>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: neil degrasse tyson is here. many know him as the most powerful nerd in the universe. he calls himself simply a servant of science. he is in the hayden planetarium in new york, and he is also the host of a new talk show on the national geographic channel called "star talk." it combines science, culture, and comedy to help bring the universe down to earth. i'm pleased to have him back at this table. welcome. when did you know that what you wanted to do was be an astrophysicist? neil: at age nine, a first visit to the hayden planetarium. it put something in my veins.

to this day, i still think it was the universe who called me, and not that i called it. of course, growing up in the bronx, there are not many stars visible anywhere in new york, especially not the bronx at the time. then sky at the planetarium was magical to me. i did not think it was real. i thought it was a hoax. i had seen the sky from the bronx, and this was not it. therefore it must be a hoax, not knowing of course that it is for training for the real sky. by age 11, i had the answer to that annoying question that adults ask children. what do you want to be when you grow up? an astrophysicist. that kind of ended the conversations pretty quickly. charlie: have you ever wanted to write a science fiction novel? neil: yes. but i'm not -- i have a story that is ready to go. i don't have talent.

it just needs a good writer. but in could advise, terms of character development and emotions, i don't have the experience, certainly not writing it. charlie: but you would know a story that would be compelling. neil: i have one in mind right now. i'm happy to tell it. the world is at war, ok? the world that we know is at war. in some very disruptive way, not with large weapons, but regional battles everywhere, and people are choosing sides, and then an asteroid is discovered. charlie: tell us what an asteroid is. neil: a craggy chunk of rock of varying sizes. there are probably hundreds of thousands of them in orbit between mars and jupiter, mostly. some of them have wayward

orbits. they crossed the orbit of the earth. you do the math, you learn that earth and these asteroids will collide with one another, guaranteed, eventually. so what we want to do is keep track of all the crossing objects and monitor them. ideally you want to put lojack on them or something. it's 10:00 p.m., do you know where your killer asteroid is? once you do that we learned , there is an asteroid that could render us all extinct. at that moment, everyone who sees other humans as their enemy then comes together and see the asteroid as the common enemy. bitss -- nit ology that has been developed all around the world, it's a bit in the future, so they are developing their technology to fight wars. we find we have to assemble pieces of all these technologies. charlie: to develop a common front. neil: not only that, but we need

different pieces of technology or the deflection device. charlie: so this is real, you could make this as a real possibility. neil: the science would be not only the threat of the asteroid, the space mission to deflect it, the tools you would use. if something doesn't exist, you can go into the laboratories. you see the pressure on them to invent something that could work. you have to go to your enemy the invented another piece that comes together to make the whole thing work. it can be quite dramatic. maybe we could have a little piece of the asteroid still hit earth. you have to flood a city or something otherwise hollywood , doesn't want it. in the movie armageddon, they managed to save earth, but pieces managed to hit earth. and they had a really good aim. one decapitated the chrysler building. they were aiming for major human monuments. [laughter] most of the earth's surface is ocean. they will probably hit the ocean. and you can still get to destroy cities with a tsunami. charlie: what was the last big

one that came to earth? neil: two years ago, one the size of the studio, traveling 40,000 miles an hour collided with the earth's atmosphere in russia. charlie: what would have happened if it hit the center of manhattan island? neil: that happen to explode about 20 miles up. that is high enough that the energy gets deposited into the atmosphere and dilutes before it reaches the earth surface. even so, it was enough of a shock wave to shatter every single window in the near city. while people were looking out the window, to wonder what the light was they had just seen. light travels faster than sound. they see the bright light of the explosion, look out the window, the shock waves come, 1600 people were injured. lacerated faces, hands, skin. that was a shot across our bow, the universe asking us, how is your space program?

