>> rose: welcome to the program. as summer comes to a close, we look tack at some of our favorite moments of the year. tonight an encore presentation of my conversations with two men of science, neil degrasse tyson and e. o. wilson. >> there are four scientists working for a decade to get this result. they realized that the elements on the periodic table that we might remember from chemistry class owe their origin to thermonuclear fusion in the cores of stars. fusion. light elements under high temperatures coming together to make heavy elements. if they only stayed in stars, that would not be interesting, but these particular stars explode and scatter this enrichment across the galaxy, and this enrichment, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, all

these elements scatter into gas clouds that then collapse and form next-generation star systems, one of which was ours. so the very ingredients that comprise life are traceable to stars. so they gave their lives billions of years before we arrived. >> rose: so we are stars? so we are not only figuratively but quite literally star dust. >> let us consider that human beings are above all a biological species in a biological world. 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. so if, when we get this understanding of where we are and what we are and where we came from, we'll be better prepared to decide where we're

going. >> rose: neil degrasse tyson and e. o. wilson, when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> rose: additional funding provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: neil degrasse tyson is here. many know him as the most powerful nerd in the universe. he calls himself simply a servant of science. she the long time director of the hayden planetarium in new york and 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 am pleased to have neil degrasse tyson back at this table. welcome. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: when did you know what you wanted to do is be an astrophysicist. >> at age 9, the first visit to the hand planetarium. >> rose: that did it for you? that put it in my veins. i think the universe called me and not i that called it. i thought, wow, of course, growing up in the bronx, there aren't many stars visible anywhere in new york, especially not the bronx at the the time. so the sky and the planetarium was magical. i thought it was a hoax. i've seen the sky from the bronx, and this is not it, therefore it must be a hoax, not knowing, of course, it's portraying the real sky. by age 11, then i had the answer that -- i had the answer to that annoying question that adults

ask children, what do you want to be when you grow up. >> rose: and your answer was? astrophysicist. that ended the conversations pretty quickly. >> rose: have you ever wanted to write a science fiction novel? >> yes. however, i don't have talent writing. i wish i did. >> rose: but off story? i have a story, it's ready to go! (laughter) >> rose: it just needs a good writer. >> i've got a good story and i could advice on such a story but in terms of character development and emotions, i don't have tex persons, t you know a story that would be compelling? >> i have one in mind right now. i'm happy to tell it. >> rose: okay, tell me. okay. the world is at war. >> rose: the world we know is at war? >> the world we know is at war and, in some very disruptive way, not with large weapons, but regional battles everywhere, and people are choosing sides. then an astroid is decovered.

>> rose: tell us what an astroid is. >> an astroid is a craggy chunk of rock varied in sizes, countless tens of thousands of them, probably hundreds of thousands of them. in the orbit between mars and jupiter, most of them, some have wayward orbits, they cross the orbit of the earth, some in thousands. you learn earth and the astroids will collide with one another guaranteed eventually. so we want to keep track of all the earth-crossing objects and monitor them. ideally, you want to put lojack on them. it's 10:00 p.m., do you know where your killer astroid is? once you do that, we learn there is an astroid that could render us all extinct. as that moment, everyone who sees other humans as their enemy come together and see the astroid as their common energy and the technology that has been

developed around the countries in the world, countries are now technologically able and they have been developpic technology to fight wars -- >> rose: they develop a common front against the astroid. >> not only that but we need different pieces of technology for the deflection device. >> rose: you could make this as a real possibility. >> yes, so the science would not only be in the threat of the astroid and finding and searching it, the space mission to deflect it, the tools to use to engage that deflection, if something doesn't exist, you can go into the laboratories, you can see the pressure on them to invent something that works, you find out i have a piece of this but i have to go to my enemy who invented another piece for it to come together and make everything work. so it can be quite dramatic. maybe we can have a little piece of the astroid to work, you have to flood the city, otherwise hollywood doesn't buy it in.

