his dozens of professional publications Dr. Tyson has written and continues to write for the public, his two latest books are the "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries", which was a New York Times bestseller, and most recently, "The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet". He has appeared on camera, host of PBS NOVA spin off program, Science Now and most recently, the PBS NOVA program, The Pluto Files. He is the recipient of 12 honorary degrees and doctorates, and NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal. His contributions to public appreciation of the cosmos and education have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of an asteroid, 13123 Tyson. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose directorship of the Hayden Planetarium. But on a personal note, and this is something that, to me, means a tremendous amount. I first met Neil 12 years ago, when the thought of a regional science center was just that, a thought. He was the one person who kept telling me John, keep doing what you're doing, keep working at it. The result of his inspiration, his motivation, and he is truly an inspiring individual and lecturer, is now GoScience, a reality. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of East Carolina University, the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences and GoScience, I'd like to present to you Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson 7:41
Oh, I should've removed my gum earlier, sorry. Okay. Well, this is my first time in Greenville and it's like, it's a friendly, lovely place, and I'm sure you have weather like this all the time. That's what uh- it's what they assured me when I landed at the airport, let me just get a little comfortable here. I like just getting comfortable. So, oh you get to see what's going on there, okay. So let's get rid of that. And that. Yeah. Okay. I got it. Did that come up? So I- it was advertised that we would chat about cosmic origins. And, while I could have done that, I just thought there's not enough teeth in that. I want to take you places that have teeth, take you places that have geopolitical, social, cultural consequences. And so I want to tell you all about the past, present and future of space exploration, which then lives within the spirit of this series, which is Voyages of Discovery. I think it'll live better with this series than just talking about cosmic origins- During Q&A, you can ask, that'd be fine. You could ask about Pluto. Get over it, just in a summary there. I'm just saying, I just- we could talk about the end of the world that won't happen in 2012. There's a lot of things during Q&A Week places we can go. I'm here. I'm here for the night, so we can chill. But until then, the next 45 minutes, I want to take you to the frontier of space exploration and alert you to how deluded most space enthusiasts are. That will be what my attempt to convince you of before the 45 minutes is up. So it's a reality check on our dreams of space exploration. Okay? So the slides are like- they're split. So if I gesture here, I mean no offense to you over here. And vice versa, okay, that's the ground rules here. Doesn't mean I love them more if I happen to be over here for a minute. Oh by the way, I don't know if you notice the slide the- the flower arrangement. It's got planet orbs and things- very beautiful. It's very beautiful.

So well done, whoever thought that through. That was really, very nice. Very good. So do you see this little birdie at the bottom? If you're over 30, I just can't explain that to you. It just- there is no explanation I could possibly give you that will give you any understanding of what that is. Okay, if you're under 30, you know what that is? And that's the handle. Okay. That's just how that goes. It's just one of those things. I apologize in advance. So this is the Twitterverse. You know about that. So I tweet the universe, they're mostly brain droppings of an astrophysicist, but every day I just sort of chat about things that cross my mind. Like, a few hours ago, well- this morning, coming through Charlotte- Charlotte. Switching to a plane to land in Greenville, an ever smaller plane that that required. And, so I was a gate C14 and I had to get to gate E9. And I think I walked a mile. And that includes moving- moving walkways. I think it was a mile, so I sat down. I had to tweet that. So I said, "In Charlotte, just went from gate C14 to E9. I think it was a mile. Can't wait until cosmic wormholes allow that to happen quickly." Okay. To connect airport gates to airport gates. Then there was a whole slew of replies. If you had cosmic wormholes, you wouldn't need the airport. So I'm going to tweet right now, actually. There we go. And there we go, let's... Hang on. Just bear with me. Okay. At East... Carolina... University. Univer-sity. Did I spell right? No? -iversity. How about that? Ready... no. So, thousand people in attendance. Ready to rock the house. How about that? Okay!

