Brisk winds blowing in some showers, some of which will be wintry, especially across northern ireland, wales and the south west. These are our temperatures. When you add on the windshield this will make it feel colder wind chill. As we head into the evening and overnight, expect a widespread frost. Now on bbc news its time for hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk, from new york. Im stephen sacker. This city is testament to the power of science and technology. But we shouldnt be fooled by these gravity defying towers. We are not masters of the universe. Covid and Climate Change remind us of that. And so too does my guest today, arguably americas most famous scientist, Neil Degrasse tyson. His special subject is astrophysics, but his mission goes much wider, to get us all to respect scientific fact. So hows that going . Neil degrasse tyson, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you. Your dayjob is being an astrophysicist, but you are also one of americas leading champions for science. So you tell me why there appears to be such a strain of scepticism among so Many Americans toward the basics of scientific knowledge. I dont have a good answer for that and i poked around in the ether for what could be behind it and im going to give what sounds like an easy sort of cop out answer, and it has to do with how science is taught in the schools. Its currently taught as a body of information, a satchel of facts that are imparted upon you and the you regurgitate that for an exam. Thats an aspect of science, but its not the most important part of science. The most important part of science is knowing how to question things and knowing when an answer has emerged that represents, sort of, an objective truth about this world. And if you think science is just that one Research Paper that reports the one result that you either like or dont like, no, thats not how science works. Its Notjust A Block of facts. Its not a block of facts nor is it any one Research Paper. If you have a brilliant idea and you test it and it unearths so much of what has been known before, were going to double check that, the rest of us, did his cross his ts and dot his is . Let me check the power thats driving his experiment, you know, the wall current, let me check how that was conceived and done. And if no one can duplicate your results its not a result. But at the time you came up with your result the press came up to you and said this is amazing, lets make a headline, this undoes the cherished beliefs of generations of scientists, and so it leaves people thinking that science doesnt really ever settle on what is true or what is not, that its just the whims of whatever experiment gives you and i think it frees people up for thinking that they can establish their own truths. Science then requires open minds and it requires curiosity. And just i wonder whether you feel in your country today there is an absence of open minds. The people have lost track of what open mind means. When i say earth is round, youre not being open minded by saying, you know, i wonder if it could also be flat. You have to know at what point the evidence is sufficient to have established an objectively true understanding of the natural world. And then you move on. And if people dont have those tools to make thatjudgement, they will think that they are being bravely sceptical and bravely open minded by standing in denial of what entire bodies of Scientific Evidence produce. And thats a problem. And i will trace that back to how science is taught. Its how it was taught to me, its how its taught today. So that is an aspect of it. Not only that, we live in a world where, because the internet connects us all and social media makes us all friends, you can type in any crazy idea you have and it will find every other person in this world who shares that crazy idea. You will even find the website that extols that crazy idea and you will believe that youre onto something, simply because other people have affirmed what you think is true. Is that where you feel america has been going . So i sometimes wonder, like, has anything ive done made any difference . Do you . I sometimes feel that. But then i say to myself, maybe if i didnt do all this, and others who are on this landscape, science educators, on those social media platforms, and there are many, there are dozens, not hundreds, but certainly dozens, maybe without us all things would be much worse. Because we dont have the timeline, the worldline that says heres what happened if you didnt do it. Right. We dont know that. So thats the mission you feel, the sort of crusade you continue to fight, but i want to take you right back. I dont like the word crusade, but thats your word. Fair enough. Crusade has a lot of historical baggage. I get you. Its a journey. How did a kid from the bronx, who didnt really have role models to look to in science back in the day, how did he get to be running the main planetarium in new york city, to be, perhaps, the most famous astrophysicist in the country . So a couple of things, first, i figured out early that role models are overrated as a construct. In the following way. What is a role model . Its someone who you have found who has achieved something but has a strongly overlapping historical journey to yours, maybe they grew in the same place, they are the same gender, they are the same whatever, you match up as much as you can and they landed where you want to land and then you emulate their path. And i thought myself, i dont want to be anybody else. Iam me but the very fact that there were not people who look like you. Hold on, hold on. Im only halfway through my answer. 