[laughter] if it happened over manhattan, it would have shattered many -- you have a different problem when you shatter windows, because then the windows fall and they become sharp sabers descending to the street, possibly hurting or killing pedestrians. charlie: has science learned a lot because that happened two years ago? -- has the united states learned a lot because of the lessons from that? neil: we did not know that was coming until it was too late. you might has three minutes of evacuation time. that one was not large enough to catch it far enough away. plus it is not large enough to render anybody extinct. charlie: could we shoot it down or something? neil: are you a macho man? blow that sucker out of the sky. i've of those movies. the kinder, gentler way is to deflect it. charlie: how do you deflect it? neil: they're interesting plants

-- plans but all on paper. , nothing has been funded to make this happen. you take your spaceship, bring this patient nearby and park it there. they will feel one another and want to drift one another because of their mutual gravity, but you don't let that happen. you fire little retro rockets to prevent that and the act of doing so slowly tugs the asteroid out of harm's way. you don't have to destroy it, just make sure it doesn't hit earth anymore. if you get good at this, it's like shooting pool cues. you just knock them out of your way. charlie: that is one of the theories. neil: that is one way to do it, and you can monitor your progress. if we just go and blow the thing out of the sky -- here in america, we are good at blowing stuff up, but less good at knowing where the pieces will though when you are done. land you are done.

it is very messy when you try to explode the asteroid. you don't know if it will break into two pieces and you have to evacuate both coasts. and it works on paper. the engineers have worked it out. but there is no plan in place. there is no international collaboration in place to find this. -- fund this. suppose it is heading for the indian ocean? do you tell all of those countries, you have to fend for yourself? if we had the most advanced space program at the time, should we pay for it? should you tax everyone as part of their gdp and do you hand that money to the most able country who can deflect it? here's another let's say it's one. headed for the united states and we deflect it, and it fails, now it's going to hit europe. now what do you do? so all these problems. charlie: we could put this in the movie. [laughter] neil: you are still thinking hollywood. charlie: what are the most important unanswered questions?

neil: that's a great question. i have an unorthodox answer for you. for me, the greatest, and it will sound like a copout, but it's not. to me, the greatest unanswered questions are those questions we don't even yet know to ask. because they only manifest upon reaching some next frontier of ignorance. so yes, i want to know what dark matter is. it's 85% of the gravity of the universe. we have no idea what is causing it. we don't even have the right to call it dark matter. that implies it is matter. we have top people working on this with top equipment. but at this moment, we don't know what it is. charlie: what is the most likely answer? neil: i have a preferred answer. charlie: what is the preferred answer? neil: that's my answer, but particle physicist what to say it is particle, because they are particle physicist. charlie: and they call it god's

particle. takes -- theis higgs boatswain is a very powerful particle. if you're going to be a particle, that is the one you want to be. [laughter] there is dark energy. the universe is accelerating. against the wishes of gravity. we don't know what is causing that. we don't know how you go from organic molecules to animated life. that is a transition on the front here. how do you go from lifeless organic molecules, organic chemistry, to self replicating life? charlie: we don't know that either. neil: we don't know what was around before the big bang. these are great questions. we have top people working on it. [laughter] i will put you on my speed dial if you want to know the latest. what is dark matter?

neil: we don't know. we should call it dark gravity. charlie: that's one of the big questions. neil: dark energy, we don't know what that is. charlie: what is the big bang? neil: the beginning of the universe. charlie: i know that. [laughter] neil: if you turn the clock back, what you will notice about the universe is it was smaller and hotter for every day you turn the clock back. you run the clock all the way back and you learn the entire universe was in the same place at the same time, and at extremely high temperatures. in the trillions. trillion is the highest number anyone has any comfort with, but the temperature was much hotter than that. when you have these temperatures the thing is unstable and it , explodes. so you have the birth of our universe. we don't know what was around before that. i and then -- i am an