Tweet! That just got tweeted, there it goes. And, you know what's really creepy? It's just scary creepy, is that within a few seconds, these are people's comments who- "I always want to hate my science teacher. What would Neil Tyson or Bill Nye the Science Guy do?" And so, but what happens is, the people who- who read- who live in the Twitterverse, right? And they, I don't know if they do anything else in life. It's a huge time sink. Everybody's sharing 140 character snippets of thoughts. So we'll tune back in on this a little later and see if people had any comments on it. But let's get on with the program. There we go, sorry. Delusions of space enthusiasts, you know, often talks such as this are just veiled commercials for some book the person wrote. That's typically the case, and this is no exception to that. I just want to say. Just- disclosure, you know, actually- Actually, the content of today's talk is not in any of these books, because I actually don't believe in book talks. Because just buy the book. Why talk about a book when you just buy the book. I'll talk about something else. And right now I'm talking about something else that will- actually I learned an hour ago, will become a book in nine months. And it's all about space and the travels and the travails that we experienced trying to get there. Can we raise the volume on this mic a bit, please? I think you've lowered it since earlier this afternoon. I think that's what happened. So, let's see what happens here. I'm going to actually do this in show presenter mode. There we go. And... network. Yes. There we go. Okay. Embarrassing quotes, let's go back in time. Let's go back at a time when we believed people knew what they were talking about. Okay. Let's see. Let's see what we have here. Here's a good one. "It's scarcely possible that the 20th century will witness improvements in transportation that will be as great as were those in the 19th century." The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 30th, 1900. They were riding high. The railroad was crossing the country, the car, the internal combustion engine automobile had just been invented. Bicycles were in great use. "Scarcely possible that the 20th century will witness improvements as great as the 19th." This is a boneheaded comment. What would happen three years after this? Airplanes would be invented, for example. So here's somebody who was completely clueless. Here's one, you ready? "Man will not fly for 50 years." That's 1901, that was spoken. Well, who said that? Wilbur Wright to his brother Orville! Now, that's just embarrassing. I think you know, please! The two dudes who invented flight, did it here, right? North Carolina, as your license plates so boldly shows, making Ohioans feel embarrassed that they didn't think of that first. Wilbur and Orville are from Ohio, but you were on the case there. That's embarrassing, 50 years. What is that? Here's one. Oh, do you know the actual date that Wilbur and Orville first flew? December 17th, very good. What year? 1903. Let's find an editorial in the New York Times, December 10th, 1903. I'll read it for you. "We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and money involved in further airship experiments. Life is short. He's capable of services to humanity, incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly. For students and investigators of the Langley type, there are more useful experiments." Seven days later, Wilbur and Orville flew. This is the New York Times being boneheaded. It's not the first or the last time they were boneheaded. They wrote an editorial criticizing when we demoted Pluto in New York, and then they retracted it later, but didn't say "oh, we messed up" before, they just gave the new view like they somehow- they come up- came up with it! Boneheaded. What else do we have? Okay, here we go. "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." This is Orville Wright! This- What's wrong with these people? He invented the airplane. So here are people who are undervaluing the advance of technology. They don't quite believe that things could keep going at a faster rate than they had already just witnessed. They think that they are the pinnacle, and things will level off after that. This is a common theme that will repeat, and it's not just engineers or bicycle mechanics as Wilbur and Orville Wright were. Here's one. Here's one, "There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping Earth's gravity." This is an astronomer! 1932, you think he should know better! No excuse there, studies gravity. No hope. Okay. How about Science Digest, the magazine? Let's fast forward to 1948. "Landing and moving around on the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them." How many years did it take, after this? 20. 20. They're getting it wrong every single time. How about engineers? How do they feel about it? "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." You know, seeing quotes like this make you afraid to ever say anything about anything. All right, now here's what happened. So what happened in October 1957? Sputnik, the Russian Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite shortly after this, and all of a sudden, space became in reach. Space became real. Technology was going beyond Earth. It became real. Now we have an inversion of this commentary, from previously people saying it'll never happen to now people thinking it will happen faster than it actually will. Let's see what happens. 1966, the Wall Street Journal, "The most ambitious U.S. endeavor in the years ahead will be the campaign to land man on Mars. Most experts estimate this will be accomplished by 1985." Who here was not even born yet in 1985? Raise your hand. So now people get excited, unjustifiably. They don't know how to measure or contain their enthusiasm. How about The Futurist? It's a magazine conceived and designed to think about the future. "A manned lunar base will be in existence by 1986." The Futurist, we're two years away from landing on the moon, the Apollo program is in progress. We're- we're moving, we had been through Mercury, Gemini, we're into Apollo, and this feels so real to everybody. 1986 was the Challenger disaster. Just getting to low Earth orbit. All right, let's keep going. How about rocket scientists? Do they predict any more accurately? "By the year 2000, 50,000 people will be living and working in space." In the year 2000, do you know how many people there were living and working in space? Three. Three. So, there's a mismatch. Not only is this operating on the community, there's also faulty memory. We, the older generation- I'm in that generation. We remember a time when we were space pioneers. That whole era where we went to the moon. We're in space for Americans. This America. We- we explore, we- we can't help ourselves, we just got to explore new stuff. Okay? Well let's find out the space first...

