And now, according to the Buzzfeed report, Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, the producers of the Cosmos reboot hosted by Tyson, are investigating these incidents.

The statement by the producers of Cosmos:

“The credo at the heart of COSMOS is to follow the evidence wherever it leads. The producers of COSMOS can do no less in this situation. We are committed to a thorough investigation of this matter and to act accordingly as soon as it is concluded.”

The statement from Fox Broadcasting Company and National Geographic:

“We have only just become aware of the recent allegations regarding Neil deGrasse Tyson. We take these matters very seriously and we are reviewing the recent reports.”

This looks real and serious, but it also looks like a story that is already being obscured by the smoke billowing off of hair-on-fire bloggers. So, I’m reserving judgement until I learn more.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has made a statement on Facebook. Since not everybody is on Facebook, I’ll post it below, along with a link.

On Being Accused

For a variety of reasons, most justified, some unjustified, men accused of sexual impropriety in today’s “me-too” climate are presumed to be guilty by the court of public opinion. Emotions bypass due-process, people choose sides, and the social media wars begin.

In any claim, evidence matters. Evidence always matters. But what happens when it’s just one person’s word against another’s, and the stories don’t agree? That’s when people tend to pass judgment on who is more credible than whom. And that’s when an impartial investigation can best serve the truth – and would have my full cooperation to do so.

I’ve recently been publically accused of sexual misconduct. These accusations have received a fair amount of press in the past forty-eight hours, unaccompanied by my reactions. In many cases, it’s not the media’s fault. I declined comment on the grounds that serious accusations should not be adjudicated in the press. But clearly I cannot continue to stay silent. So below I offer my account of each accusation.

The 2009 Incident

I am asked by thousands of people per year to take pictures with them. A flattering, time consuming, but delightful chore. As many in my fan-base can attest, I get almost giddy if I notice you’re wearing cosmic bling – clothing or jewelry or tattoos that portray the universe, either scientifically or artistically. And I make it a priority to point out these adornments for the photograph.

A colleague at a well attended, after-conference, social gathering came up to me to ask for a photograph. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a tattooed solar system extending up her arm. And while I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation. As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me. I was reported to have “groped” her by searching “up her dress”, when this was simply a search under the covered part of her shoulder of the sleeveless dress.

I only just learned (nine years after) that she thought this behavior creepy. That was never my intent and I’m deeply sorry to have made her feel that way. Had I been told of her discomfort in the moment, I would have offered this same apology eagerly, and on the spot. In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.

Summer 2018 Incident

While filming this past summer, I had a (female) Production Assistant assigned to me, to ensure, among her countless tasks, that every ounce of my energy was efficiently allocated to the production needs of the show. As part of this, she was also my driver, to and from the studio, ensuring that I arrive on time. In the car we would review details of the shoot and she would help me anticipate parts of the shoot to come. Across the many weeks of shooting she and I spent upwards of a hundred hours in one-on-one conversation. We became so friendly that we talked about all manner of subjects, even social-personal ones, like the care of aging parents, sibling relationships, life in high school and college, hometown hobbies, race, gender, and so forth. We also discussed less-personal topics in abundance, like rock lyrics, favorite songs in various musical genres, concert experiences, etc. And we also talked about food – I’m kind of a foodie, and her fiancé was a chef. In short, we had a fun, talkative friendship.

She is a talented, warm and friendly person — excellent traits for morale on a high pressure production. Practically everyone she knows on set gets a daily welcome-hug from her. I expressly rejected each hug offered frequently during the Production. But in its place I offered a handshake, and on a few occasions, clumsily declared, “If I hug you I might just want more.” My intent was to express restrained but genuine affection.

In the final week of shooting, with just a few days left, as a capstone of our friendship, I invited her to wine & cheese at my place upon dropping me off from work. No pressure. I serve wine & cheese often to visitors. And I even alerted her that others from the production were gathering elsewhere that evening, so she could just drop me off and head straight there or anywhere elsewhere. She freely chose to come by for wine & cheese and I was delighted. In the car, we had started a long conversation that could continue unabated. Production days are long. We arrived late, but she was on her way home two hours later.