0k . And when im done you will know that what youre about to ask is not even connected to where were going here. So, watch. I found scientists who were brilliant and knew all kinds. They were mostly, resources in the city, at the American Museum of natural history, which is the Hayden Planetarium as part of it, that is educators and scientists. I found scientists and thought, wow, if i am ever a scientist that is the command of science that i want. Then i saw an educator and i said he has such a beautiful turn of phrase and what a compelling storyteller, if im ever an educator, thats the kind of educator i wanted to be. My father worked for the City Government under mayor lindsay during the Civil Rights Era and i said if i ever have to think about the plight of the disadvantaged in this world, i want to do it the way my father has, because he does it with compassion, even for the people who are screaming at those who are just trying to integrate to school. He never had a bitter bone in his body. He saw them a sort of victims of their own upbringing, of their own immersion. So what i did, i cobbled together bits and pieces of people who had abilities and talents that i respected. I stapled them together and i said, thats who i want to be. And in there, yes, there are people with darker coloured skin who had achieved, but they didnt have to achieve astrophysics for me to know or to ask how they navigated the hurdles that they confronted. Why limit yourself to role models . Right. All humans are out there and are available to us to emulate, whether or not you even get to know them in person. So there was that determination which led you to believe you could push frontiers from a very early age. And im now getting to a metaphorical notion of the frontiers you continue to push. Yeah, i wouldnt say that its not that i believed i could do it, its just ijust wanted to do it. I was deeply curious, from childhood, as we all are, but somehow it gets. It evaporates, maybe by middle school, certainly in teen years, something happens where its no longer cherished to be curious in this world. If you manage to hold onto that into adulthood youre a scientist. So heres the challenge you face today, how do you make people continuously curious about something that is the scale and scope of the universe, which, thanks to our technologies, we are learning more about every single day . How do you make them consistently curious when one could argue quite easily that the scale of all of this, that the billion upon billions of galaxies that we can now look at, far beyond our own, its almost overwhelming, almost dehumanising. And yourjob is to somehow bring it back to us, with meaning, as human beings. How do you do it . I dont think im making people be curious. I am fanning embers that still glow from childhood. Hoping to ignite them back into flames so that they can remember how fun it was to be curious about the unknown. Im asserting that its not completely gone, that it can be resurrected within us all. And, yes, the universe is immense, and, yes, it can make you feel small, as it ought to, we all need an ego check every now and then. Its a cosmic perspective on us all. Its a perspective that says however important you think you are and however significant you think your differences are with another human being whos living on the same planet, just take a look at earth from space. Itll re benchmark all that you thought mattered in your tribalistic ways. There is a new generation of Space Telescope about to be deployed, which is going to take what hubble did and then exponentially increase the capacity to see to the corners we havent yet seen of the universe. What really are you expecting it to tell us . Fundamental things like truly whether there is scope for life out there . So this telescope is specially tuned to observe the birth of galaxies at the origin of the universe. This remains a sort of a gap in our telescope access. The telescopes we have today, the way theyre configured, theyre not tuned for that. This one is exquisitely designed for that. So we know in advance where we want it to take us. But in addition, to be tuned for the Edge Of The Universe also means its tuned for peering deep within gas clouds of our own Milky Way Galaxy and its within the gas clouds that you have the formation of next generation star systems, planets, and possibly conditions for life as we know it. Or, even better yet, life as we dont know it, to find. But we sort of know one of the fundamentals, i mean, the National Academy of sciences� recent report on whats coming up next over the next decade in Space Exploration. By the way, we do that each decade, its one of the things we are proudest of. Its called a decadal survey. I know. We get together and say lets prioritise ten years� of money. I know. And heres what they lay out for this one. They say, the coming decades are Gonna Set Humanity down a path to determine whether we are alone. Yes, were gonna get an answer in the sense that, i dont know if were alone, but in every way we can imagine were not alone we are going to perform experiments to test it. And thats whats going to unfold over the next years. And it seems to be. On mars and on the icy moons ofjupiter, where beneath, its kept warm from stress from jupiters gravity and the tugging of other moons, deep beneath the frozen surface theres oceans of liquid water. And every place on earth we have liquid water, we have life. So one of nasas mantras, and the European Space agency, among others in this group, is follow the water. Maybe if we look for where the water is or once was, well have evidence of life that is or once was. And thats all being lined up in the coming decade. Yes. Why is it that if we bring this down to the prosaic human level that the United States government, which was so committed, if we think back to the � 60s and � 70s, in pushing for Space Exploration, as a National Priority, spending more than 4 of National Income on the space programme, why is it that today that figure� s down to 0. 