I meant to silence this I'm sorry. Sorry about that. Okay, sorry about that. So, let's find out. We think of ourselves as winning the space race? Well, let's- let's analyze this. What was the space race? How about the Soviet Union, did they have any firsts? First satellite in orbit, first animal in space- first non-human animal in space. First human in space, first woman in space, first black person in space, first person- First to land on the moon, they had a rover on the moon. So they had a- a stationary craft, then a rover, first to photograph the far side, first to photograph Earth rise. First to land on Venus, first to land on Mars, first in a spacewalk, first Space Station, longest time logged in space- a record that still lasts to this day, and by far the most reliable manned vehicle. During both of the space shuttle disasters, our access to space was provided by the Soyuz space capsule that the Russians have been using since the 1970s. So what did we do? What are our records? I count three. With first land people on the moon, that's good. That's- that's good. First across the asteroid belt with a- with a craft. The first to achieve hyperbolic velocity. Those would be the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. They have such high speeds, they will never come back ever, ever, ever, and they will journey to the stars. We were the first to do that. This is a nice list of three, but we're remembering ourselves as pioneering space- and in fact, Russia beat us in practically every measurable way, that entire journey. So what we did was, when we landed on the moon, we said, "We won!" That was- we made that the goal and we just said we won. So, this is operating on our memory, more- more faulty memory, that we're leaders and visionaries. People are saying the reason why we're not on Mars today, cause we need vision. We need visionary leaders, we need presidents like Kennedy, to declare that the space is the next frontier, and all we need that is today and everything would be fine. There's a quote, "I'm not that interested in space." I'm sorry, you can't make this up. I'm just- this is the reality check. What else does he say? "This is whether we like it or not a race. Everything we do in space, would be tied to getting to the moon ahead of the Russians." There is nothing about exploration in that sentence. There is nothing about science in that sentence. There's nothing about exploration genetically encoded in our DNA in that sentence.

James Webb is the head of NASA at that time. What are the motivations? Wer'e at war with Russia. Military motors are real. They drive decisions in Congress, like no other force of nature, military motors. We don't like to admit that to ourselves, but that's just how it is! And don't shoot the messenger. Okay? So, I would declare that the militarization of space is inevitable. Inevitable. I'll tell you why, it's quite simple. First of all, because it involves humans. That's a simple fact. And the history of human behavior, in the face of new resources, or new high ground, is more often one of war in conflict than of peace and cooperation. That is the history of human behavior with each other. And so... what are we supposed to think? Are we supposed to think? Well, what's the last- cislunar space? You know, "cis" is a new word in many people's vocabulary, that's space between Earth and the Moon. Cislunar. Not just low earth orbit, every place from here to the moon. Cislunar space, the new high ground? Defense of assets is a fundamental behavior of sovereign nations. This is what sovereign nations do, they defend their assets. Just add these up. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3. As space assets grow, military presence grows in tandem. Space assets like communication satellites, weather satellites, locational satellites, the GPS system. No obvious reason that turf wars in space will be politically different from turf wars on earth. Why should we believe that space- that humans would behave any differently in space than we do here on Earth? To say, Oh, we're killing each other here on earth across a line in the sand. Oh, but everything will be peace and harmonious in space? I'm not given reason to- to believe that. My species has not convinced me that we have justified that expectation of our behavior. Not only that, we have something that I call Apollo worship. You know what Apollo worship is? Have you seen the Saturn V rocket? Who here's ever seen it? There's like four, scattered- there's