ENGLISH SPEECH NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON Human Motivators English Subtitles

Thank you for that warm introduction, but 
it requires a couple of clarifications  

I’d like to offer. That asteroid 
with my name on it before I agreed  

to accept that distinction, I verified 
it was not headed towards earth. Because  

that would be rough right there that 
story Tyson takes out North America.  

Also, that People Magazine distinction sexiest 
astrophysicist alive. First you have to consider  

the category, all right. I don’t… not something 
you get big headed about I don’t think. Indeed,  

my wife is a graduate of Rice University and 
somehow of all the things that she remembers most,  

what I seem to hear most about was baker 
beer bike, right. Is that still happen? 

Now back when she was there the official drinking 
age in Texas was still 14. So, I don’t know.  

Now, why am I asked to deliver this commencement 
address? I think it’s because of my association,  

my long association as sort of a follower and 
advisor of NASA. And it was announced that this  

is the hundredth anniversary the closing of the 
hundredth year of the founding of the school.  

It’s also the closing of the 50th year of 
the famous speech given by president Kennedy  

in Rice Stadium to an audience of 35,000 
people. Titled, ‘We choose to go to the moon’  

speech. That very phrase appears in the 
speech and it is followed by the phrase,  

‘Not because it’s easy, but because it’s 
hard.’ That speech was delivered here  

on the campus of Rice university.
That was delivered a year after  

president Kennedy announced that maybe the moon 
is something, we should do some place we should  

go to. That was first announced in congress, May 
25th, 1961. We were spooked into him saying that.  

Six weeks before that speech the Soviet Union 
launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit. As I tweeted  

about a year ago, Yuri again was the 
fifth mammal to achieve this feat.  

After a dog, a chimp, a few mice, and a hamster.  

But the point there is, in that speech 
that’s where he uttered the phrase,  

‘We will put a man on a moon return him 
safely to earth before the decade is out.’  

That’s kind of all he said about 
the moon in that speech. The whole  

plan got laid out in Rice Stadium a year later.
So, you can say, oh we had charisma and will and  

political motivation back then, until you look at 
the beginning of that speech he gave to congress.  

Three paragraphs, two or three paragraphs 
before he says we’ll go to the moon. He says,  

‘The events of recent weeks Yuri Gagarin going 
into orbit’. If those are any indication of the  

impact of this adventure on the minds of men 
everywhere, then we need to show the world the  

path to freedom over the path to tyranny. It was a 
battle cry against communism. People were spooked. 

NASA got founded a year after Sputnik was 
launched, motivated by a cold war climate.  

So, what happens president Kennedy gives his 
let’s go to the moon speech in Rice Stadium,  

a year later Rice donates the land that is Johnson 
space center. That is the seat of the astronaut  

program of NASA. Rice university was there at 
the beginning of this epic adventure to the moon.  

Now I’ve studied this, what drives people to 
do things. I’ve looked throughout all of time,  

all of human time and I found only three 
drivers that get people to do things  

in a big way. One of them is war, 
that’s obvious to any political analyst. 

War makes you spend money like it’s a flowing 
river. Even when you don’t have money you  

spend the money like it’s a flowing river. War, 
one of the great motivators of human conduct.  

A next motivator is money. So, the first is I 
don’t want to die. The next one is I don’t want  

to die poor, right. Two great motivators 
in the history of human cultures. There’s  

a third motivator much less revealed in the world 
today and that’s the praise of royalty and deity.  

That’s what gets you the pyramids in Egypt and the 
Church building and Cathedral building of Europe. 

Today you don’t find Gods and kings 
driving major investments. So,  

we’re left with just sort of war and money, 
that’s kind of what’s going on here. But we  

haven’t been honest with ourselves about that. 
If you go to Kennedy space center in Florida,  

there is that section of his speech. We’ll 
go to the moon before the decade is out  

and it stands chills up your spine. 
Because he galvanized an entire nation.  

But what’s missing on the granite wall behind 
where this is chiseled in, is the other part of  

the speech. Where he introduces the war driver. 
No one ever spent big money just to explore. No,  

no one has ever done that.
I wish they did, but they don’t. So,  

we went to the moon on a war driver. But that’s 
conveniently left out in the granite wall behind  

Kennedy. They could have put it in, and they could 
have summarized. Kill the commies go to the moon,  

right. That’s what they could have said but they 
didn’t. That part got cleansed from our memory.  

So, cleansed from our memory that 
20 years after we landed on the moon  

George Herbert Walker Bush wants to give a similar 
kind of rabble-rousing speech that Kennedy did. 

July 20th, 1989, he goes to the steps of the air 
and space museum in Washington an auspicious day,  

commemorating the moon landing. An auspicious 
moment, and he puts a lot of the same language  

in his speech. Reflecting on Columbus Voyages and 
all the, which was driven by money by the way.  

All the great explorers of the past saying, 
it’s our time it’s time to go to Mars,  

time to go to Mars. It got costed out at $500 
billion, it was DOA in congress at $500 billion.  

But, wait a minute. That was going 
to be spent over about 30 years.  

You divide 500 billion by 30, that’s about $16 
billion a year, that’s NASA’s annual budget. 