Afterwards, she came into my office to told me she was creeped out by the wine & cheese evening. She viewed the invite as an attempt to seduce her, even though she sat across the wine & cheese table from me, and all conversation had been in the same vein as all other conversations we ever had.

Further, I never touched her until I shook her hand upon departure. On that occasion, I had offered a special handshake, one I learned from a Native elder on reservation land at the edge of the Grand Canyon. You extend your thumb forward during the handshake to feel the other person’s vital spirit energy — the pulse. I’ve never forgotten that handshake, and I save it in appreciation of people with whom I’ve developed new friendships.

At that last meeting in my office, I apologized profusely. She accepted the apology. And I assured her that had I known she was uncomfortable, I would have apologized on the spot, ended the evening, and possibly reminded her of the other social gathering that she could attend. She nonetheless declared it her last day, with only a few days left of production.
I note that her final gesture to me was the offer of a hug, which I accepted as a parting friend.

Early 1980s

I entered astrophysics graduate school directly out of college in 1980. It’s a grueling adventure-marathon, and many people do not finish the PhD. In fact, it was not uncommon for half the admitted students to leave after two or three years, finding some other kind of work in their lives. While in graduate school I had several girlfriends, one of whom would become my wife of thirty years, a mathematical physicist — we met in Relativity class. Over this time I had a brief relationship with a fellow astro-graduate student, from a more recent entering class. I remember being intimate only a few times, all at her apartment, but the chemistry wasn’t there. So the relationship faded quickly. There was nothing otherwise odd or unusual about this friendship.

I didn’t see much of her after that time. Our student offices were on different floors of the building and we were not in the same classes. A few years later, I ran into her, pregnant, with who I think was the father by her side. That’s when I had learned that she dropped out of graduate school. Again, this is not itself an unusual fact, but I nonetheless wished her well in motherhood and in whatever career path would follow.

More than thirty years later, as my visibility-level took another jump, I read a freshly posted blog accusing me of drugging and raping a woman I did not recognize by either photo or name. Turned out to be the same person who I dated briefly in graduate school. She had changed her name and lived an entire life, married with children, before this accusation.

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember. Nor does she remember waking up the next morning and going to the office. I kept a record of everything she posted, in case her stories morphed over time. So this is sad, which, for me, defies explanation.

I note that this allegation was used as a kind of solicitation-bait by at least one journalist to bring out of the woodwork anybody who had any encounter with me that left them uncomfortable.

Overview

I’m the accused, so why believe anything I say? Why believe me at all?
That brings us back to the value of an independent investigation, which FOX/NatGeo (the networks on which Cosmos and StarTalk air) announced that they will conduct. I welcome this.
Accusations can damage a reputation and a marriage. Sometimes irreversibly. I see myself as loving husband and as a public servant – a scientist and educator who serves at the will of the public. I am grateful for the support I’ve received from those who continue to respect and value me and my work.

Respectfully submitted,

Neil deGrasse Tyson,
New York City

This is not a book that fully explores the alliance and overlap between war and makers of war on one hand and science and scientists on the other. Authors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang focus on one part of that relationship, the link between astrophysics and related disciplines (really, astronomy at large) and the military.

Even as I recommend Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, which I do, I want to broaden the conversation a little with a couple of thoughts about the relationship, from my own experience. Then, I’ll give you my strident critique of the book (there is One Big Problem), and then, again, tell you to buy it