one in Houston. One in Florida, two in Huntsville, Alabama. And then maybe one on the West Coast, I forgot. The Saturn V rocket- it's huge! It's, it's like this whole area here could fit inside of one of the nozzles of the five rocket nozzles at the base of the Saturn V rocket. And it's 32 stories tall. 32 stories tall, and essentially all fuel. And astronauts are in the little bitty thing at the top. And so, the Bravery comes in, you're sitting on top of basically a bomb, alright, and hoping that the bomb aims you in the right direction, alright. And so, the Saturn V rocket is the first machine to ever take humans to a destination other than Earth. And we genuflect in front of it, because we've never haven't done anything like that since. You can't even believe it, we're touching it- you know, like the monkeys and the monolith in 2001 it's like- wow, how did this? How did we do this back in the 1960s? I- I don't mind worshipping technology. I do it almost daily, here's the problem though. Let's look at the first of things and see what we do with them. Compare the first car. That's quaint. That's Carl Benz with the first internal combustion engine vehicle. You don't want that car, except to- to admire- just for, to put it in a museum. You want the car on the right. Okay, it's- that's a modern day Mercedes sports car. You don't want the first car you just- oh isn't that charming, look it- isn't that cute? How about the first cell phone? You don't want the first cell phone! No you don't! No you don't! Now, back then he was getting dates with that thing. That was- he was hip cool dude with that cell phone on his shoulder. Have you re-seen the 1987 Wall Street film? Gekko has a phone just like that on the beach as he's calling Buddy. And I remembered seeing that movie saying, boy I wish I had one of those. It's like, no! I don't want one of these. You want something, you want- that! Okay. That's one of my earlier iPhones. So, that is a photo on the airplane of me holding my iPhone in front of my laptop's camera. Okay? You don't want the new one, the old- the first one of these. How about the first computer? No, you don't want the first computer! You don't even want the first PC! You want, like the latest thing. You're not genuflecting in front of the first computer. You're just not. So why is it that we're genuflecting in front of the first ship to the moon? Because it hasn't been surpassed. So we're stuck. We haven't- we don't have anything more modern than that. So that's the one we worship. Do you remember the Concorde SST? The commercial supersonic plane? I don't know that it landed in places other than LA and New York, but I'd go to JFK Airport and you'd see it- that you just had to stop and look at the thing. There's a delta wing, and it flies supersonic-ly, it's got a nose that moves and lines up, it's a pointy nose, it's just- Now I would still feel that way about it, even though it's 35 years old. Why? There has not been anything since. Period! If you have not advanced your technology, you're stuck worshiping something old, wishing you had something new. So, part of this is- part of the Apollo necrophilia is we are worshiping something that in fact we should have surpassed long ago. Then there's a talk, well, back then we were risk takers. But today we're pansies. You hear that a lot. Well, I don't really believe that. I don't really believe that. If you were an Apollo astronaut, there was an 8% chance you would have died. In the shuttle, 2% chance you die. Automobile? This is sort of per- this is your likelihood of dying per... there's a unit of time above it. I forgot it, I have to check my notes. Commercial aviation, the safest way to move a mile, is by far the safest thing we do in form of transportation. The point here is, the shuttle. Where does the shuttle go? The shuttle boldly goes where hundreds have gone before. I'm not going to take a one in 50 chance of dying, to boldly go where hundreds have gone before. So it looks like I'm risk averse, but the equation is wrong. The equation should be, take me somewhere interesting. Now let's have that conversation again, about what risk I'm ready to accept. And if I tell you that there's a 20% chance you're going to die, but this next mission will be the first people to walk on Mars, I will have a line wrapped around the block of people who want to take that mission. It's not everybody who does it, but there's the subset among us who embrace... embrace the risk, provided the reward is high.

