Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tysonis an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 October 1958
CountryUnited States of America
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
Companies want to innovate. Companies that don't innovate wither on the vine. The connection between STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the financial stability of a nation is what needs to established.
Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.
Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.
My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.
Speaking as just simply an American who cares about the economic health of our country, I see one of the surest ways to bring wealth and prosperity to the country is to innovate in science and technology.
WhenIWasYourAge: We had to open all doors by ourselves. None of them knew we were coming.
Most science fiction is about tomorrow, a tomorrow brought to you by innovations in science and technology, and China was worried that if they just have everybody learning what is, they're not going to be in a position to invent a tomorrow because their brain isn't even wired to go in that direction.
So many people have that kind of attitude and approach to learning that it gives me great hope for the world. I say hope in the sense that innovations in science and technology will be the engines of a 21st century economy and I don't want to go broke, as a nation. So, the hope I have is that, if people embrace it, we'll have a healthier, more secure, wealthier nation than we have.
(Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.