astrophysicist so i care about , the dna, but all those are very real questions that exist with us today. and for answers to those, you just start dishing out the nobel prizes. charlie: if you can answer those. neil: if you are on the stage. i want to know what questions we are not even intellectually mature enough to ask yet. they will reveal themselves after we answer these questions we just on the table. charlie: has a new question revealed itself in the last 15 years? neil: yes. dark energy was discovered in 1998, 17 years ago. it is still a big mystery. charlie: who discovered it? neil: two teams are measuring supernova of exploding stars out to the farthest regions of the galaxy. it's interesting. a particular species of supernova is like a standard candle, measuring time and distance in the universe. they are potent in their ability to measure the expansion rate of the universe and the size of the

universe. two teams, one in california and one on the other coast, were working on the same problem and arrived at the same answer and they shared the nobel prize. just recently. charlie: this is a simple question and i assume the most frequently asked, are we alone? neil: my best guess is that the universe is teaming with life. our galaxy in particular. but complex life might be much rarer. charlie: why is that? neil: here is the argument. you have the timeline of the earth. 4.5 billion years. put this planet out there, and some planets are born yesterday. some are born at the beginning of the universe. you don't know when in the timeline of a planet you will land there. here is a dart at the timeline. most of the time the dart hits earth, there is only a single cell life.

then we have something called the cambrian explosion of life. oxygen is like rocket fuel for complex life. life now has carte blanche to become complex because the system can support it. now you get limbs and detectors like eyes and sensors. it's a stunning development in the fossil record of life on earth. you will have complex life. so that is a smaller piece of the total timeline. how else if you throw the dart will you find intelligent life? that is the last little hit that we define as intelligent. if earth is any measure of anything, throwing darts at planet we might land on, who is to say we're going to land right at that moment where what we call intelligence has arisen? charlie: what is on mars? neil: rumor is on mars.

rover is on mars. the curiosity rover on mars is the size of an suv. the martian surface has rampant evidence that there was running water. charlie: that says something. neil: yes. what i mean that evidence, i mean really awesome evidence. there are riverbeds, dry meandering riverbeds. if you fly over the midwest, and you look at the things that flood waters and longtime rivers have done, grand canyon kind of things, you see all these telltale features on mars. charlie: when did we see them? neil: anytime we take a photograph of its surface. charlie: but we could have known that without going there? neil: no the resolution is very , hard to pick up. that is hard. you want to get close. then you can see ridges and valleys. charlie: that tells you water

was there. neil: for a liquid. we are pretty sure it was water, but certainly a liquid. to meander, it means a river was there or some time. -- for some time. you don't meander overnight. it's a very slow thing. not only that, there are dry lake beds where you see salt , deposits at the bottom. how do you get salt deposits? you get that from standing water that had minerals deposited in it. the water evaporates, concentrating the mineral deposits. when there is no water left, you get a salt lake. fly over utah, that's what salt lake city is sitting next to. ♪

charlie: should we go to mars? neil: i want to go, yes. why not? charlie: it is feasible and doable? challenge, people say, the radiation in this stuff. we have clever engineers. i have no doubt they will figure out all the technological parts. it is money. it is only ever money, at all times. charlie: are you disappointed we don't do more in space? neil: the curiosity part of me is disappointed, but the politically astute side of me fully understands why that is the case. we haveto the moon --

always had other priorities. a false excuse. when we went to the moon, we had at plenty of other priorities. there was the civil rights movement, the cold war with the soviet union, campus unrest. we did it because we were at war with the soviets. that was an act of war, essentially, without the weapons. if we were not at war, the motivation to go to the moon, we tell ourselves we went to the moon because we are doors and it -- we are americans and we are explorers, and it is in our dna. that might be true, but the people who write the checks don't care about this lofty speak. is your security at risk? we will spend any amount of money to protect that. that is when money flows like rivers. in that claimant. charlie: should we create that kind of urgency again for something like going to the moon? neil: i joke about it, i say, let me go to china and with to