Back when I was working in or near the Peabody Museum, in Cambridge, the museum’s assistant director, Barbara Isaac, hired me to work with the NAGPRA database. NAGPRA was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Ultimately, large swaths of the Peabody Museum’s collection would be turned over, or some other thing done to it, as per the wishes of the various Native American groups associated with that material. Most of the work had already been done. But, Barbara is a meticulous person and wanted to make sure the dotting of each i and crossing of each t was double checked. So, I was one of two people charged with going over the printouts, on that old green and less green striped paper, bound in large blue cardboard books. Each line (or two) was an item or collection of items, with notes, and an indication of what was going to happen to the material. There were just a few options, but the basic idea was this: An item listed was either going to be returned to a tribal group, or not. My job was mainly to look at stuff that was not going to be returned and, given my ongoing scan of what was going to be returned, and my knowledge of North American prehistory, ethnography, and archaeology, to earmark things that said “do not return” but where maybe we should be returning it. So, for example, after noting that a particular South Dakota Lakota tribe would have this, and that, and this other, soapstone tobacco pipe returned to them, when I saw that the ninth pipe on the list, several lines down and all by itself, is labeled to not be returned, I’d earmark that. Nearly 100% of the time, that ninth pipe was just something that nobody wanted, or it didn’t really exist (not all museum databases are exactly accurate). But, it would be earmarked.

Many items on the list had information as to how the item had originally gotten to the museum.

Many, many items, especially items taken from Native Americans living in what was the frontier between about 1840 and 1900, were taken by medical doctors who, as we all know, also stood in for naturalists, or some kind of traveling scientist, on military and quasi military expeditions (Like Darwin).

And many of those items were taken for use as medical specimens.

We initially learned that Native Americans have a particular blood type because, in part, of studies done on blood stains on shirts of slain warriors, collected after various battles with the US Army units accompanied by such scientists. There are a few famous cases of Native American bodily remains, mostly but not all skeletal remains, sitting in the anatomy teaching rooms of this or that college. But a lot more, a lot not noticed by either historians or even the all seeing all knowing Wikipedia, are or were sitting in museums around the world. Collected, by scientists wearing military uniforms, on military ventures, with a scientific twist.

So the science-military link is not exclusive to astronomy and astrophysics.

I wrote elsewhere about the person I met who was taking Pentagon funding to build an object that would help cure cancer. An example of a scientist subverting the military funding process. And so on.

OK, my complaint.

The authors have two long chapters (and references elsewhere) covering the early history of human endeavor in general (not limited to military) and the evolution of astronomy, mainly as it related, over a very long period of time, to navigation. One chapter covers land, the other the sea.

Staring somewhere along the way in each chapter, we get a very nice, well done, and pretty full description of the process of humans learning about the stars, about the earth and how to find one’s way, etc. But prior to that, the authors do what so many authors do and I so much dislike. I’ve written about this before. We get a version of human prehistory, and indeed, current human variation (or at least, ethnographically recent), that is bogus. For example, the authors speak of the first modern humans wandering around in the Rift Valley of Africa. There is no evidence that modern humans evolved there. Using just the archaeology, southern Africa is a more likely origin, and the physical anthropology record is simply incomplete. There are early fossils there, but that is because the rift valley is and was a big hole that made fossils. The entire rest of the continent is big, and the evolution probably happened there, not in the rift.

Similarly, ethnographic variation we see in the present and recent times is stripped out. For example, most rain forest dwelling foragers are not known to have a sky oriented cosmology, or to use the sky for much information about seasonal change in ecology, or navigation. And, there have always been a lot of rain forest dwelling foragers.

Putting that criticism aside, however, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military is a very enjoyable and informative read, and makes all the important points about the sometimes uneasy, sometimes too easy, relationship between science and the military enterprise, with a careful look at politics, government, and powerful industrial interests.

Now we also need a book on the broader issue of military-technology links. And, we need a personal ray gun that zaps out of control robots:

Indeed, the understanding that variation is key is one of the characteristics that separates the ancients, who may have engaged in what looks like science but rarely advanced true understanding, and the moderns (to oversimplify greatly, ironically).

The moon and other celestial bodies always do the same thing, never change in their course or appearance, and once one has finished cataloguing them, there is nothing else to see.

Or is there? Isn’t there in fact change all the time? Isn’t change itself the essence of the universe? Is it not true that a star is a dynamic thing that has a birth, stages of life, a death, and from its remnants come other things? Isn’t this how astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson are able to utter such brilliances as “I am made of star dust”??? Don’t planets form, collide with things or things with them, cool, change dramatically across the surface, even break lose form their orbits now and then?