Lately, all we've been doing is driving around the block. 2%, for me, is not a low enough risk to make that happen. Then this- well has the public lost interest? In space? Now, this- I wrote an op-ed one time in a paper and Buzz Aldrin wrote an op-ed, we used the same data to arrive at opposite conclusions. That's always fun to do. So, Aldrin said, "The public has lost interest, and so therefore they're not interested in space and that's bad." I said the public looks like they've lost interest, but in fact have not. In fact, the greatest expression of interest is that you no longer pay attention. You're saying what's wrong with you, Tyson? What is that, I can see your- in some of your faces. I'll give you an example. I visited Italy 10 years ago, went to the grocery store. I'm walking down the aisles. One of the aisles, is the pasta aisle. I had never seen such a thing. There are pasta names and numbers I did not know existed, and it is both sides of an entire aisle. I noticed this. Do the Italians notice it? No. That's just the pasta aisle. You go to the far East, an entire aisle of rice. All cut high gluten, low gluten, aromatic, Thai rice, Chinese rice. Do the Chinese notice that they have an entire aisle of rice? That- they're not even thinking about it. That's just the rice aisle. So then I asked them, and I said when you visit America, is there something in our grocery store that we no longer take notice of? They said oh, sure. I bet. I said what is it? We have a ready to eat breakfast cereal aisle. Nobody else has that! Have you ever thought about that? The entire- top to bottom! And they have the colorful kids cereals at eye level for the- for the five year olds that you're walking down- You know what else we have that nobody else has? The soft drink aisle. You don't notice it? Yet it is a fundamental part of our culture. We pioneered soft drinks, carbonated soft drinks, we invented ready to eat breakfast cereals, because Americans are always in a hurry. You don't want to cook a thing! Pour it out of the box, put in the milk, there it is. You're done. So I submit that the fact that we're not tracking, the fact that we can't recite the names of astronauts in space is evidence that space exploration, space activities have become part of our culture. That's the measure that it's part of our culture, that you no longer pay attention to it. That's a good sign, not a bad sign. Though how do you distinguish between it being part of your culture and actually not caring? So what happened was Columbia. The space shuttle broke up on orbit, we lost astronauts that afternoon. The nation stopped. Television stopped. All coverage was on the loss of those astronauts. There was an entire reworking of the mission for NASA. That's not the behavior of a nation that doesn't care. That's the behavior nation that sees space exploration as a fundamental part of their identity. And that's not often retold in that way, but you need to know that. Now, what is the space community? Here's a problem, you can- maybe you can't read that, but I'll tell you. The space community is actually a small special interest group. The Boeing Company, 150,000 employees. Lockheed Martin, 140,000. Northrop Grumman, these are the folks who make spacecraft. They also make airplanes, of course. NASA has 20,000 employees, the Planetary Society, National Space Society, Mars Society, add them up- 100,000 employees. The total in the entire- all the people who could possibly have anything to do with space professionally, numbers about 700,000. That's 1/4 of 1% of America. Well let's compare that with some other special interest groups. The NRA, 4.3 million. Alcoholics Anonymous, 1.8- That's not really a special interest group, but because they don't lobby, they don't- but, just so- just to compare the numbers. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a million people. Hannah Montana Fan Club, a million people. Here's the problem. These groups, which far outnumber everyone who has a professional interest in space, are not... If they didn't exist, we'd pretty much still- it'd still be America as we might imagine it. But if you take away the space community, who innovated jets, airplanes, who innovated spacecraft that do science, that go to the moon, Mars, and beyond, who put our astronauts in orbit, becomes part of the identity of what it is to be American. I was at Florida once at a conference, and the people I met who are from- what country is that? Denmark. This is in Florida, and they were they said, well, after the conference they're going to tour Florida. And they wanted to see that old, the very first church, what's it called? St. Augustine, the town and the- they would- that was on their list. And I said, okay, that's fine. However, you're from Europe. Stuff that we think is old in America is not old for Europe. The settlement was maybe 1600s, or something, I forgot the exact date, it's 400 years old. The stuff that they don't even maintain in Europe is 400 years old. It only gets interesting to them to preserve it if it's 700 years old, 1000 years old. And so I said to him, okay go there, however, that's not America. You want to see America, go to the Kennedy Space Center. And you will see what Americans did as a nation that nobody else had ever done before. Then you will see the culture as it is expressed uniquely on the landscape of cultures in the world. Now about funding trends, you know NASA's funding has been about the same. If you do if you do the math on constant dollars, there's this graph that we always show. It peaked during Apollo, then Apollo dropped off, and then it wiggled a bit, but basically, if you take a running average of that it's been about the same over all these years. About the same. And here are the numbers. Even though the moneys have been about the same spending power, the nation has gotten wealthier. So in 1966, NASA was 4% of the gross domestic product. Right now it's one half of one penny. Actually, not of the GDP, it's one half of one penny of the tax base. That's I should have written that I'm sorry. So, we value NASA less as a nation- national activity than we did in 1966. All right, well here's something interesting. NASA's budget is now $19 billion. And that just was maintaining the shuttle going- boldly going where hundreds have gone before. You want to go to Mars and beyond? You guess- do they want