-- whisper to the head of china, can you leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on mars, but don't tell anybody. that memo shows up in the pentagon, and we will be on mars in 10 months. one month to design, build, and fund a spacecraft and nine-month , to get there. that is how motivated i think he will be because that's how motivated we were back in the 1960's. i don't want to go to mars for military reasons. i think there's a strong economic reason one can make or. for it. it's a little more subtle. i think it takes slightly longer than the proverbial elevator ride you have to save up for your member of congress. this takes maybe twice as long as an elevator ride. i'm thinking i voted for my , representation in congress. i want them to listen to me for longer than an elevator ride. it is simple. if you're going into space in a asteroids,siting

mining asteroids, terrorist -- taurus johnson to the moon, science jaunts on mars, there might be military activities, all of this to accomplish this will require advancing the space frontier. you will be inventing and innovating. patents will be inventing -- invented. you will have these discoveries in weekly if not daily in your newspapers. that infuses a culture of inquiry, expiration, and innovation. when you come from a culture of innovation, stuff gets solved. your whole mindset is different. charlie: do you believe we have lost the culture of innovation? neil: yes, it has been gone since we stopped going to the moon. charlie: what about silicon valley? neil: that is a great culture of innovation. but i was misrepresented in headlines when i said, i gave a talk, at the end of it in response to a question, someone asked me about it. i said the world has problems

that are bigger than can be solved just waiting for your next app. we have problems in transportation, housing, poverty, disease, energy, climate. these are huge problems. if we all sit down and play with our apps, they are not going to get solved. that's what i said. the headline was, tyson attacks entrepreneurs. saying that they are like cavemen. charlie: so what did you mean? neil: what i mean is, to bask in the pleasures of your next app will hide from you the fact that there are larger problems that need to be solved. charlie: which raises the question, all these people like elon musk and sir richard branson, who wanted create some kind of vehicles in space -- don't laugh at me. neil: somebody has got to do that. they affect how other people

think. i have had students in my class who say, when dan want to work -- one day i want to work for spacex. they are the smartest kid in the class. i want to invent a new car, a new transportation system. i want to invent the next rocket. that is the influence that i am telling you infuses into a , culture when you go into space in a big way. the space sets and everything else comes in after that. charlie: are we losing the race to develop the brightest minds in sufficient quantity as well as other people serve science? neil: the focus tends to be on the brightest units, to get them -- who brightest students, can we get them interested in science, and can they invent something to save the world. there will always be the smartest kids in the class, so i'm not worried about them. i'm worried about the rest of everyone else who is given the freedom to say to themselves and

to others, i was never good at math, ha ha ha. science is not for me, i'm into this other stuff. and somehow be ok with that. suppose i said to any other person, i don't read because i was never good at nouns and verbs. i stick with science. you would laugh me out of the room. these are fundamental parts of civilization. the arts and sciences have defined civilization ever since there has been civilization. to separate yourself from one or the other and claim to be informed, as the good dr. sagan said, that is a combustible mixture, especially if that kind of ignorance is wielded by people in power. for me, it is sufficient for me to say let us spread and appreciation of science to everyone. if the people understand what

science is and how it works, and why it works then you can vote , intelligently on issues that involve scientific principles. charlie: and things like climate change. neil: and issues. then you can know who is not telling the truth and who is. charlie: do we have that many scientific deniers in our country? do we give too much prominence to those who want to look the other way? neil: there are some of those. dare i implicate some elements of journalism in this, because there is this journalistic ethos. not to tell you what your ecosystem. but as i understand it, the journalistic obligation is to give equal column space to all sides, or half to one of each side. if someone says the earth is round and someone says the earth is flat, at some point, you are going to make a judgment, that the earth is flat people are just let out wrong. -- flat-out wrong. i will not be giving them the attention. we are wasting time and i'm not doing a service in my role of informing the public.

