may be getting ahead of the slides here. >> the milky way was not the only galaxy in the universe, that the universe in fact, consisted of multiple galaxies. .. .... ....

>> guest: now, i am an administrator. i teach online classes. i have had over 100,000 in those. i do budgets and try to improve outreach for the college and various things. science literacy is a big concern of mine for science students and the general public. >> host: when did you get interested in astronomy? >> guest: a little late. i grew up in big cities with no stars so i got into physics and that is the gateway drug to a astronomy. >> host: what is the connection between the university of

arizona and astronomy? >> guest: we are underway to make the largest telescope. i think astronomy and optics are worth about a quarter billion a year in the southern arizona industry. employs a lot of people, we have research and telescopes. >> host: professor, before we get into your book, can you go back to the football field and the spinning mirrors. what was that about? >> guest: well, telescope size seemed to have reached a limit. it wasn't exceeded for decades. the russians tried but it was a crappy mirror. but big mirrors are expensive

and hard to move around. roger angel, one of my colleagues, invented this way of making mirrors large, thin, very accurate. the way you do it, the trick, the secret sauce, is put the glass walks in the oven, and you spin it fast enough to take the shape of a parabola and you take it out and have a large mirror that is light and not as extensive. >> host: what is the connection to the football field? >> guest: at the team, that was the only place with a big enough space to do this. you need vertical and horizontal space. you just have to avoid game days. it is underneath the stand. and the university said it was available space. >> host: why would it matter how

big a telecope -- telescope is? >> guest: more gathering, more light, let's see you further away. we are trying to get as close to the big bang as possible. you need bigger and bigger class. and bigger mirrors make sharper images. to see details you want a bigger mirror. everything is driving you in the direction of bigger glass. >> host: where are these physical telescopes? >> guest: the very biggest ones are in chile now. we have two six and a half meter telescopes in chile and the 22 and a half meter one we are building is in chile. it is the darkest, driest best place to explore.

>> host: professor, you write your dna tells the story of the profound human image to explore. what does that mean? >> guest: birds and mammals that migrate and travel the planet in search of food or mating. we have the only ones that traveled out of curiosity.

you have to go up and out. >> host: so 1959, when we landed on the moon, what happened with that? >> guest: some people think we did it, some think it as a hoax, and setting aside that so many americans were not alive when that happened. it is a dim culture memory. it is fading from you but it is the most spectacular achievement humans have received, enormous amounts of money doing with computers what were so primitive. hundreds of people were

excited. you know, the government space agencies has had a hard time. their budget soared during apollo and was retracted as vietnam started and we could not afford to spend that much on nasa. but nasa's budget has gone down as a fraction of the federal budget by a factor of two. nasa has to make more with less and thinks are expensive and the technology is challenging. nasa is an important space player but there are new players. probably three dozen private space companies and a few funded by billionaires and have other investors.

i think they rival nasa's budget and will eventually far exceed it. >> host: are they cooperating with each other or off on their own? >> guest: with nasa, i think there is frustration that things were moving slowly and the space shuttle was obsolete technology. the space shuttle is not loved universally. elon musk wants to reinvent rockets from the ground up and thinks he can do better. so there is definitely rivalry but recently there is cooperation, too. first of all, these private space companies don't really have a good business model yet. orbital sciences and spacex and several others have multibillion contracts with nasa to shift freight and eventually astronauts up into the orbit. and that money is important to them and it is important to nasa

because nasa can't put an american in space and hasn't in six years. also, nasa is trying to be more nimble and encourage student groups and small start ups to put microsatellites up and nanosatellites and cube satellites. nasa is trying to roll with the times and be more entrepreneurial and there is a lot of partnerships. >> host: you mention the university of arizona has its own space program. >> guest: yes, we have been trusted by nasa to do everything except the launch for itself for a space probe. first the phoenix lander that went to the martial polar reason and that is cyrus rex that will grab a little bit of an asteroid and bring it back in seven or eight years. >> host: you write about the importance of asteroids. what is that? >> guest: if you want to get a

glitter in your eye they are valuable. it happens to be coming near the earth and probably has a billion worth of precious metal at current market prices and about the name -- same -- amount of bare earth. these are huge mineral resources out there and available. the practical problem of tethering them into a safe orbit without threatening earth and harvest that motherload at an economic level without destroying the market pause you have so much of it. -- because. but that is discouraging people. there are people that thing maybe 15 years from now there will be valuable asteroid mining. >> host: it is time to retire the space shuttle? >> guest: absolutely.