You could have just made that the trip to Mars, 
but people got spooked by the money. Why? You  

know what else happened in 1989, peace broke out 
in Europe. That’s what happened in 1989 the war  

driver evaporated. No, we didn’t go to Mars, no 
and people are saying. ‘oh, we lost our drive;  

we lost our will.’ No, it’s the same will we’ve 
ever had we just weren’t threatened. That’s a  

sobering thought. But I had there’s a solution in 
there I think, there’s a solution. How about the  

money driver? Do you realize in the 1960s, the GDP 
per capita of the united states rose 35% across  

that decade and it hasn’t risen that high since?
In fact, in the decade of this century it rose 0%  

between 2000 and 2010. It been dropping ever 
since. Of course, there’s a lot of complex  

analysis related to that but all I’m saying is one 
could say that going into space inspires people.  

You can remove the war driver and say it’ll 
boost our economy, not just spin-offs. You  

always have spin off who doesn’t love a good 
spin-off. But it inspires people to innovate.  

Headlines: We’re going to the moon. We’re going 
to Mars. We’re looking for water. We’re looking  

for fuel. We want to deflect an asteroid. These 
headlines hit the press and you convert; you shape  

a nation into one that becomes an innovation 
nation. That’s what was going on in the 60s. 

Everybody was thinking about the future. That 
was the bloodiest decade on American soil  

since the civil war a hundred years earlier. 
Civil rights movement, campus unrest, 100  

servicemen dying a week in a hot war in Southeast 
Asia. We were in the middle of the cold war.  

1968, the bloodiest year in that decade, two 
assassinations. Apollo 8, an unheralded mission  

hardly ever hears of Apollo 8. The first 
mission to leave earth and go someplace  

other than orbit. It went to the moon, didn’t 
land but it went to the moon, December, 1968.  

It orbited the moon, came around the 
back side. They held up a camera and  

there was earth rising over the lunar surface.
That to this day is the most recognized photograph  

of anything at any time of any object earthrise. 
And there was earth, not as we had ever seen it.  

It was in display as nature would have 
you absorb what it is. There was earth,  

not with color-coded countries. 
There was earth with oceans, land,  

clouds. Do you realize no representation of 
earth before that included clouds? No one  

thought to think that maybe the atmosphere 
is part of earth. No one drew that before.  

So, what happens? Here’s something interesting. 
Over the next four years 1969, 70, 71,  

72, 73, 5 years the following happens on earth.
The environmental protection agency is founded. A  

comprehensive clean air act, a comprehensive clean 
water act is passed. Earth day is founded. The  

organization doctors without borders is founded. 
Where do they get that phrase without borders?  

Where did that come from? Did anyone before that 
photo think of earth as a place without borders?  

No. What else happened? DDT was banned, the 
catalytic converter was introduced, leaded gas was  

removed from the environment. All of this happened 
in those five years, while we were still at war.  

Something changed about us, after 
the publication of that photo. 

It was a cultural response to our presence in 
space. It affected commerce, it affected how  

we treated earth. It affected our outlook, it 
had us thinking about a future as never before.  

The world’s fair in New York city was all about 
the future. The world’s fair didn’t create that  

decade the decade created that world’s fair. 
So, you know what happens? You go to the moon;  

you look back and it’s a whole new 
perspective a cosmic perspective.  

We went to the moon to explore it, but in 
fact we discovered earth for the first time.  

That takes vision. By the way, the first president 
of Rice University was an astrophysicist.  

Look it up. 

What a private enterprise they’re there, they’re 
going to help out but not going to lead this.  

You know why they can’t lead it? Because space is 
expensive, it’s dangerous and it has unquantified  

risks. You put all three of those under one 
umbrella, it cannot establish a capital market  

valuation of that exercise. Private enterprise 
comes later governments need to do that first  

to find out where the trade winds 
are, map the coastlines of space.  

Then private enterprise comes in, that’s how 
it’s always happened. That’s how it happened  

with Columbus. The first Europeans to the new 
world were not the Dutch East India trading  

company ships. It was Columbus funded by Spain 
in a vision that the nation had of exploration. 

All of you will graduate in some kind of major 
today, a major. But you know what your major  

is? You can boast what you know in your major but 
at the end of the day it’s actually a stovepipe.  

You know a lot about this thing that sits 
in a stovepipe. But I just described to  

you the Apollo program that involved 
mathematicians, scientists, engineers,  

artists. Artists captured what this voyage was on 
the pages of life magazine and collier’s magazine.  

Artists, engineers, lawyers, yes. 
There are lawyers in there too.  

It was an entire participation of a culture.  

An interplay of politics, science, technology 
and who and what we were as a nation. 

So, your diploma is really not a ticket to show 
off what you know. You know what it really is?  

It’s permission to admit to yourself how much you 
still have yet to learn. And you know it’s still  

left to learn, all the things that come together 
when great things happen in a nation, when great  

things happen in a world. As I said the science, 
the art, the geopolitics all of that matters.  

Nothing happens without some touching of 
all those branches of culture. There is no  

solution to a problem that does not embrace 
all that we have created as a species. 

So, I can tell you the original seeds the space 
programs were planted right here on this campus.  

And I can tell you that in the 
years since we landed on the moon  

America has lost its exploratory compass. 
But I know the talent that is seated here,  

because I have conversations with 
my wife. I know who’s in front of  

me right now. I know what legacy means. 
I know what happened here 50 years ago.  

I know all of this. I can tell you that, 
now is the time for you the class of 2013  

to lead the nation as Rice graduates 
once again. Thank you all for your time.