i think journalists are really smart people and highly educated and curious. they have the curiosity that kids have, that they still have as adults. it's a great thing to have, but at some point, invest your brain energy to recognize when something is fringe. charlie: but i'm sorry to say this, but you are a journalist. you are a journalist. neil: don't apologize. i host a talk show, so i agree that i am a journalist. charlie: not only that, you are in pursuit of questions. neil: yes, i agree i'm a journalist. the only part of the question we don't answer is who. who, what, when, why. who moved the black hole? there is not an answer to that. charlie: do we know what is at the bottom of the black hole? neil: no, in fact, if you take i stines -- einstein's equation --

charlie: do a primer for me, i have no idea what a black hole is. neil: it's a region of space where matter has collapsed to such density that the gravity -- as matter collapses and gets denser and denser, and it gets the surface density gets higher and higher and harder for you to escape. at some point, this blob of matter has condensed so significantly that for you to escape, you would have to travel faster than the speed of light. which means light cannot escape. if light cannot escape, you are not getting out of this place. it's not only dark, it is a hole. a three-dimensional hole. a black hole, that's what it is. charlie: how long have we known about the black hole? neil: einstein could have predicted it with his own equations, but he didn't, interestingly enough. charlie: why not, because he wasn't interested enough? neil: no, to quote stephen

hawking, ask him directly over dinner. why didn't isaac newton make certain discoveries with his own mathematics and he is equation heat invented -- is equation he invented? his answer was einstein didn't come up with black holes you , cannot think of everything. [laughter] charlie: what about time travel? that it has been suggested there might be some laws of physics we have yet to discover that will prevent you from going back in time. maybe there is a law of physics we have yet to discover that will declare without hesitation that thou shalt not go backwards in time. because if you do, and you prevent your parents from meeting one another, unlike the terminator series where you have to kill people so that they don't mate, all you have to do is prevent them from meeting or prevent them from having sex.

that is really all you have to do. and then whoever started the revolution is not there. have them have sex 10 minutes later than they otherwise would have, they will give birth to a completely different person. but then it would not have been the gore fest. if you go back and prevent your parents from meeting one another, you would never have been born, to have been alive to go back in time to prevent your parents from meeting one another. so you have this paradox. it is a causality paradox. that being said, we have no shortage of interesting ways to go forward in time. we can speed you up, you go very fast on a spaceship. time ticks more slowly, not just your clock. the electronics in your digital lot, like you have -- watch, like you have. your physiology, everything about you will tick more slowly. you will age more slowly than your twin here on earth. you come back, you will be younger than your twin.

so you have effectively gone into the future. that is one way to do it. , incan also do it by gravitational fields, they portray this in the film " interstellar." very strong gravitational fields also have an effect on what rate your time ticks. we can measure this. the gps satellites that are farther away from earth's center than we are, their time ticks at a different rate than ours does. their time ticks -- clocks on gps satellite tick faster than clocks on earth, but they send you the correct time. how did they do that? we knew in advance about einstein's general relativity. aregps satellites pre-corrected for this time change by formulation of einstein's general area of relativity.

now it can send the correct time down to us. otherwise the times would separate from one another and you could not use gps satellites to tell you anything but where you are on earth surface. this is real. it is physics and it works. it is not something we cherry who have people political philosophies that differ from the truth. charlie: tell me this thing about dust. there was a 60 minutes profile about dust and chemistry. neil: not everybody comes out of 60 minute profiles better than when they went in. [laughter] one never knows about those. but thank you for your interest in my life and work. charlie: but staying with this idea, it was dust to dust. the composition of the earth and dust and what is within the human body. neil: ok. you want to get a piece of that. to lead america, with the basic fundamental things are the essence of science and your work and others. neil: the single greatest gift