armageddon, they managed to save earth but pieces hit the earth. the astroids have good aivment one decapitated the chrysler building. they were aiming for human monuments. they will probably hit the ocean. you probably get to destroy the cities with a tsunami. >> rose: the last big astroid that hit the earth -- >> two years ago, one the size of this studio traveling 40,000 miles an hour collided with earth's atmosphere above a town in the euro mountains. >> rose: what happened if it hit the center of manhattan island? >> well, so that -- that happened to explode about 20 miles up, okay, 20 or 25 miles up, and that's high enough so that energy gets deposited into the atmosphere and dilutes before it reaches earth's surface. but even so, that was enough shock wave to shatter essentially every single window in the city, while people were

looking out the window to wonder what the light was they had just seen. light travels father than sound. so they see the bright light, the light of the explosion, look out the window, the shock wave comes, lacerated faces, hands, skin, 1600 people injured. that was a shot across our bow, the universe asking us, how's your space program coming? (laughter) so if that happened over manhattan, it would have, now, in manhattan, you have a different problem when you shatter windows because they fall and become these sabers, sharp sabers descending to the street, possibly hurting or killing people, pedestrians. >> rose: have the united states or any other country done a lot because they've learned the lessons from the astroid two years ago? >> more people are talking about it burks that astrode we didn't know was coming till it was too late. you might have three minutes evacuation time. that one is not large enough to catch it far away. >> rose: and if we detect one

far enough away, we shoot it down or something? >> no, that's macchio. are you a macho man? >> rose: no. blow theer ou sucker out of the sky (laughter) >> rose: how do you deflect it? >> there are interesting plans. knot hack funded to make it happen. one thing is you take your spaceship, and if that's the astroid, you can bring your spaceship nearby and park it there and they'll feel one another and want to drift towards one another because of mutual gravity but you don't let that happen. you fire retrorockets to prevent that and the act of doing that slowly tugs the astroid out of harm's way. yousdon't have to destroy it. just make sure on its route it doesn't hit earth anymore. it's there to hurt you another day, but if you get good at this, it's like shooting pool cues. you knock them out of the way.

>> rose: so that's one of the theory shthetheories? >> that's one way. you don't just go and blow things out of the sky. here in america, we're good at blowing stuff up and let good at knowing where the pieces will go when you're done. so it's very messy to try to explode the astroid. what you don't know will break into two pieces now you have to evacuate both coasts? it's a challenge. the the engineers have worked this out, but there is no plan in place, no international collaboration in place to fund. this suppose it head ford the indian ocean. do you tell all the indian ocean countries, oh, you have to defend yourself? if we have the most advanced space program at the time, should we pay for it? do you tax everyone as part of their gdp, the way the membership at the u.n. is taxed, and hand the money to the most able country who can deflect it? here's another one, let's say it

heads for the united states and we deflect it, it fails and now it's going to hit europe. now what do you do? so all these problems. >> rose: we could put this in the movie, couldn't we? >> exactly. you're still thinking hollywood. >> rose: no! (laughter) what's the most important question that's unanswered glare. >> that's a great question, and i have an unorthodox answer for you, okay. for me, the greatest question -- and it will sound like a copout, but it's not. for 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, yeah, i want to know what dark matter is, it's 85% of the gravity of the universe. we have no idea what's causing it. we shouldn't even -- we don't even have the right to call it a dark matter. we have top people working on this with top equipment.

so i get that, but at this moment, we don't know what it is, and it doesn't interact -- >> rose: and what's the most likely answer? >> i have a preferred answer. >> rose: what's the preferred answer? >> that's my preferred answer. particle physicists, they want to say it's a particle because the particle physicists -- if you want to be a particle you grant mass to other particles. i grant the mass you will measure for it. so there's dark energy, the universe is accelerating in expansion against the wishes of gravity, we don't know what's causing that. we don't know how you went from organic molecules in the early earth to animated life. that's a transition that's on the frontier. >> rose: say that again. how do you go lifeless organic molecules. >> rose: which is chemistry? yeah, organic chemistry, to self-replicating life, based on the organic molecules.