to top that off? But that's the same money that got us Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo to the moon, same spending power. So I'm worried that it's just maybe NASA has gotten bloated? Maybe NASA, maybe we got to shake the tree, I don't know, because it's like the military. Military is $300 billion a year. Oh, you want to actually fight a war? Okay, we need another $200 billion. The $300 billion is just to maintain the army. That's not to actually do any fighting. And so I worry that NASA going forward, it's just got big and fat, and to do something interesting requires money on top of the fat. Rather than the lean machine that it once was. Now you've heard this, skip this. Let's just skip that. Let's- let's skip this. Well, how about the future, of human space exploration? I'll tell you something. Tell you. Who's doing the discovery? Check this out. Lately, we've been not very kind to- to people who want to come to America and start their new lives. Lately, we've been, we've been a little rough with them. Some of it is sort of xenophobia after September 11th. Maybe some of that is understandable. But let's put some of this in context. Let's just figure- you're not gonna read this slide, but I'll tell it to you anyway. You know the Manhattan Project, that's the development of the atomic bomb. We paid for that, in America. We lead that, but all the people involved in it in one way or another, most of them were not American. Nearly all of them were not trained in America. All these names on their list, famous physicists contributed in one way or another to the Manhattan Project. Born in Germany, Denmark, Germany, Italy, USA, Germany, Austria, USA, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Hungary, where'd they get their PhDs? Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, USA, Germany, Australia, Germany, Germany, Italy, Germany, Germany. That tells you that Germany was on top of things back then. That's pre Second World War, obviously, cause you get your degree, then later, you become the practicing scientist. So, they were foreign nationals in America, working on our science and cultural needs. Who's responsible for landing men on the moon, it's America! Who led that? Captured German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, German. To this day, our stereotype for a brilliant engineer is a person who speaks with a German accent, isn't it? If I said to you, think of an engineer, like a German person pops into your head that stands- standing right there. Am I- am I right?

What's going on internationally? Well before they had the euro, every country in Europe had their own currency. Well, alright, who do we put on our currency? Like the Founding Fathers, this sort of thing. Other countries, they're a little more sort of forward thinking than that. And you know what they do? They put famous scientists on their country- on their currency. In the middle, right there this Nikolai Copernicus from Poland, we have Nikolai Tesla up above. On the middle left, we have a saint, Saint-Exupéry, not a scientist, but an aviation pioneer. And see the little cartoon illustration there, Who is that? That's the Little Prince, he wrote the story of The Little Prince. Let's flip this money over and see what they illustrate on the back. Look at that, you got a telescope in the upper left, you got science projects in the upper right. You've got airplanes, there's a celebration of human discovery in science and engineering. On the currency, on European currency. There's more! Okay, in the upper right. That's- how much is that? That's 10- 10,000 dinars. This, the gentleman there is from 1,000 years ago. A famous mathematician and early physicist in Baghdad. He discovered that eyes don't beam rays out from them, that they receive light from what's out there, and you make that image in your head. The currency on the left is from Romania, and it celebrates a total solar eclipse that went over the country. Which has the eclipse path on one side of the currency and the solar system on the other. And by the way, that money is not made of paper. It's made of polymer, that doesn't get dirty and it does not rip, and basically hardly ever wears out. In the bottom right, we have Darwin. Bank of England. This keeps going, I don't want to spend too much time on it. We get it. We've had Euler and Galileo, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss. We've got- guy in the bottom left here, Pasteur, Louis Pasteur in France. We've got Michael Faraday, bottom right. Most famous scientist there ever were. Look at the guy in the middle right, that's Carl Friedrich Gauss. That's German. Let's take a close look at the face of that currency. Whoa, I don't know if you can see it, but in the middle left, there's a mathematical distribution function on the money. Can you see that? That's the Gaussian normal distribution function. Wait wait, who were the engineers we said, we talked about? German engineers, of course! They did not fear putting an equation on their money.

We actually have a scientist on our money, who is it? Ben Franklin. He's on the $100 bill. Is there any sign at all that he's a scientist? I don't think so. They could have at least put a kite! Something! A key. Just a little zigzag lightning bolt. There's nothing! So, while he was one of the most famous scientist in his day, known all throughout Europe, that's not why he's on our currency. He's on our currency as a founding father, not as a scientist. And I worry that you combine all these forces. You combine it all. We're not really going into space anymore, well we think we are, but it's not for another 20 years and it's not- we're operating on the educational pipeline. The money is not inspiring us to do anything grand that we're coasting on the investments of a generation before us. Who here remembers when it was common to dream about tomorrow? Doesn't happen anymore. When was the last time you saw an article in a newspaper or a magazine that said, the home of tomorrow. The city of tomorrow. Transportation of tomorrow. That was a weekly occurrence, back in the 1940s up through the early 1970s. Who here remembers that? Of course you do. You remember it. You thought about it, you dreamed about it. It empowered you to want to become an engineer. Whole jet- whole legions of people entered science, engineering, math and technology because