that astrophysics has brought civilization is the discovery back in 1957 by four authors -- no movies are made about them because there are four of them, not just one. we romanticize the lone researcher burning the midnight oil. this is for scientists working four scientists working for a decade to get this result. they realized that the elements on the periodic table, that you might remember from chemistry class, owe their origin to thermonuclear fusion in the cores of stars. light elements under high temperatures coming together to make heavy elements. if they only stay in stars that , would not be interesting, but these particular stars happen to explode and scatter this enrichment across the galaxy. this enrichment -- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, all these elements scattered into gas clouds that then collapsed

and formed next generation star systems, one of which was ours. so the very ingredients that comprise life are traceable to stars. they gave their lives billions of years before we arrived. charlie: so, we are stars? neil: so we are not only figuratively, but quite literally, stardust. charlie: finally this. the notion of you, do you have things you want to accomplish beyond being at the end of a phone with somebody who asks a question and you give credibility to whatever their project is by giving them direction? neil: people have seen me on tv in so many ways, shapes, and sizes. someone asked me who is my agent. my agent must be the universe because there is no human being there who is doing this. i would say one of my favorite , quotes was uttered by horace mann, an educator, who said, be

ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity. i want that on my epitaph. i want that on my tombstone. charlie: be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity. neil: that can be on any level. that can be raising kids who are responsible. that is a very broadly defined victory. i'm not the first to say this. at least leave the world a little better off for you having lived in it. why not? clean up your mess. [laughter] and after you've cleaned up the room that you just lived in, maybe leave a flower behind. leave it a slightly better place.

then we can all celebrate each of our existence in this world and not lament it or regret it. there is so much in the world that regresses civilization. it is sad. i wonder how far we would be were it not for such forces that operate in this world. charlie: thank you for coming. neil: thank you for having me. charlie: a pleasure having you. ♪

charlie: e.o. wilson is here. he's one of the world's most distinguished biologist and naturalist. he has written 30 books and is a professor emeritus at harvard university. his new book grapples with some of life's most fundamental questions. it is called "the meaning of human existence." i'm pleased to have e.o. wilson back at this table. welcome. tell me how you came to "the meaning of human existence." e.o.: over a long, long route. i started my career as an evolutionary biologist. i actually invented that term. that is another story, very interesting. in the course of studying every aspect of the biology of ants, i became interested in the broad subject of social behavior. the biological origin of social behavior.

i wrote a book entitled sociobiology and so on and other related books. charlie: that became a bit controversial. e.o. wilson: it did. but we settled that in the 70's. now it is not controversial. this led me to human behavior inevitably. after all, we are social animals. and eventually it just seemed logical or i found myself , positioned to think about some of these questions that philosophers and even religious scholars have largely abandoned. which are where do we come from, , what are we, and where are we going? charlie: and what does it mean to be human? which is the meaning of human existence. e.o.: i think we are approaching a time now where the appropriate disciplines of science have learned enough and are moving , enough in the right direction so they can connect with the

best of the humanities to create a much better picture of who we are and where we came from then ever before. i would like to refer to it, what is happening or will happen shortly as the new enlightenment. as time for -- has come for us to renew. charlie: define the new enlightenment. define what it might be. it was originally a time in the late 17th and throughout the 18th century, in which philosophers and scientists, they didn't call them that at that time, but those who recalled actual -- natural philosophers were in agreement. they were learning so much so fast, that in short order, we would be able to combine a list all that knowledge and come to understand humanity in the light of the knowledge we could acquire ourselves. and not just rely on -- charlie: so much came in so fast

and it was time to step back and say what have we learned and what do we make of it? e.o.: the old enlightenment faded away because of two developments. one was the romantic period of literature. it came to dominate a lot of english language. also it was that science could not deliver, not in the early 1800s. this promise of actually contributing something fundamental to the question, what is the meaning of human existence? that faded away. we had to wait for two centuries. now after two centuries, i think we are ready to answer those questions again with a lot more confidence. charlie: also much more challenging, because science has roared ahead and challenged traditional definitions of what it means to be human. e.o.: that is exactly right. let me just say about this it science that holds

