Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Contrary to implicit tenets of the green movement, not all that is natural is beautiful, and not all that is beautiful is natural.

With no legal expertise, I cannot comment on the legitimacy of her lawsuit, but I have thoughts on the existence of the lawsuit itself. At the time, I was only ten years old, but had the me-of-today met the Madalyn-of-then, here’s how that conversation would have gone down: Neil: Were you strapped to a Saturn V rocket, with nine million pounds of thrust, and sent a quarter-million miles away into deep space to witness Earthrise from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve? Madalyn: No. Neil: Then shut the fuck up.

But in their far-left worldview, everything Fox was synonymous with Fox News. They never noticed that entire swaths of Fox’s portfolio are paragons of progressive programming. Highlighting just a few examples, Fox is 20th Century Fox, which brought Avatar (2009) to the screen—a sci-fi blockbuster (the single highest grossing film of all time) that chronicles the plight of indigenous peoples on another star system, where they harness the mystical powers of plants and woodland creatures to defend their native planet against greedy corporate colonists. It might well have been titled Pocahontas in Space.

Left-leaning people tend to see GMOs as an evil, unhealthy scourge on health and civilization. Scientists and right-leaning people14 tend to be just fine with it.

Another overlooked dimension of risk is our willingness to embrace studies that tell us our habits or diet may increase our chances of contracting cancer. Often, when such studies are reported, they tell you how much your risk of cancer increases when you engage in one kind of activity or another. Knowing the baseline risk for that particular cancer is paramount, yet we hardly ever pay attention to that statistic.

As we say in mathematics, there are separable variables in that argument. Suppose all animals consumed by humans were humanely raised and treated. Suppose further that they led full lives and were slaughtered without pain. That might bring some people back from vegetarian-land, especially when you consider that killing and eating animals is not the unique province of humans. Entire branches of the animal kingdom are pure carnivores: lions don’t long for kale salads while mauling zebras; snakes don’t forage for berries; owls don’t ogle the broccoli in your garden.

That roomful of computers was composed of sentient carbon-based life—computationally fluent and scientifically literate women hired by the men of the Harvard College Observatory to do the tedious measurements and bookkeeping of all the data.1 Little did the men know that spectral classification was not just the act of cataloging data, it would establish the entire subfield of stellar evolution.

During my life, I’ve achieved what was surely unthinkable to each of these Confederate leaders—and honored for it in the cradle of the American South and birthplace of General Robert E. Lee. Yes, that’s progress, but these statues nonetheless evoke in me the country’s darkest era. I’m not debilitated by these thoughts, but they do represent a kind of socio-emotional tax I pay. Maybe all these men were kind and noble members of their community. Maybe they were pious Christians and went to church each Sunday. Maybe they helped rescue cats from trees. Could all be true. That’s not why these equestrian statues were cast in their honor. The soldiers are memorialized for defending the Southern way of life from an incursion of Northern aggressors. But there is no Southern way of life that isn’t economically and culturally conjoined with the fate of four million enslaved Africans—fully a third of the South’s population.8 To sustain the hierarchy requires an endemic belief system of racial inferiority, complete with laws that prevented the education of Negroes. A key step when you want to feel superior: can’t have stupid, inferior Black people walking around who are more educated than you are.

If we give our hypothetical Black racists control over legislation, they may just do what the White racists did against Black people—create laws that prevent White people from being educated and then justify their subjugation and enslavement for being stupid and subhuman.

This inversion reminds me of an effective homophobia workshop.

The debaters are given the topics that will be covered, except they don’t know what side of the debate they will be assigned to argue until the day of the contest. The winner is the person or the team that makes their case most convincingly to the judges. The goal is not to find out what is objectively true about anything. Instead, the entire system trains you to argue—either side of any subject. The rules also presuppose that all topics of debate have only two sides to them. Not three. Not five. Not a continuum. Learning of this, as a budding scientist, I could think of nothing more disruptive to the search for truth than this breeding ground of arguers.

possess 5 or 10 percent more smarts

The intelligence ratio is not linear with changes in total DNA.