5 and the us government, frankly, apart from the notion of building a space force for military protection purposes, doesnt really seem that committed to space . Yes. It is a lowered National Priority and part of it is because we all bought into a narrative that was delusional. All of us. Especially americans. In 1960 we told ourselves we are americans, explorers, we are discovers, it is in human dna especially in american dna were going to the moon. All right, i can tell you based on my read of history that is insufficient driver to spend the hundred billion dollars in modern money that that required. Insufficient driver. You need a better driver than that than just because you want to do it or because youre feeling that that is the right thing. 0h, remember what it is, were at war oh, my gosh we had a cold war with the soviet union. Kennedys speech where he said, lets put a man on the moon and returning him safely, that is what we quote, thats the quote thats in the front entrance of the Kennedy Space center in florida. How about the rest of the speech, from which this quote was. Thats not on the granite. Plenty of room to chisel on the granite, no. What else was in that speech . This is almost verbatim, if the events of recent weeks, he couldnt even utter the mans name, yuri gagarin, if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. It was the battle cry against communism. Thats why we went to the moon. So. So a Military Driver is, without question, the greatest of them all. The i dont want to die driver. And thats not whats going on right now. So the question right now is whether, actually, a huge amount of resource is being wasted. Nasa is committed to getting back to the moon theyve had to put it back a year because theyre short of money, but theyre now saying theyll put a man back on the moon by 2025. They have a longer term plan to put human beings on mars. But is any of this really very useful . Maybe we are misspending our money. Maybe the people Likejeff Bezos and elon musk and others whove become obsessed with space theyre wasting their money too . We have so many problems to fix on this planet of ours, this fragile planet. Isnt there a case for saying as Prince William did the other day it is absurd to spend all this money on that kind of Space Exploration . For many people who utter this, they see this great expense of rockets and telescopes and moonships. And then they say, we can do that, but we cant solve. I say, how much money do you think were actually spending out there . And they will come up with a number thats typically ten times what were actually spending. And i said, ok. You know why they think that . Because when nasa does anything, its way more visible than when anybody else spends money in the federal government. I will tell you one of the great forces operating on whether a kid wants to go into science is are there places they can dream . And i say, yeah, were going to the moon. Do you want to be the first kid on mars . Yes yes. And they dream. I want to be an engineer. I want to be a mathematician. All of a sudden, you have something that stokes the educational pipeline with ambitions of students that dream about wanting to do something scientific and technological in this world. And those are the advances that bring about the changes that feed people, that create health, and wealth, and security. Now we can talk about the billionaires. The billionaires are opening a new tourism industry. I dont have a problem with that. This is what the dawn of aviation was only rich people and famous people flew in aeroplanes in the 1920s and � 30s. Then it became a whole industry. Now, millions of people fly every day. If you were around back then, are you saying, stop wasting your money on this stunt . This Biplane Thing this is a stunt . So, dare i say though you are the host of this programme that im glad people with attitudes such as that do not win the day among those who are trying to advance what civilisation can be, and all the ways that technology can empower it. As the host of this programme. Laughs. I actually want to bring you back down to earth. And i want to ask you a question which i suspect youre not going to find easy to answer. But you having become one of americas most famous popularisers, sort of messengers for science, you, in recent years, ran into some significant personal trouble. You faced allegations from women you had worked with, from academic colleagues, of abusive behaviour. Now, they never reached a courtroom. Nothing was ever put before a jury or a court. So then why are you mentioning it . Only because i would like you to reflect on what that taught you not just about the world you study, or the universe you study, but about deeper personal things. Did you learn from the experience you went through . So youre basically referring to the Metoo Movement and all that it encompassed. I can tell you that we knew enough about the Workplace Environment that metoo could have happened 30, 40, 50 years ago, especially when women started entering the workplace in large numbers. So that was a long overdue movement, and any elderly woman who was active in the workplace decades ago will have no end of stories. So these stories are not new. So im very glad it finally hit a head. And it looks like it needed social media for that to happen. And did you. Hold on. You asked me, and im answering it. So that was, i think, long overdue. So i think any time theres a movement, you have to ask well, what are the forces operating on that movement, and how are they going to manifest . And im happy we live in a world, by and large, where. An active accusation is not, itself, a verdict of guilt. 