the promise of connecting with the humanities and renewing the quest. i think we are close to finding the grail, but not just any science. for example, you will get nowhere if you ask an astrophysicist or astronomer. you will get nowhere on this question if you ask a chemist. even my colleagues are just too far removed from what we need to know about where humans came from, where they fit in the earth's fauna and flora as a species that evolved from something less human into our present self glorified form. charlie: so where do we find the answers? e.o.: let me list five disciplines where we are finding the answers. a couple of these may surprise you. we are finding them in evolutionary biology. which is advancing with the help

of genetics, molecular genetics. other disciplines advance itself very quickly. the next one that is contributing big time is brain science. of course that is now the subject of immense interest and intensity of research. the third one of course, as anyone would want to list, would be paleontology and archaeology. they sort of segue into each other. then comes the two surprises, artificial intelligence and robotics. these are the branches of science and technology which are attempting actually to understand how the human brain

works, and thereby just what evolution has produced. charlie: there are people who are scared about the consequences. does that bother you? e.o.: not in the least. i just had the opportunity of meeting with six of the key figures in robotics and artificial intelligence. we arranged for a roundtable discussion on the present status of those subjects. in my case, we were bringing in biological diversity. how is this going to affect the living environment of the world will we start filling it up with robots and changing our consumption patterns and so on? the answer is, because this became an ancillary subject. are the robots going to take over? that is a great story, and hollywood loves a great story.

so they tell the story over and over again. the short answer is no, because we have control. we are not going to allow even advanced humanoid robots -- charlie: you're saying we can control it so we will not allow it, we understand the danger of it and therefore we will put a barrier -- bring iton: we will short. we just haven't even begun really to understand how the emotional centers that are the core of our human nature, how they work. we are just locating them. charlie: but in the last 10 years, we have made a lot of progress. e.o.: rapid progress. but that being the case and understanding were just beginning to find out where all those subconscious centers are, and how they feed into the imagery, with this red-hot

intense area we called the conscious mind, were not likely to be able to duplicate or try to duplicate that in robots. but if we were to try to duplicate it, we are certainly not going to give the robots the chance to evolve. charlie: if we could, we are not going to give it to them. but here is the question. that is very nice to say, but there is probably somebody out there somewhere who says i don't particularly want to follow e.o. wilson's definition of where we should let the robots evolve to. i want to see how far we can take it. e.o.: you are right. that is the mantra of the techno-scientific age. there will be no halting of any scientific investigation or potentially useful technology

because it is our human nature to want to explore and keep exploring always. but there is a big difference between the mad scientist who has invented a great new neutron bomb in his private laboratory and teams of scientists working that are needed to produce the ability of robots or artificial intelligence of any kind to communicate and to go through natural selection. i think those who make up the good stories for us in hollywood don't appreciate exactly what natural selection and artificial selection are. charlie: i thought, here we go, the revered e.o. wilson has decided to say we are creating human life, into the way were -- in too many ways in which we are trying to design human life. that is what i thought you were going to say.

so that is not an issue for you. e.o.: i am glad you brought that up because it raises the whole issue of the importance of the humanities, which you might have noticed, i touch on in a chapter called the all important influence of the humanities. the reason i did that, is consider that rational abilities and rational process and the engineering and technology that emerges from that, nevertheless is not human, a fundamental human quality. the degree of capacity is unique to humans, but what is fundamental to human policy, what makes us a distinctive species and gives humanity to us, may i use the word metaphorically, what our soul is, is in our emotions. and we're not going to tinker with souls. that is the core we are trying to save. i did not mean that it is

impossible. i'm just saying that when we finally settled down if we do , settle down before we wreck this planet, we're going to come to understand that it's the conglomerate and complex interaction of our emotional process that makes us distinctive and is the core of our humanity. charlie: our emotional process. and what advancements are we making in terms of that emotional process? e.o.: just studying. charlie: there are no landmarks? e.o. wilson: well, there are landmarks in the sense that neurobiologists, you cannot really tell where they are from one month to the next, they are moving so rapidly. but right at the moment they , have succeeded in locating quite a few centers for emotion and also centers for