>molecules. we're not there yet and we don't know what was around before the big bang. so we have top people working on it. and i'll put you on my speed dial if you want to know the latest. >> rose: what is dark matter. we don't know. >> rose: we don't know that. we should call it dark gravity. >> rose: that's one of the big questions, though. >> yes, it is. >> rose: and the other one -- dark energy, we don't know what that is. >> rose: okay. it was around before the big bang. >> rose: what was the big bang? >> well, the beginning of the universe. duh... (laughter) if you turn the clock back, what you will notice about the universe is that it was smawrnlr and hotter, for every day you turn the clock back. so you run the clock all the way back and you learn that the entire universe was in the same place at the same time, and at extremely high temperatures, in the trillions. you know, trillion is the highest number anyone has any

comfort with, but temperatures much hot than that. so 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. >> rose: so from the university we have to know what happened in chemistry to make dna. >> yeah, because i'm an astrophysicist. i know we have life and i've got that but all those are very real questions we ask today. if you can answer that, dish out the nobel prizes. i want to know what questions we're not even intellectually ma chiewf enough to ask yet. they will reveal themselves after we've answered the questions we put on the table. >> rose: has a new question revealed itself in the last 15 years? >> yeah, dark energy was discovered in 1998, 17 years ago burks it's still a big mystery. >> rose: who discovered it?

two teams. they're measuring super novae. a particular species of super novanova, they're potent to meae the expansion and size of the universe. two teams, one in california and one on both coasts were working on the answer and shared the nobel prize for that recently. >> rose: are we alone? my best guest is the universe is teaming with life, and our galaxy, in particular. our galaxy is sort of proxy for other galaxies, is teaming with life, but that complex life might be much rarer. >> rose: why is that? well, here's the argument. you have the time line of the earth. earth is born.

this is today. that's 4.5 billion years. put this planet out there, some are born yesterday, some at the beginning of the universe. you don't know when in the time line of the planet you will land there. here's earth. throw a dart at the time line. most the time the dart hits earth, there is only single-celled life. then we have the cam bringian explosion of life. oxygen is rocket fuel for complex life and life now has the carte blanche to become complex because the system can support it, and you get limbs and detecters like, and sensors and it's a stunning development in the fossil record of life on earth. then you have complex life. so that's a smaller piece of the title timeline. you ask when do you find intelligent life? that's this last little bit that

we define as intelligent. so if earth is any measure of anything, throwing darts at planets that we might land on, who is to say that we're going to land right at that moment where what we call intelligence has arise noon what's on mars? >> the rover is on mars, i'm happy to report. the curiosity rover is the size of an suv. >> rose: so what's up there? well, mars is curious -- >> rose: water? well, the martian surface has rampant evidence of there once having been running water. >> rose: so that says something. >> yes. what i mean by evidence, i mean really awesome evidence. like there are river beds that meet dried, meandering river beds. the things, if you fly over the midwest and you look at the things that flood waters have done and long-time rivers have done, cut into the landscape, the grand canyon kind of things you see all the tell-tale features. >> rose: when do we see them?

anytime we take a photograph of its surface. >> rose: we could have known that without going there? >> uh... the resolution is very hard to pick up. that's hard. you want to get close, then you can see ridges and valleys and mountains -- >> rose: so that tells you water was there? >> yes, or a liquid. we're pretty sure it was water, but it certainly was a liquid. to meander a river means the river was there a long time. you don't meander overnight. and dry lake beds with salt deposits at the bottom. how do you get salt deposits? from standing water that had minerals in it. when there's no water left, you've got a salt lake. you fly over utah, that's what salt lake city is sitting next to. >> rose: should we go to as far as.