It turns out that the Moon varies over time in its physical relationship to the Earth, because orbits are not perfectly simple geometric shapes. It turns out that this variation in orbital geometry, of the moon in relation to the earth, and the earth in relation to the sun, is incredibly important. You know tides are important. Regular readers of this blog also know that variations in tides from day to day, caused by this orbital variation, also matter. You know that the sun provides energy to warm the surface of the Earth (the atmosphere, the ground itself, the seas and lakes, etc.). Readers of this blog also know that variation in orbital geometry is one of the factors that cause immensely important variation in that process. Day vs. night is a big deal, seasons are a big deal, and the changes in the nature of day and night and seasons over time scales of tens of thousands of years are among the key determinants in whether or not we have ice ages. That sort of thing.

The so-called “supermoon” is a phenomenon whereby the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times, and thus looks bigger and is brighter to our eye. The difference between the smallest looking moon and the biggest looking moon is about 14% in apparent area and 30% in apparent brightness. That brightness difference is comparable to differences between different size light bulbs one might choose, or maximum and minimum difference in screen brightness one might set for a smartphone or laptop screen. Most people would, and do, spend considerable effort and energy appearing to be 14% different in size (one way or anther). That is not a small amount.

So, with the supermoon, two things can happen. One, regular people who are not scientists can get a taste of variation, to understand that the fixed objects of our solar system arent’ so darned fixed, and in fact vary impactfully in the way they relate to each other. That can lead to interesting discussion if one lets it. Two, the supermoon phenomenon, an astronomical phenomenon that is real, can lead more people to get outside and look up into the sky at stuff.

But Neil deGrasse Tyson, enigmatically, will have none of it. He says stay inside, don’t look up, don’t engage with the cosmos. The supermoon is nothing. NdGT tweeting:

FYI: The very concept of a Super Moon is an embarrassment to everything else we call super: Supernova, Supercollider, Superman, Super Mario Bros.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 3, 2017

If last month’s Full Moon were a 16.0 inch pizza, then this month’s “Super” Moon would be 16.1 inches. I’m just saying.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 3, 2017

if a 16.1 inch pizza is “super" to you, compared with a 16.0 inch pizza, then we have an issue of vocabulary..

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 3, 2017

Want another?

This month's “Super Moon” is 1% brighter than last month’s non-Super Moon.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 3, 2017

Note: that is an anti-science technique known as cherry-picking. One does not measure the magnitude of variation by comparing two adjoining points along a series showing change. One looks at the maxima and minima. Sorry, Neil, this is what climate science deniers and the like do. 🙁

And another?

For the Super Moon to look big in a picture requires a substantial telephoto lens. Try one with just your smart phone and post it.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 3, 2017

Note: That is true of the moon at all times. Photographing the moon impressively is hard, as is the case with all nighttime photography, and all astrophotography. But, if one in ten thousand people who take a picture of the moon with their smart phone and find disappointment are inspired to strive for more, and become amateur astrophotographers, the supermoon is a win.

Neil, you need to take a breath, remember your roots (you were the always the guy on TV telling everyone to get outside and look up!), and rethink this. Put the supermoon in proper context and help people understand it, and encourage learning. Don’t cherrypick and belittle a phenomenon, tell people that actual variation in a natural system isn’t really there, and discourage engagement with the natural world.

Just as disappointing (and yes, this is a post about me being disappointed that someone is wrong on the Internet.) as Dr. Tyson’s tweetish mooning of the supermoon is the slobbering fanboy/girlism whereby so many fall into this trap (I won’t repeat the tweets, but you can go and look.) I applaud and thank the others, some astronomers or other scientists, who have pushed back on Twitter.

What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.

But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

Give a listen to my interview with NdGT, from a few years back. Which, by the way, was a great interview, because I did two things to prepare. First, I checked out several other interviews done of him, and vowed to not ask any of those questions. Second, I read all his books and looked into his professional and academic background, and mostly asked him questions about his area of research. Do you know what his specific research area is? Most people don’t. Find out.