subconscious decision-making. the idea is to learn about this as thoroughly as possible. decisions can be anything. --what i was recently given as what was recently given a nobel prize for, it can be judging distance and orientation, the quick learning process, and what centers that is, but center by center, linkage by linkage, we are beginning to get a map of the mind, and then we will be able to map the emotions and moved to the next phase. there is a nice term that is being used, and that is whole brain emulation. emulate the human brain, but not try to exactly duplicate it. charlie: what is the difference, if we emulate it, where would we go if we emulate the human brain that would be different if we try to duplicate it?

e.o.: that's a very good question, sir. emulation means that the computing that depends upon decision-making, that has emotion like components to it, is one of the goals of artificial intelligence. there is a kind of technology that is being developed that is secondary in importance to digital or binary models. that is called neuromorphics. that is computers that actually designed to be analog and work a bit like the brain. i suspect that in time, we will have those robots. charlie: i like going way out

there. e.o. wilson: that's good. the goal i believe is that we will have computers smart enough to perform the obvious complex tasks we want them to perform on the surface of mars and the middle of volcanoes and so on. but we want them also to be able to make judgments that are appropriate for human needs. that is about as far as i think we would want to take it. charlie: let's assume you were thinking of doomsday. is it more likely to come, as you have talked about often, somehow what we do to the planet, or are we going to unleash something beyond our comprehension which will have a velocity of change that we never imagined? e.o.: both. it is a race amongst doomsday's as to which will come first. in other words, now we are above

critical level in the concentration of the planet change components of the atmosphere. and scientists who are experts on this subject, the real scientists wonder and worry that there is some kind of a tipping point that could be catastrophic in nature. they can imagine scenarios, so we could do massive damage, catastrophic damage with a tipping point that we didn't anticipate well enough. we are allowing the potential cause of that to go on and on, so we should be careful about climate change, because that could create a catastrophe. but the other way is by the means of whimper. i'm beginning to concentrate all

my energies on this. that is conservation of the biosphere. the biological diversity of the world. not let species slip away 1000 times faster than before humans came. because we don't know what would happen with the biosphere. it could mean we would just wind down to a less controllable, less interesting, and less productive planet, and that would just be a dark age that we could never emerge from. charlie: ok, dr. wilson. tell me, what is the meaning of human existence? e.o. wilson: i know our time is limited, i will have to just answer with a couple of general statements, which i think carry the meaning of the meaning. first is that history makes no sense without prehistory. prehistory makes no sense without biology. human existence is a result of a

long series of evolutionary and cultural events. the cultural starting primarily when agriculture was discovered. it has led up to what we are today. the meaning then is the actual history, the epic that goes all the way back to the origin of our biological imperatives. then i would say, let us consider that human beings are, above all, a biological species in a biological world. that we live in a razor-thin layer of the atmosphere within which life can exist, and to which we as a species are exquisitely well adapted. it is when we get this understanding of where we are, what we are, and where we came

from, we will be better prepared to decide where we are going. charlie: e.o. wilson, thank you. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

>> this is "trending business." rishaad: this is a look at what we are watching. sales of slide pushing the aussie dollar down. it was the first fallen retail sales for 15 months. the end of world war ii with a grand parade to tiananmen square.

other wartime allies have stayed away. trying toobama protect his nuclear deal with iran. tehran says u.s. oil companies will be welcomed when the sanctions are lifted. the new ambitious china on parade today in beijing marking the 70th anniversary of the old of -- end of world war ii. most of china's wartime allies had stayed away. give us a taste of the atmosphere. >> it is full of pomp and circumstance if i have to speak slowly it is because the up on thehas taken dias along with president vladimir putin of russia.