it never lived up to its promise of going out once a week. i think it never went out more than once a month. and two orbitors out of five were lost. that was devastating. it was long overdue to retire. >> host: is it important the international space station continue to orbit? >> guest: i think so but maybe not for the scientific reasons. scientists and companies are not flocking oo do research on it. it is not a magnet for the economic and research activity people hoped. but what it has been is this is demonstration we can live and work in space. 17 countries involved in the space station including our super power rivals russia and china. it is an emblem of cooperation and living in space and learning how to do it. until you do it like that.

a lot of it is electrical and plumbing and not glamorous. it is important in that regard but expensive. it is $120 billion and more. >> host: george w bush called for a return to the moon when president. is that important to you? >> guest: it is ebb and flow. to visionaries it is disappointing to set our sights half a century after being back. but the moon, as the space station is a good place to live and learn how to work in space, so just half a days drive up, the moon is a very good place to learn how to live in a self sufficient colony because you can use the lunar soil which is sterile, you can get a liter of water out of a ton of soil, and you can turn the water into rocket fuel, oxygen to breathe,

you can use it for plants you grow there. the moon is the best place to learn to live beyond the earth and also the best place to serve as a staging post for the rest of the solar system. >> host: in your book, beyond our future in space, where would you like to see us go? >> guest: some of the moons of jupiter and saturn are interesting. we have a clipper going to this water world around jupiter. could well be the next place where we could find life beyond the earth. and some of the other moons in the outer solar system are fascinating places. it is just a more expensive project. >> host: is there life in view beyond earth? >> guest: yes, since beyond earth includes a few hundred

stars in our own galaxy and billi billions beyond that i can't say for sure but statistically i am almost certain. there are tens of billions of earth-like planets just in our own galaxy. the odds they are all sterile given billions of years including billions of years before the earth formed that nothing happened with biology when it did happen here are very low. yes, i believe there is life out there. >> host: what is that pipe dream you have when it comes to space exploration? >> guest: for myself, obviously that i get to go. it is beyond my means and i am not going to be an astronaut but i would like to experience earth orbit. my pipe dream for the whole activity is that we figure out a way to get beyond the solar system to the stars and unknown systems that are tens of

thousands of times greater than going to jupiter or saturn. we will need a way to go into suspended floating. heading to the stars would be an extroidinary thing. >> host: is anyone doing that r rnd? >> guest: yes, nasa has resusitated some of their ideas. they are trying send nanobots to the star system and nasa is hosting conferences on this again. the medical research in how humans could be taken into a weight state for other reasons like life extension and medical reasons. the balls are moving forward. >> host: what is about you that

a hundred thousand students take your courses online? >> guest: to be honest, 100,000 is a lot but it isn't outrageous because you are tapping the whole world. this is in 170 countries. my course is about the cutting edge of science so i give students the good stuff. i talk about exoplanets and huge telescopes and how we measured black holes. i try to dive -- give -- them the research, cutting edge topics without the math. it is a lot of fun teaching online. >> host: your book is anom academic title not a textbook. is that on purpose? >> guest: absolutely. i enjoy writing a poplar book. explaining to a general audience is a challenge and it helps me

know my subject better. when i write about cosmology it is an abstract concept and chalicha challen challenges you to know it well when you explain it. science is important and getting facts out there is important now more than ever. >> we have been talking here on booktv with chris impey his book is called "beyond our future in space" professor of astronomy here at the university of arizona. thank you. rhode island senator sheldon whitehouse offered his his opinion on white house business.

and discussing our how bodies react to fat. washington editor bill girts will provide his statements on how the united states can outpace competitors. and we will explore the life of the leader of the liberian women's movement and the first female president elected in african history. john kasich reflects on this 2016 presidential campaign. and former chief of the new york department internal affairs bureau will describe this work investigating corruption in the police force. >> i spent 41 years in the nypd and saw acts of bravery and integrity but there is that one cop that keeps you up at night.

