Rather than delve into the structural roots of those abuses, however, Tyson suggests that the human sciences would be fine if they just worked harder to be more like his bailiwick, the physical sciences. From eugenics to conversion therapy, science has routinely been manipulated and invoked to justify racist, homophobic and transphobic beliefs and policies, and it remains rife with implicit bias of all kinds. Only when Tyson attempts to grapple with the hot-button issues of race and gender identity does he acknowledge that the world of science isn’t always as noble and objective as he has contended. In an embarrassing incident from his own “Forbidden Twitter File,” Tyson recalls, he posted a tweet pointing out that mass shootings represent “a tiny fraction of all preventable deaths in the country … within days of the 2019 El Paso, Texas shooting, in which 46 people were shot in a Walmart, 23 of them killed.” The social media pounding that Tyson received “for my insensitivity to the victims and their loved ones” was a reminder of a similar backlash, before the Twitter era, after he compared the death toll on 9/11 to the number of Americans who die in traffic accidents every month.
In other places, however, he exhibits some self-awareness that real-world headlines aren’t always best met with slide rules and scientific calculators. In some of the book’s most fanciful passages, Tyson proudly lets his nerd flag fly, imagining what visitors from space would make of our social divisions and holding up Comic-Con, the annual gathering of comic book aficionados, as a model of social community.
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