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Monday, April 19, 2021

Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks Science Can Reign Supreme Again

"In the 1960s, while we're going to the moon, you didn't need special programs to get people interested."

...if there's anything we would call a scientific authority, it is the National Academy of Sciences. Most people don't even know that the frickin' thing exists. Why is that? We need better marketing.

What would be the mechanism for that? I'll go pie in the sky: a mission to Mars with humans. That would do it. Why do I know that? Because in the 1960s, while we're going to the moon, you didn't need special programs to get people interested in science and engineering. It was writ large in the daily headlines because every mission was more ambitious than the previous mission. This went higher, this orbited longer, now we're docking, now we're going to launch the craft that's going to the moon, now we go to the moon. And you knew it was fluency in science and technology that was empowering that journey. So a mission to Mars with humans, I could script this: We're going to do this in the year 2035. It's 14 years from now, and we want the crew to be in their upper 20s in age, which means that right now that crew is in middle school. Let us do another Mercury 7 [4That's the name given to the original team of American astronauts, who were selected from a larger group of 110 candidates and then introduced to the public in 1959 to much ballyhoo]  except we're going to find the middle-schoolers who we are going to track, and Teen Beat is going to say, "How were your grades? Are you doing all the right things? Are you studying?" They become models for society without having to take out an ad. They go to Mars! By the way, for this you also need biologists, medical doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, chemists, geologists. You tickle all the STEM fields, and everybody is going to want to be a part of that, and science would reign supreme once again...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/magazine/neil-degrasse-tyson-interview.html?smid=em-share

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