>> yeah, why not? >> rose: if it's feasible and doable. >> people say, oh, the radiation! we have clever engineers. i have no doubt they'll figure out all the technological problems. it's just money. >> rose: really? it's only ever money at all times. >> rose: are you extremely disappointed we don't donor in space? >> the curiosity part of me is disappointed, but the politically astute side of me fully understands why that's the case. >> rose: because we have other priorities? >> no. we've always had other priorities. that's a false excuse. when we went to the moon, we had plenty of other priorities. there was a civil rights movement. there was the hot war in southeast asia. the cold war with the soviet union. the campus unrest -- >> rose: we did it for p.r. we did it because we were at war with the soviets. that was an act of war, essentially, without the weapons, and if we were not at

war, the motivation to go to the moon, we would tell ourselves, oh, we went to the moon because we're americans and we're explorers and it's in our dna! okay, that might be true but the people who write the checks don't care about any of this lofty speech. it's is your security at risk? we will spend any amount of money to protect that, and that's when money flows like rivers and we went to the moon in that climate. >> rose: but should we create that urgency again for something like going to the moon? >> you know what i joke about? >> rose: no. i say, let me go visit china and whisper to the head of china, pssst! u want to put military basess on mars? don't tell anybody! then that memo shows up in the pentagon, we will be on mars in ten months, one month to design, build and fund a spacecraft, and

nine months to get there with the astronauts. that's how motivated we will be because i think that's how note violated we were in the '60s. i want to go to mars for military reasons. it's more subtle and takes slightly long 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, and i'm thinking i voted for my representation in congress, i want them to listen to me for longer than an elevator ride. so it's simple -- if you're going into space in a big way, visiting astroids, mining astroids, tourist jaunts to the moon, science on mars, you're doing all these activities, might be military activities, all of this, to accomplish this will require advancing a space frontier. you will be inventing, innovating, patents will be granted and you will have these discoveries weekly if not daily

in your newspapers that that infuse as culture of inquiry, of exploration, of innovation, and when you come from a culture of innovation, stuff gets solved because your whole mindset is different. >> rose: do you believe we've lost the culture of innovation? >> yes, it's been gone since we stopped going to the move. >> rose: silicon valley is a great culture of innovation. >> yes, it is a great culture of innovation burks i was misrepresented in headlines when i said -- i gave a talk and in response to a question, someone says what do you think of them? and i said the world has problems that are bigger than can be solved than waiting just for your next app. we have problems in transportation, housing, poverty, disease, energy, climate, and, so, these are huge problems, and if we all sit down and play with our apps, they're not going to get solved. that's what i head. the headline was tyson attacks

entrepreneurs saying they're like cave men. >> rose: what did you mean? what i mean is, to bask in the measures of your next app will hide from you the fact that there are larger problems that need to be solved. >> rose: which raises the question of all these people like jeff basos and elonmusk and sir richard branson that want to create some kind of vehicles in space -- don't laugh at me. >> no, no, i'm not. somebody has to do that. whether or not they will succeed you want somebody there doing that, and they affect how other people i think. i've had students in my classes saying one day i want to work for spacex -- not wall street and get rich. they say, i want to explore what he's doing. i want to invent the new car, the new transportation system, the next rocket. that is the influence that i'm telling you infuses into a culture when you go into space in a big way.

