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Astrophysicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson has been doing the media circuit recently bringing attention to the need for our country to focus on the sciences.

Tyson has recently appeared on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart and “Real Time” with Bill Mahr, NPR, CBS this morning and MSNBC to promote his book, “Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.”

The Washington Post reports:

But it probably also has something to do with how Tyson talks about science and space exploration. He is not just a child prodigy with a lot of media appearances and a penchant for wearing celestial-themed ties and vests without a trace of irony. He is a gifted communicator who displays qualities of leadership that seem lacking in so many public officials. For one, he makes the reasons for space exploration accessible, putting its importance into simple and often humorous terms. “Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect—I kind of want to know what happened there,” he said in an NPR interview Monday. “Mars once had running water—it’s bone dry today; something bad happened there as well. Asteroids have us in [their] sights. Dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, so they’re not here to talk about this problem. We are and we have the power to do something.”

He also has a genuine passion and child-like fascination with what he does, and isn’t afraid to wrap the space program up in grand talk of bold adventure and big ideas. His enthusiasm is infectious—and credible—even for those who couldn’t care less about space and see it as a nice-to-have at a time of bloated deficits and economic pain. He thinks President Obama should be talking about upping NASA’s budget because “not only is it the grandest epic adventure a human being can undertake” but such an increase would “create a shift in the state of mind of people where they will say hey, ‘we are dreaming about tomorrow again.’ ”

Read More At The Washington Post

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