THE KINDS OF MINDS WE NEED.....

Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a televangelist....he isn’t a politician, nor a man teaching you how to get rich on Wall Street. He isn’t of Silicon Valley, designing Apps so that we can access inane social micro-information. He doesn’t do ”selfies”.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a self proclaimed educator, an Astrophysicist by definition. He went to Harvard, and Columbia but he won’t tell you what to think, or what to believe. He wants to inspire you to think, based on proven scientific principles. He wants to spike your curiosity, to increase your knowledge, and give you a strong dose of skepticism. He wants you to be a part of humanity and to participate in solving the world’s great challenges. At the very least, he wants you to be educated in science (provable) to the point where you can’t be manipulated and controlled by those who reject it, those who are ignorant of science.

There’s a level of gullibility that leaves people susceptible to being taken advantage of. I see science literacy as kind of a vaccine against charlatans who would try to exploit your ignorance.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

In short....Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to ”turn you on”, to “light your candle”. He thinks the future of the world depends on it. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his “extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science”.

Tyson thinks we should put a man on Mars (or into space in a big way) “because if you are going into space on a big mission..to accomplish this will require more innovation, more inventing, more patents, a culture of inquiry, a culture of innovation....that has been gone since we stopped going to the moon. That is how we solve many of the world’s problems.”

Carl Sagan, another Astronomer and Astrophysicist, said this:

Science is more than a body of knowledge, it is a way of thinking.. a way of skeptically interrogating the Universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true and to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are “up for grabs’ for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.

Thomas Jefferson said the same thing..”it isn’t enough to enshrine some rights in the Constitution or Bill of Rights…the people have to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism in their education..otherwise we don’t run our government, the government runs us.”

So, be concerned about a society or culture where science is disregarded, where people are not educated but expected only to ”believe” and obey....where religious zealotry and intolerance to skepticism and scurtiny is the enforced doctrine for all.

The world should not be run by those whose recalcitrant belief system is anchored in 6th century storytelling that demands faith and not Truth, at the expense of Science and reason.

Food for thought......