the space sets the carrot and everything else comes in after that. >> rose: is that part of your mission? >> i don't have a mission. i would rather stay home. >> rose: when you get up in the morning -- >> when i get up in the morning, i hope the phone doesn't ring. >> rose: why are you going to work? >> i want to play with my kids, have a play date with my wife, that's all i want to do, then i want to go to my lab. >> rose: are you serious? what happens in there is i get a phone call because iverse and they want a sound byte on the evening news or a documentarian has an idea they want to explore and i get a phone call, i serve those interests, i am a servant for the public appetite for the universe. that's what's i do. i don't go door to door. you don't see me marching with placards. i will never tell someone who to vote for. that's not what i do. i'm an educator. >> rose: but are we losing the race, you know, to develop the

brice mines in sufficient quality that we serve science as other people may come to serve science? >> a lot of focus is on who are the 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 really 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 -- or, science, that's not for me, i'm into this other stuff, and somehow be okay with that. suppose i said to any other person, you know, 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 the 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 in -- is wielded by people in power. so, for me, it's sufficient to say let us spread an appreciation of science to everyone, if the people understand what science is, how it works and why it works, then you can vote intelligently on issues that involve scientific principals, on issues and you can tell who is telling truth and who is not and analyze it. >> rose: do we have too many scientific deniers and give too much prominence to those who wants to look the other way than science. >> there are some of those and dare i implicate some elements of journalism in this, because there is a journalistic ethos --

not to tell you what your ethos is, but as i understand it, and it's been told to me, the journalist obligation while writing a story is to give equal column space to all size or half to one of each side. and if someone says the earth is round and someone says the earth is flat, at some point you will make the judgment that the flat idea is flat-out wrong, i'm not giving them attention, we're wages time and i'm not doing a service in my role of informing the public. so i think journalists are really smart people and they're highly educated and curious, they have the curiosity that kids have that they still have as adults that the others branch of curiosity manifest in society, scientists and journalists, and that's a great thing to have, but at some point invest your brain energy to recognize when something is friend. >> rose: i'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you are a journalist. you are a journalist. >> you don't have to apologize. >> rose: no, i'm not.

i host a talk show, so i can't say i'm not a journal snies not only that, you're in pursuit of questions. >> yes, i agree i'm a journalist as a scientist who asks questions. the only part of the question we don't ask is the who. we're good at the when, where, what, how. but who moved the black hole, there's not an answer to that who. >> rose: do we know what's at the bottom of the black hole? >> no, but if you do a scientific equation -- >> rose: some have no idea what that. >> it's a region of space where matter collapsed is such density that the gravity -- as matter collapses and gets dearns and denser the surface gravity gets hiring and higher, so if you stand there, you will weigh more and more, it will be hard for you to escape. at some point this blob of matter condensed so significantly that, for you to

escape, you have to travel faster than the speed of light, which means light can't escape. if light can't escape, you're not getting out of this place. so it's not only dark, it's a hole. it's a hole in every direction you fall in, a three-dimensional hole, it's a black hole. one syllable, black hole, that's what it is. >> rose: how long have we known about the black hole? >> einstein could have predicted their existence with his own equations but didn't, interestingly enough. >> rose: interestingly enough, why? because he wasn't interested enough? >> no, no, no. to quote stephen hawken because i asked him directly over dinner, why didn't isaac newton maketies coffers with his own mathematics and equation that he invented? his response is einstein didn't come up with black holes you can't think of everything. (laughter) >> rose: explain to me time travel. >> it's been suggested there might be some law of physics

we've yet to discover that will prevent you from going backwards in time. because think about it -- >> rose: it's been said -- maybe there's a law of physics that 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 having sex, and then whoever started the revolution is not there. have them have sex ten minutes later than they would have, you give birth to a different person than who led the revolution burks then it wouldn't be the gorefest it turned out to be.

off paradox. a causality paradox. so that being said, we have no shortage of interesting ways to go forward in time. we can speed you up, send you on a spaceship you go very fast, your time ticks more slowly, not just your clock, and then the electronics in your digital watch i see 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's one way to do it. you can also do it by -- in gravitational fields -- they portrayed this in "interteller," the film -- gravitational fields have an effect on how your time ticks. the satellites farther away from