0k . If it is, thats a different country, thats a different legal system. Thats a different. If thats sufficient, then you just indict people by up or down vote based on how things are reported in the press and what people think is true or what they even want to be true. But i guess im asking you something slightly different, which is whether you reflected on whether you needed to change some of your behaviours. That very question presupposes guilt. Not at all. Of course it does. I would say that i was glad for investigations. Im glad for that as any such situation should be subjected to. Thats what thats called civilisation. Mmm. Otherwise, what kind of world are we building for ourselves if guilt is just established by what people want or feel should be whats going on in the world . So thats thats how that. I was delighted that everything got investigated. Very happy for that. A final thought which builds on what you just said we have to think about what kind of world were building. I wonder as you reflect on your long career and you look at where we, as a species, are today and our relationship with our own planet and its Sustainable Future whether, actually, our biggest problems arent sort of making sense of and understanding the universe beyond, but our biggest problem is understanding ourselves properly, understanding what motivates us and why we find it so very difficult to collaborate, to do things which can sustain our life on this planet, never mind what lies beyond . I think were not always wise about how best to use our own discoveries in the interest of our own survival. That wisdom, i think, lags. You know, we invented social media. Thats really cool. And then we find out that entire factions get together, feed misinformation, and it shifts politics of the world. That cant be good. So i dont think we saw that coming, right . In a way, that absolutely gets to the nub of this conversation. We are getting ever more knowledgeable, but are we getting wiser . I think the wisdom well, so. I dont know. But i do know that we need a tandem we need someone right next to every kind of walking alongside as the next device, the next bit of technology, especially when the technology wields power oh, my gosh. Theres always someone walking among us who has nefarious objectives, and will use some of our greatest technology for the unravelling of civilisation. Thats always been the case. I dont think thats a new thing. So, thats a problem. And the wisdom is are we wise enough to control the power that we create for ourselves . And i dont think we are. Not yet. That is a moment we have to end with something very much hanging in the air. Laughs Neil Degrasse tyson, thank you very much indeed for being on hardtalk. Hello again. Its been a cold start to the day and it is going to continue in that vein through the day. Weve got this Weather Front producing some rain across the south east. Cold air follows on behind, some ice this morning but also some snow at all levels across Northern Scotland accompanied by gales, even severe gales with exposure across the far north. That combination means we could see temporary blizzards and snow drifts on some of the higher areas. We lose this rain as we go through the afternoon. A lot of dry weather. In the brisk winds we could see further showers which will be wintry in places, primarily in the hills in the west. Add on the wind chill and it will feel like 4 in aberdeen. As you can see, wherever you are its going to feel cold today. Through the evening and overnight, we hang onto the snow in scotland accompanied by strong winds. Sedimentary showers coming in across northern ireland, north west england, wales, South West England and possibly as far south as the north and west midlands. Another cold night with a widespread frost and risk of ice. We start on a windy night tomorrow with a ridge of High Pressure building and things are settling down. The winds will ease, many showers fade, there could still be some coming in from the west, east and north. Once again, feeling cold. These temperatures are closer to where they should be at this stage injanuary. As we move from wednesday into thursday, this High Pressure moves away. Weve got this warm front coming in, behind it something a bit milder. And then on its hills, this cold front. Behind that, something a bit colder follows. As the rain bumps into the cold air ahead of it, well see some snow at all levels. And then as the warm front goes through, a return to rain. Here comes the cold front behind it and the cooler conditions. Eventually, we will see a return to some wintry showers. Temperatures are six in the north to maybe ten towards plymouth with a change in Wind Direction to more of a south westerly. Heading into friday, the wind coming in from the west, not particularly strong. Living in a fair few showers. The strongest winds through the irish sea and we could see some gales later in the day across parts of western scotland. Temperatures three in the north to nine in the south. Hello, this is bbc news. Im victoria derbyshire, and these are the latest headlines in the uk and around the world. A day of Critical Court hearings for Prince Andrew and virginia guiffre his lawyers in new york will argue that her civil case against him, alleging he sexually assaulted her when she was 17, should be thrown out. A University Dropout who became a Silicon Valley Success Story has been convicted of fraud for lying about the technology that made her a billionaire. Millions of pupils across the uk are back to school today, amid concerns about covid related staff shortages. A month before the winter olympics, a second chinese city goes into full lockdown, as new Covid Infections are recorded. 0h, oh, you pretty things