when i was a precinct commander everyone knew that one or two officers you didn't trust. when i went to internal affairs, i brought the commanding officers onboard and we would meet with them on a regular bases and i would ask them questions like who in your command are you a little concerned about? who in your command keeps you upt a night? we will do an investigation, maybe an integrity test, we will not put a case on your command. some commanders are worried if there is too many cases against my command they will think i am not doing a good job. but we told them if you are part of the investigative team and work with iab you will come out this looking well and not being criticized. the other cops are willing to tell you if they are willing to listen who they stay away from and who they don't want to work

it. >> you can watch all previous afterwards programs on our website. booktv.org. >> britain was an industrial powerhouse in those days. it had a multiple of coffee, shoe and textile refactories, sugar factories, dozen of breweries and innovative entrepreneurs invented chicklets, the deady bear, domino sugar and pinks. in 1849, one of the many german immigrants to arrive and was a skiens sciences opened up one of the largest pharmaceutical companies and you probably know

the company for making zoloft, lip tore, and viagra. over the yours, companies like pfizer employed millions of immigrants and brooklyn neighborhoods grew to accommodate them. but the fortune shifted in the second half of the 21st century. the factories started to leave, not for china and mexico, but far less crowded and more truck-friendly american suburbs. in 1957 when walter o'malley broke the heart of everything brooklyn citizen by taking the beloved baseball team, tem bombs, to los angeles. in retrospect it seemed to tell

the future story. in 1966, the navy yard which during world war ii was the larm largest and best known employer was decommissioned. by the time i moved about a mile away from the navy yard it was home to a few operating warehouses but mostly empty buildings, wild dogs and the body that was randomly dumped. there were holdovers from the earlier wave of immigrants. our neighbors were an older irish couple who came in during the depression and decades following. they were now being picked by

the city to have elderly. that was the musical accompanyment of my children's early years. in fact, brooklyn was actually loosing population. years later the writer who grew up in working class park slope would say about this time you heard it over and over in those days, we got to get out of brooklyn. and you know what? a lot of people did. so the question i had in my mind as i approached the book was how did the old brooklyn become the n n new brooklyn? the place gq called the coolest city on the park.

when i moved there, there were protections for the cashiers and now they have free tastings of their expensive and inexpensive pinor collections. how could we get a point as we did in the 2015 where the department store spent a month celebrating brooklyn mania? how come the only cric people wanted producks made in brooklyn? chic. and one final question why should anyone care what happened to brooklyn? it isn't a city but a borough

aborough. what is the big deal? what i try to show in the book is brooklyn is a microcosm for the changes that have been ruling our politics and the politics of western europe. over the past 30-40 years, advanced economies like that of the united states have been shifting away from manufacturing or to put it crudely making stuff, toward knowledge, information, or again to be crude thinking about stuff. new york city was already becoming the u.s. capital of the economy by the 1960s as corporations centralized and moved their headquarters to downtown and midtown. 59% of the new york city labor force was in white collar occupations. this gave new york a competitive

advantage over other fading industrial cities. most of the white collar people were predominantly men who remember working downtown took to train like rob pea tree played by dick vandyke the fictional husband of laura pea tree played by mary tyler moore who i wanted to mention. but a few of the workers, especially the creative ones, started working in brown stone brooklyn. they were gentrifying to use a word that was poplar decades later. these were all lovely 19th century brown stone neighborhoods that had gone into disrepair. the number of white collar workers increased as did the

number and variety of white collar jobs in new york. government was expanding and so were colleges and universities and along with them jobs for lawyers, administrators, and professors. by the 2000s, technology was opening up new occupations for the creative and young including occupations people never heard of before. the operators at the sugar refinery might have been gone but the new brooklyn has thousands of web designers, app designers and web consultants. the house next door to me is a perfect example of the shift from the older to the new knowledge economy. it is gentrification in a single brown stone. i already mentioned there was an elderly irish couple living there. the husband had been a postal

working and his wife had been in charge of the border. fast forward 15 years, the house was told, renovated and divided into condos. marble bathrooms, granite counters, recess lighting the whole dwi deal. the first people to move in with people you would never met in the old brooklyn. an architecture and his wife, and an editor at real simple, a wall street trader moved in soon after with his wife a free lance writer and three children. same block, same house, old brooklyn, now brooklyn. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

elizabeth rosenthal, former doctor and editor of kaiser news, explores the current state of health care. congressman ken buck looks at washington in drain the swamp. and david callahan reports on how the wealthy are using ventures to influence society in the givers. richard florida officers thoughts on how to make american cities more culturally and financially diverse in the new urban crisis. also being published this week, authorer and former investigative reporter jeff begin recalls the life of jim jones who was responsible for the deaths of over 900 people in the road to jones town. new york university public policy and economics profess jonathan more duck and center

for financial services innovation senior vise president rached synder followed the spending habits of over 235 families over the course of a year in the financial diaries. and journalist drew phillip chronicles rebuilding an abandon house in his hometown in a $500 house in detroit. look for these in bookstores in the coming week and watch were the authors on booktv on c-span. >> good frafternoon, welcome to the heritage foundation.