the earth's center than we are, their time ticks at a different rate than ours. their time ticks -- the clocks on g.p.s. satellites tick faster than clocks on rt but they send you the correct time. how do they do that? we knew advance about einstein's theory of relativity, so the g.p.s. clocks are precorrected for the time change because of einstein's theory of general relativity and sends the correct time us to, other wise the times would separate from one other and you couldn't use g.p.s. salts to tell you anything about where you are on teeter. it's not something we cherry pick by people who have political philosophies that differ from the truth. >> rose: tell me this thing about dust. you remember you told me on the "60 minutes" profile about dust and energy -- >> not everyone collins out of "60 minutes" -- not everyone

comes out of "60 minutes" profile better than when they went in (laughter) but thanks for your interest in my life and work. >> rose: but dust to dust, a composition of teeter an the eae dust in the human body. i want to leave america with a sense of basic, fundamental things that are the essence of science and your work and others'. >> i think 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 it's four of them, not just one, and we romanticize the lone researcher burning the midnight oil. this is four scientists working for a decade to get this result. they realized tell meant on the

periodic -- they realized the elements on the periodic table owe their origin to thermonuclear fusion in the cores of stars, fusion, light elements under high temperatures coming together to make heavy elements. if they only stayed in stars, that would not be interesting, but these stars explode and scatter enrichment across the galaxy and this enrichment -- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon -- all these elements scatter into gas clouds that then collapse and form next-generation star systems, one of which was ours. so the very ingredients that comprise life are traceable to stars. so they gave their lives billions of years before we. >> rose: so we are stars? so we are not only figuratively but quite literally tion of you, do you havee things you want to accomplish

beyond being at the end of a phone where somebody has to ask a question and you give credibility to whatever their project is by giving them direction? >> quickly, people have seen me on tv in so many ways, shapes and sizes, someone came up and said to me, who's your agent who puts you on tv? i said, my agent must be the universe because there is no human being that's doing this. one of my favorite quotes was uttered by horace mann, the educator, who said, "be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity." and i want that on my epitaph. i want to be purr idea and i want that on my tombstone. >> rose: by ashamed to die unless you have scored some victory for humanity... >> that could be at any level.

it could be raising kids that are responsible. that is a very broadly-defined victory. so i think you -- 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? just -- it's like, clean up your mess! (laughter) and as you've cleaned up the room you just lived in, maybe leave a flower behind, something where people can come in and say, this is a slightly better place, and then we could 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's sad. i wonder how far we would be,

were it not for such forces that operate in this world. >> rose: thank you for coming. thank you for having me. >> rose: e. o. wilson is here, one to have the world's most distinguished natural lists and biologist, wrote two books, pulitzer prize winner and professor at harvard university. his new book grapples with fundamental questions "the meaning of human existence." i am pleased to have e. o. wilson back at this table as i always am. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: tell me how you came to the meaning of human existence. >> over a long, long route. i started my career as an evolutionary biologist. i actually invented that term. that makes another story, very interesting. but 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. >> rose: that became a bit

continue versal? >> it did. that was in the '70s, though, and now it's not controversial. but this led me to human behavior, inevitably. after all, we are social animals. >> rose: right. eventually, you know, it just seemed logical where i found myself positioned to think about some of these big 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. >> rose: what does it mean to be human -- >> that's correct. >> rose: -- which is the meaning of human existence. >> exactly. the point of view of combined science and humanities, we're approaching the 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 than we ever had before. in fact, i would like to refer

to it p what's happening or will happen shortly as the new enlightenment. >> rose: really? the time has come for us to renew. >> rose: find the new enlightenment in life. >> yes, i think we are ready now. >> rose: help me define what it might be. >> the original period was primarily 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 were called natural philosophers and the first scientists were in agreement that they were learning so much so fast that in sort order we would be able to combine all that knowledge and come to understand humanity in the light of the knowledge that we could acquire ourselves and not just rely on -- >> rose: so much has come in so fast that it was time to step back and say what if we learned and what do we make of it? >> what happened was the old

enlightenment failed away because of two developments. one was the romantic period of literature. >> rose: right. that came to dominate a lot of the english language. but also it was that signs could not deliver, not in the early 1800s, so it's promise of actually contributing something fundamental to the question of what is the meaning of human existence, that faded away, and we had to wait for two centuries. now, after a two centuries, i think we're ready to ask those questions again with a lot more confidence. >> rose: also much more challenging because science has roared ahead and challenged traditional definitions of what it means to be human. >> that's exactly right. let me just say about this, too, it isn't just science that's the promise of connecting the humanities and renewing the

quest, i think we're close to finding the trail, but not just any science. for example, you're going to get nowhere if you ask an astrophysicist, an astronomer, you're going to get nowhere on this question if you ask a chest. even me colleagues in molecular biology, we're too far removed about what we need to know about where humans came from was a fit in the earth's form and flora as a species that involved from something less human and pre-human into our present self-glorified form. >> rose: so where do we find the answers? >> where do we find the answers? let me list five disciplines where we are finding the answers and a couple may surprise you. we are finding them in evolutionary biology, which is advancing with the help of molecular genetics and other disciplines advance itself very

quickly. the next one that's contributing and will contribute big time is brain science. of course, that is now the subject of immense interest and intensity of research. but a third one, of course, as anyone would want to list, would be paleontology and archeology. you know, sort of segueing into each other. but then now comes the two surprises, would surprise people, i think, pretty much. 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.

>> rose: there are very wise people who are scared about the consequences of. this does it bother you? >> not in the least. i just had the opportunity of meeting with six of the key figures in artificial intelligence and robotics. they had gathered to receive a prize, and i was there, and we arranged for a round-table discussion on the present status of those subjects and, in my case, we were bringing in biological diversity, how is this going to affect the living environment of the world when we fill it with robots and changing our consumption patterns and so on. >> rose: and? and the answer is, this became an ancillary subject, are the robots going to take over? that's a great story, and hollywood loves a great story, and they tell the story over and

over again and the short answer is no n. >> rose: because? because we have control. we are not going to allow even humanoid robots to -- >> rose: we'll control it because we make sure we understand the danger of it and, therefore, we will put a barrier... >> we'll bring it short. we haven't begun to understand how the emotional centers, the core of our human nature, how they work. we're just locating them. now the brain mappers -- >> rose: in the last ten years, we've had progress. >> rapid progress. but that being the case and we have an understanding that we're just beginning to find where the subconscious centers are and how they feed into the white hot sense areas we call the conscious mind, we are not

likely to try to duplicate that in robots, but if we were, we're certainly not going to give the robots the chance to evolve. >> rose: if we could, we're not giving it to them? >> yeah. >> rose: that's very nice to say, but there is probably somebody out there somewhere who says, i don't want 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. >> well, you know, you're right. that's the mantra of the tech no scientific a.j age. there will be no halting of any scientific investigation or potentially useful techology te, because it is the core of our

human nature to want to explore and keep exploring, always, but there is a difference between the mad scientist who's invented a great neutron bomb on his own in his private laboratory and teams of scientists working that are needed to produce the ability of robots or art initial intelligence of any kind to mutate 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 is. >> rose: i thought, here we go with the revered e. o. wilson decided to say we are trying to create human life in too many ways in which we are trying to design human life. that's what i thought you were going to say. so that's not an issue for you?

