INTRODUCTION: This is AudioExplorations, a podcast series from AccessScience, the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology Online at www.accessscience.com. I'm Jessa Forte Netting. Today Dorian Devins speaks with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for this AudioExploration: Pluto. This segment: "Tyson's Top 5: The Most Exciting Areas of Research — From the search for life to computer neural networks"

DORIAN DEVINS: What do you think are the most exciting areas of research right now in astrophysics?

DR. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: I've got a top five list, probably a top ten, but I have to think longer about it. The top one is: are we alone in the universe. That's a perennially interesting question. But it's been about time that we finally come out of the question are we alone, let's find intelligent aliens that we can talk to, and we've sort of weaned ourselves off of that first need and said, "Is there any kind of life out there at all?" Even if it's simply bacterial life, because a biologist, while finding intelligent life would be intriguing, to a biologist any kind of life would be just as exciting. And you'd ask questions like, "How does it encode its identity? Is it DNA, is it some other molecule? Is its chemistry based on carbon?" There are fascinating, interesting questions you can ask, and you need the biologists stepping into the unknown side by side with the astrophysicist in order to address that. Because we found places in the cosmos that are our next places to look, like Mars, like Europa, where it has water. And there may be some other places where there might be life based on chemistry we have yet to explore. That would be even more intriguing. So the search for life I would hold as one of the highest callings one can invoke to become a scientist today.

And I'd put a close second, a close second behind it, which is actually a bigger scientific problem, is "What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?" It's a bigger scientific problem because we don't know what those things are. We know they're there because we can measure them, but we don’t know what they’re made of, whereas life, we already know life exists in the universe. We're life, so the question isn't "Can the universe sustain life?" It’s the "Can the universe sustain life beyond us?", and that would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest otherwise. With regard to these other fundamental questions about dark matter and dark energy, we don't know where the answer will come from. Is it a rethinking of the nature of physics, the nature of the universe? Are there parallel universes whose gravity we feel that crosses the membranes of higher dimensions?

So what links back to this is the study of the multiverse, are there multiple universes of which we are just one? That has philosophical foundations because we used to think of Earth as something unique and the planets were out there. And then Copernicus says, "Well, Earth—the Sun is in the middle, Earth goes around the Sun like the rest of these objects, so we're just another planet". Well surely the Sun is special and unique and bright. Oh no, it’s just one of the same as every other star in the night sky. They're just much farther away. Okay, well maybe our night sky is unique, maybe we have the Milky Way. No, there’s a billion, a hundred billion other Milky Ways. Oh, but we've got our one universe there, so it's our one universe, that's unique. Well, maybe not, maybe not, because we've kind of been down that road before. So the multiverse folk have good philosophical background to suggest that we're not alone even when counting universes. So that’s a very … those are questions very high up on my list.

Another one is, "Will we—this is more technological—will we be able to create computer circuits that actually mimic the creativity of the human mind?" That would be just, that would be cool to know if that can happen. And if so, is that the emergence of consciousness? Now that doesn't, that's not centerline to astrophysics but I'm answering more broadly as a scientist what are the things that intrigue me.

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Additional Material

DR. TYSON (continued): And I'm a little more sensitive to that now because I'm now hosting a spinoff program from Nova called 'Nova Science Now', which is a magazine format television program much like CBS's '60 Minutes' where there's segments. And these segments will be drawn, I'll be hosting them, this will be drawn from each of the frontiers of the science areas, finding what is the emergent discoveries that we can anticipate in a month's time. So I've become sensitized to some of the frontiers of other fields, and I remain fascinated by where they're going.

DORIAN DEVINS: That would be neural networks that you were talking about before?

DR. TYSON: It can be, yeah, I mean it's, there's a lot of ways people are trying to approach that problem. I guess the real question is, if you make a computer that mimics humans perfectly, will there be circuitry that emerges from that wiring, pathways, current pathways within the wiring that serve the same role as our sparks of inspiration and creativity? Because when you transition from being a student who learns what already exists to being an adult who now has to create, that's the kind of transition I'm referring to in the field of computing. I'm also curious what quantum computing will bring, that will make modern day computing speeds look like what old computers look like to us today—the room sized computers that contain the computing power of a 'Tickle Me Elmo' doll, you know. Quantum computing will make our modern day computing look like that. And there are many problems in astrophysics that are still awaiting a level of high speed computing that that will bring to solve the problems.