His new book is actually more about his research are than many of his other books are.

Neil does have his own spaceship, like Carl did. That’s important because it lets him fly to interesting places. It is one of those spaceships of the imagination. Everybody should have one.

The visuals are amazing and informative and seem to be scientifically accurate to the extent possible. There is quite a bit of attention to scale, and how perspective shifts with changing scales, throughout the episode.

The predominant metaphor is that of a journey, starting with Earth which Neil takes little time to leave, where he quickly covers the details of the solar system. He spends a lot of time on Jupiter but barely touches on Uranus. Uranus and Neptune are the outermost planets. Then “beyond the outermost planet there is a swarm of tens of thousands of frozen worlds. And Pluto is one of them.” (Made me laugh.)

Then Voyager One, which reminds me of a story. Neil notes that this spacecraft, the one that has gone farthest of any we’ve launched, bears a message to distant and future possible recipients that includes “the music we made.”

One day in the Ituri Forest, living in a camp with the Efe Pygmies, we had a tape player and a few cassettes (a pre-iTunes device using plastic ribbons on which sounds could be stored). The music was playing, and Happiness Is A Warm Gun by the Beatles came on. About the time Mother Superior jumped the gun, the Efe guy who was one of our main informants, who also turned out to be something of a shaman, came running over.

“Turn that off, turn that off,” he said. He was perturbed.

“Why?” I replied, switching off the machine, thinking that he had heard something out in the forest, perhaps a herd of elephants heading our way, which had been a concern lately since they were in the neighborhood.

“That music is evil. It will make it rain, really bad.”

“Oh, OK.”

“Thunder and ligtning and floods!”

“OK, Ok.”

“Don’t play that again!”

I never played that tape again while in the Ituri.

But it occurs to me now that something similar could happen a billion years from now when Voyager One is finally discovered by intelligent beings from some other planet. How do we know that what we think of as music, with all it’s meaning and lack thereof, a thing that expresses cultural depth but usually enjoyed with no reference to meaning at all, will be seen in the same way by the Blorgons, or whoever it is that discovers it? Maybe they will think it is powerful magic and they will want more. Maybe they fight with music and will see it as a challenge. Maybe to them it will be a mating call. Either way, we could be screwed.

OK, back to Cosmos.

I’ve noticed that so far Neil has used the terms “countless” and “numberless” and “trillion” but not yet Billions. Just sayin’

Wait wait there it is! Approximately countdown 34:33 from the end. Billions of something. Orts.

Now on to other stars’ planets, and the new post-original-Cosmos scientific fact: Planets outnumber the stars. Carl may have guessed that but he didn’t know. Now we know. Also, that there are rogue planets, that are not in orbit around any sun. There are billions of them in our galaxy. Another post-Sagan fact. Possible places for life.

Life: What is it? We only know about Earth Life.

And now on to the spectrographic analysis of the universe. This is a theme Neil has written about and that we chatted about in our interview in 2011 (here). How astronomers see. Very interesting stuff. I’ll bet he’ll do a lot of that in the series.

Eventually, we’re outside the Milky Way Galaxy, and looking at other galaxies. Helpful text overlays give us the key terminology. And more with scale; the tiny dots are stars, then the tiny dots are galaxies. Then all this wiggly wobbly stuff that is the stuff of the universe. Super mind blowing cosmic fact: There are parts of the universe that are too far away to see because there hasn’t been time for the light from those regions to reach us. So how do we see cosmic background radiation which comes from the entire universe? Aha. That will probably be covered later.

Then the Multiverse. Looks a bit like Niagara Falls.

Now back to a brief history of human thinking about the cosmos. All that wrong stuff that we eventually climbed out of. Giordano Bruno, back to earth, Neil is on the streets of Italy.

Here we see animated cartoon graphics. I love the fact that the basic style of the cartoons is a serious version of the Scooby Doo style.