>> no. i'm glad you brought that up because this raises tissue of the humanities. i touch on a chapter called "the all-importance of the rt of the reason i do that is consider that rational abilities and rational process in the engineering and the technology that emerges from that nevertheless is not human -- a fundamental human quality. the degree of capacity as unique to humans, but what is fund meant toll human polls -- fundamental to human policy, what makes us distinctive and gives humanity to us, may i use memetaphorically, our soul is in the emotions and we're not going to tinker with those. that's the core we're trying to

save. >> rose: do you avoid tinkering with that or do you say it's impossible, the idea of the soul. >> no, i don't mean it's impossible. i'm just saying, when we finally settle down, if we do finally settle down before we wreck this planet, we're going to come to understand that it's the conglomerate and the complex intersection o -- interaction of our emotional process that makes us distinctive and is the core of our humanity. >> rose: our emotional process? >> yes. >> rose: and what advancements are we making in terms of that emotional process? >> just study. >> rose: just study? just studying. >> rose: there are no landmark cases? >> well, they're landmark in the sense neurobiologists, you can't tell where they are from one month to the next, they're moving so rapidly burks right at the moment, they have succeeded in locating quite a few centers for emotion and also centers for subconscious decision-making, and the idea is to learn about

this as thorough learning process and what centers that is. but center by center, linkage by linkage, we are beginning to get a map of the earth, and then we will be able to map the emotions and move to testif the next pha. there is a nice term being used, and that is "whole brain emulation." emulate the whole brain but not exactly duplicate it? what's the difference if we emulate it? we would we go if we emulate the human brain that would be different if we try to duplicate it? >> well, that's a very good question, sir. but the emulation means the

cog that depends on the decision-making that has emotion-like components to it is one of the goals of artificial intelligence. there is a kind of technology that's being developed, it's secondary in importance to digital, you know, binary models, and that is called neuromorphics, that is computers actually designed to be analog and work a bit like the brain. so i suspect, in time, neuromorphic -- that is, analog computers -- to imitate the brain will come by and we will get the robots. now i amway out beyond -- >> rose: i like it. good, fine. this is a good conversation. but the goal, i believe, is that we will have computers smart enough to perform the obvious

task we want them to perform on the surface of mars and the middle of volcanos and so on. but we want them also to be able to make judgments that are appropriate for human need. so that's as far as we would want to take it. >> rose: let's assume you were thinking of doomsday -- >> yes. >> rose: -- is it more likely to have come 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? >> both. it's a race amongst doomsdayers as to which will come first. now we are above critical level in the concentration of the

climate change components of the atmosphere, and scientists who are expert on these subjects, the real scientists, wonder and worry that there is some kind of a tripping, turning point -- >> rose: a tipping point? -- a tipping point that could be catastrophic in nature and they can imagine scenarios. so we could do massive or catastrophic damage with the tipping point we didn't anticipate well enough, and we're allowing the essential cause of that to go on and on, but we should be careful about climate change because that could create a catastrophe. but the other way is by the means of whimper, and that is what i'm beginning to concentrate all my energies on, and that's conservation of the

biosphere, and not let these fishes become extinct a thousand times faster than before humans came because we don't know what happened with the biosphere if we destroy it. it could mean we wind down to a less controllable, less interesting and less productive planet, and that would be just kind of a dark age we could never emerge from. >> rose: okay, dr. wilson. at is the meaning of human. existence? >> i'll have to just -- because i know our time is limited -- just answer with a couple of general statements which i think carry the meaning of the meaning. >> rose: right. first is that history makes no sense without pre-history. pre-history makes no sense without biology. human existence is the result of a long series of evolutionnary

and culture events, the cultural starting primarily when agriculture was discovered that led up to what we are today, and the meaning oork, then, is the c that goes 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. so if when we get this understanding of where we are and what we are and where we came from, that we'll be better prepared to decide where we're

going. >> rose: e. o. wilson, thank you. >> thank you. >> rose: pleasure. great to see you. thank you for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and other episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> rose: additional funding provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide.

this is "nightly business report" with tyler mathisen and sue herera. >> september selloff. stocks shred about 3% sending all three major indices into correction territory. all revved up. sliding stocks didn't stop customers from putting the pedal to the medal in the showroom. automatic though sa auto sales stopped expectations, but can they keep up the pace. anding active or passive shall whi? all that and more for tuesday, september 1. good evening and welcome. i'm sharon epperson. >> and after the worst month in