Copernicus, Giodna Brno, Galileo, the search for a better understanding of the universe. Reference to Lucretius, “On the nature of things” which includes the metaphor of shooting an arrow out beyond the edge of the universe. That reminds me of a story.

Again, back to the Ituri Forest. My friend Steve Winn told me this story, while we were both in the Ituri. Most of the researchers who went there had a similar experience in that we were expected to tell the story of our journey from home to the forest. One of the elements of that journey is, for most, crossing the ocean in a plane. But in the Ituri, there are only tiny planes that are rarely seen and the largest bodies of water are medium size rivers and large swamps. It is almost impossible to convey the vastness of even a mid-sized ocean like the North Atlantic.

So one day Steve tried this, when talking about the journey across the sea.

“Imagine standing on the edge of the Uele river,” pointing down to the nearby, rather small, river. “And shooting across an arrow. That would be easy.”

Nods of assent from the Efe men listening to the story.

“Now imagine a larger river that most people couldn’t shoot across.”

Hmmmm.

“Now imagine the strongest archer with the strongest bow shooting the straightest arrow across the water and it can never reach the other side.”

Eyes widening.

“The ocean is much much bigger than that.”

Personally, I don’t think that conveys the size of the ocean, but it does serve to begin to break the barrier at the edge of knowable experience. Did the Efe men really understand the size of the ocean from that story? Do the watchers of Cosmos really understand the vastness of the Universe by Neil’s reference to some of it being so far away that the light from it has not reached us yet?

Anyway, Brno had a hallucinogenic dream that the sun was only one of many stars. Got in all sorts of trouble. I guess he didn’t expect the Italian Inquisition. Good version of the story of the first realizations of the nature of the universe.

And now, finally, the Cosmic Calendar, Neil deGrasse Tyson style. Here comes the Big Bang. Better put on sunglasses.

It would be interesting to do a day by day comparison between Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar and Neil’s to compare what we now know vs. then, what is emphasized, and the styles. Any volunteers?

Anyway, “We are made of starstuff.” Scrape that moment out and put it in Memeland.

Tides. Turns out you can explain them. Life. And sex is invented. It must be getting December.

The KT extinction event totally made me laugh. Contingently.

Sagan did not have the Laetoli footprints but Neil does.

And the introductory episode, which is bookended by appropriate references to Sagan, ends with a very quick summary of human history, the invention of astronomy, writing, and science. And finally the Sagan-Tyson link is made, which you would know if you read Neil’s autobiography but if you don’t you’ll enjoy hearing about it here. You’ll get all choked up.

And while we are on the topic, Carl Sagan, of the original Cosmos, on climate change:

See also this from Chris Mooney at Mother Jones.

And just for the heck of it, here’s my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2011.

I pretty much agree with everything they say, and I especially like the fact that cosmos 2014 is being produced in part as a reaction to three decades of anti-science activism and propaganda.

I was very disappointed with one thing Ann Druyan said. She made the unqualified (and undocumented) claim that science is taught very poorly and therefore nobody gets it. I wish the world was so simple. In many, many instances science is taught as well as it can be given the resources available to science teachers. Vicariously through my wife, a high school science teacher, directly through my own guest appearances in various science classes, and as an oft-time teacher of college introductory classes, I know that many kids get turned on to science in high school, and not because they suffer a “grueling and horrendous experience” as Ann Druyan labels it. Science teaching in this country is under assault from the very anti-science forces that she claims, quite correctly, abound. Tossing science teaching under the buss wholesale is not helpful. Neil also speaks of how horrible science education is, and he has valid points, but he refers mainly to public science communication and TV documentaries, etc. Which does, indeed, mostly suck.

There is more here on space.com

Ironic that this is a FOX news corp production. But then again, so are most of the National Geographic specials.

From a recent NPR interview:

“Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival … Not only does that get people interested in sciences and all the related fields, it transforms the culture into one that values science and technology, and that’s the culture that innovates … And in the 21st century, innovations in science and technology are the foundations of tomorrow’s economy.”

Bottom line: Exploring space still matters.

Also of interest:

• My interview with NGT from a while back
• My review of Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries