-So today, it's my pleasure and
honor to welcome our speaker,
Michelle Thaller.
Previously, she was
our Assistant Director
for Science Communication
at NASA Goddard,
but now I understand
she has moved on.
She is Deputy Director for
Science for Communication based
at NASA Headquarters.
So Michelle was 7 years old
when she first saw
the original "Star Wars"
in a very small town
in Wisconsin,
and then from that moment,
she knew what she wanted to be.
She wanted to become
an astronomer.
Few of us, of course,
have that kind of dreams
when we're very young.
She was only 7.
And that's what she became.
However, it's her great gift
in communication,
communicating the richness
of science to the public
that has taken her to places.
Michelle has appeared on
many television shows
from the Discovery Channel
to the Young Astronauts Program
to the History Channel,
the Universe,
and the Science
Channel show
"How the Universe Works."
She has received
several high-profile awards
for online science journalism
and science leadership.
And just to add to that,
in her current role,
Michelle represents
all of NASA Science,
including Earth and space,
other science
and climate change.
The sun and space weather
solar system exploration,
cosmology,
and the deep universe.
So, we are very privileged,
of course,
to have her join this series,
and without further ado,
please help me welcome
our speaker,
Michelle Thaller!
[ Applause ]
-Great, great to be back here.
I always love being
back at Goddard.
I miss this place, hint, hint.
Anybody wants to hire me back.
No, no,
I had a wonderful time here.
I think I spent
seven years at Goddard.
I've been at headquarters now
for about 2 1/2 years,
and I've actually been quite
enjoying NASA headquarters.
The people there are wonderful.
The people that are really
trying to get NASA
to work as an agency.
That's been a really
cool thing for me to see.
I'm finding out that I'm
definitely not a policy person.
I want to -- this is sort of
an uncomfortable talk for me.
I give a lot of public talks,
and I love to present
the amazing work
that basically you guys
are doing.
All the stuff that's
going on at NASA,
all of our beautiful imagery,
all of the discoveries
that we're making.
I realize I was rather
intensely uncomfortable
about being asked
to talk about myself,
so I wanted to make this
into kind of a safe place.
I'm going
to tell you a little bit
about what I'm going to
talk about today,
and hopefully we can
start a conversation.
I'll tell you a little bit about
how I got involved in science,
how I came to be in the job
that I am,
a little brief biography.
They asked me for that.
But I'd very quickly like to
transition to talking a bit
about what I've learned
about how to communicate.
Because my main job now
is communicating science.
How do you do it well?
What things are working well,
what things are not?
Giving a presentation tomorrow
at headquarters
about the exoplanet,
the Trappist 1 result.
I'll show you some
of the numbers
that we generated from that.
It's unbelievable.
Basically, we had a social media
footprint for that,
approaching about 4 billion.
So I mean, things are really
changing very quickly.
I want to talk to you
about some of the stories
that I think
we really have to tell,
and we have to tell better.
We have to tell them
in more diverse ways.
We have to tell them
in clearer ways,
and something you'll see me
come back to again and again
in this talk is reaching
into our emotions
as human beings.
Being a scientist does not mean
you're not a human being,
and it's amazing how much
in the public
this is perceived this way.
It's actually kind of
disheartening to me.
I mean, sometimes I will be
talking to somebody
who's talking
about climate change.
They'll accuse scientists
of this conspiracy
and this great lie
that's being perpetuated
about climate change.
And I'm sitting there
right with this person,
and I'm, like,
"Are you calling me a liar?
You know, do you understand
there's a person here
that you're calling a liar?"
I've had people say, "If there
was a giant asteroid heading
toward the Earth,
would scientists tell us?"
I've been asked that
in the public.
And it's, like,
"Who's the 'us,'" right?
I mean, you know, this idea
that we are not people,
it's something
that as scientists,
we're trained to be
very dispassionate
and very unemotional,
and that has something
to do with the logic
and the progression
and the scientific method.
I get all that.
But we're also failing
to sort of get ourselves
into people's consciousness
by not engaging
with them as real people.
So I want to talk
a bit about that.
I want to talk about some of
the things, as I mentioned,
that are resonating well
with the public,
and some of the things
that are falling flat.
Some of the things that
I've noticed are working,
and things that are not working.
And I want to warn
you right now,
and I've already warned
our poor recordist there.
I actually plan
to use profanity.
I believe everybody
in here is over 18.
I think they are.
I'll be using some
rough language
'cause basically, scientists
are resorting to this now.
You know, Neil deGrasse
Tyson really throws some
F-bombs around these days,
and it goes back to some
of the emotional impact
that people saying that,
"You're not a real person,
that you're not
a real human being,
that you're lying to us."
Some of these things we
are allowed to respond to,
and there's a time
and a place for everything.
There's a time and a place
to be very, very calm,
very dispassionate,
very logical,
and there's a time
to let yourself feel
some of the emotions
and let people experience
those with you.
Okay, I mentioned
that one of the things
that I find very uncomfortable
is talking about myself.
This is a safe place today.
These Maniac talks are
meant to give you
a little bit of an insight
into who people really are
and how they got to the jobs
that they're doing.
And if you ever see me
on television or giving a talk,
and I look very confident,
maybe even I look
arrogant to you.
I've been accused
of that many times.
Just so you know,
it's absolutely all an act.
I actually deal with
a tremendous amount
of imposter syndrome
and a tremendous amount
of an inability to think
that I'm worth anything.
That's something I've battled
my entire life.
And I think it was somewhat
deliberately instilled in me
as a young woman,
trying to go into science.
So this is by the guy
that does The Oatmeal.
How do you take a compliment?
Somebody tries to give you
a compliment,
and this is exactly
what happens.
The minute I get a compliment,
it's like,
"This person is confused.
They don't know
how stupid I am.
They don't know
how terrible I am."
That's what I am always
working with in my life.
I have felt like
a failure my entire life.
I have never felt comfortable
professionally or personally.
And you know, some of the things
that people often ask me about,
"How do you become so confident?
How did you become
so successful?"
These words are not words
that I own for myself at all.
So when you talk about
a space place here
and talking about emotions
and talking about
where we're coming from,
one of the things that I often
counsel people about
is that I never stop being
scared about talking in public.
I'm actually very
afraid of flying.
I fly in panic.
Poor Alex Young is not here
right now.
I don't see him,
but he's had to hold my hand.
We've been on trips together,
and Alex has been
holding my hand
when I panic on airplanes.
I just yesterday bought tickets
to Bhutan in the Himalayas.
I was invited there,
at my own expense, by the way,
to help film a music video.
I don't know how I'm going to
survive an air flight to Bhutan.
But one of the things I really
tried to own in my life
is I'm never going
to feel comfortable.
I'm never going to feel
not afraid.
And so if you ever wonder,
when you start to feel
comfortable professionally,
when you start to feel
like a success,
when you start to feel
like you belong somewhere,
I gave up on that.
A while ago.
And actually, the thing is
I'm quite proud of that.
There are a few things in life
I let myself be proud of,
and one is that
I have overcome those feelings
that I don't belong.
So, you know, the person
who introduced me --
you talked about Carl Sagan,
and I think that sometimes
we really underestimate
what the impact
of what one person is.
So I was about 10 years old
when "Cosmos" came out,
the original TV series, in 1980,
and in my small town
in Waukesha, Wisconsin,
where I grew up,
there really weren't
a lot of scientists.
Nobody had really
ever met a scientist.
So my first experience of what
a scientist was was Carl Sagan.
And there's a lot of argument,
of course.
He was never admitted
to the National Academy.
Was he a real scientist?
Was he mainly a communicator?
Was he arrogant?
Was he an attention grabber?
That's what I considered
a scientist,
and he really inspired me.
When he was telling
these stories,
stories about
the history of science,
stories about where
we come from,
about the beginning
of the universe,
that narrative
and that storytelling
was what I thought
a scientist was.
And then, of course,
also "Star Wars" when I was 7.
I was a little kid walking out
of this movie theater
in Waukesha, Wisconsin, saying,
"That was so damn cool
that I have to do
something with space."
And I very often keep in mind
that I'm not the target audience
when it comes to
science communication.
'Cause I was one of those
little kids.
My parents were not scientists.
They were both deathly
afraid of math, for one thing.
And my mom remembers
that as soon as I could walk,
she would find me trying to go
outside to look at the stars.
I don't know what it was about
those little lights in the sky,
but they fascinate me
to this day.
And there are just some people
in the world who are like that.
What is your calling?
Not everybody has
a specific one,
but you were ever
fascinated by racecars
or by horses or by history
or by the stars,
I think it's really fun in life
to try to find your tribe.
Find the other people
who actually
just intrinsically loved
what you love.
There's no real reason for it.
And to me, going into science
was about that.
It was about finding my tribe.
Finding the people
that were most like me
that could really understand me.
So to begin with, science was
a very emotional thing for me.
We didn't know about math.
We didn't know
about what a scientist did.
We'd never talked
to a research scientist.
I went through high school
never really knowing this.
So there's my little town.
I was inducted to the Waukesha
South Hall of Fame
a little while ago.
That's me with my dad.
And they think it's amazing
that somebody from Waukesha
became an astronomer.
After I was in high school,
I went to Harvard University,
where basically nobody
from my town
had ever been to Harvard.
I was incredibly
unprepared for Harvard.
You want to talk about ideas
of failure
and ideas of being somebody --
you don't belong.
You're an imposter.
I had taken high school physics
in a rural high school
in Wisconsin.
And the first day
at Harvard University
in my physics classes,
they were doing cross products,
you know,
calculus cross products.
I thought that was
a multiply sign.
Seriously, for those of you
that don't know math,
what that means is that I was
probably three to four years
behind my compatriots
in terms of mathematics.
I had had one semester
of variable calculus,
and the first day in physics,
I was expected to have
this mathematical background.
No one told me this,
and I failed miserably.
I managed to pass.
I passed the classes,
just barely, but I was scared
and I was confused
my entire four years there.
And that, you know,
it gave me this idea
that I just did not
belong in science.
The idea that I came
from a place in the world
that had no idea
how to prepare me
for Harvard University.
Everything about me
seemed to be wrong.
Harvard, in its
wonderful wisdom,
decided to assign me a mentor.
Mentoring is very,
very important.
We know this.
And because I was a young woman
going into astronomy,
they picked the most
senior impressive woman
in the Harvard
astronomy department.
This is Dr. Margaret Geller.
And Margaret Geller is
a famous cosmologist.
She does physical cosmology,
highly mathematical theories
of the big bang,
of structure in the universe.
And I only met
with Margaret once
because I went to her office
like the second
or third day of classes.
She'd been assigned
as my mentor,
this little incoming freshman
from Waukesha, Wisconsin.
And she took one look at me.
I'm this smiling little kid,
very excited,
really interested
in being an astronomer,
very little preparation.
And she told me to just
get out of here,
that I did not have
what it took.
To my face.
You know, third day
of classes, Harvard University.
Margaret has since
found me later in life
and apologized for that.
[ Laughter ]
But she said -- no, no, no,
so this is the part of me
that really --
this is the empathy.
She, all her life,
has felt cheated.
She actually didn't get tenure
at Harvard University
even though she was
an incredibly
well-performing astronomer.
She was always fighting,
being a woman.
She's older,
obviously, than I am,
so she had a much harder
fight than I did.
And she took a look at me,
and she thought it would
just be torture
to keep me in this field.
She meant the best.
She really did mean to give me
some good advice.
Interestingly enough,
another senior professor
at Harvard -- This is
Dr. David Latham.
For those of you
who know a little bit
about exoplanet science,
he's now actually recognized
with a little bit
of historical re-interpretation
as probably being the person
who found the first exoplanet.
And David was a grand old man,
old white guy,
very, very privileged, rich,
from an old family in Boston.
he saw me wandering around
the astronomy department,
so enthusiastic,
and so loving astronomy,
and quite honestly, so dejected,
and he took me under his wing.
He said, "Kid, if you want to do
astronomy, you can do astronomy.
There's nothing
magical about it.
There are not people
that have the mental capacity
to do astronomy
and people who do not."
I really fight this idea.
Learning astronomy,
learning the mathematics
which was never easy for me,
it's basically like learning
a foreign language.
It's not something
that's going to happen quickly,
and you're going to have
to go back and practice.
It takes a long time
to become --
I never became fluent
in mathematics.
I became functional
in mathematics, and I think
that he really told me,
"If you want to be
an astronomer,
you can be an astronomer.
There's no magic spark
that you have to have,
or that you don't have."
That has followed me
all my life.
There are many different ways
to be a scientist.
The fact that I was
an emotional, happy, bouncy,
midwestern small person
that did not fit into
the idea of a scientist,
think about our real
ideas of diversity.
It's easy enough to say
that we will accept scientists
of any color
or religion,
whatever we want to sort of
differentiate humanity into,
but one of the things
we have a lot of trouble
with is personality.
We still say that if you
are an emotional person,
if you experience science
through narrative
and through emotion,
you don't really belong here.
I learned the math.
You can do the math.
For me, it was always
about the emotion,
and that makes me
a different kind of scientist.
So, my life path
of doing communication
has a bit of a chip
on my shoulder.
It's got a little bit
of a "fuck you" in it.
It does because I was told
that what I was was wrong.
And there was nothing wrong
about the science in me.
You know, it's only about
what we tell each other,
about what personality
is needed to be a scientist.
I think the personality,
the classic personality
of a scientist is a holdover
from the late Victorian age,
where the main people
who did scientists were
sort of second sons
of wealthy families
who were rather
socially isolated
and weren't expected
to actually be emotional
or to engage in the normal
course of humanity.
They had the privilege
to be isolated in that way.
And I don't think the universe
cares about that at all.
So, I did actually get
into graduate school
after almost failing out
of Harvard University.
By the way, I got straight A's
in all my humanities classes.
That kept my grade point up.
[ Laughter ]
It's like, you know,
I got one of three A's
out of a class of 700
in Chinese Studies.
I aced all of that.
But these are some of my
graduate school observing runs.
That's at the WIYN
Telescope at Kitt Peak.
This is at the Mayall
at Kitt Peak.
That's obviously Keck there.
So I went and did a lot
of observational astronomy.
I did a survey of colliding
winds in very massive spectra --
massive stars, did spectral
surveys of all that.
I had a wonderful Ph.D. adviser.
His name is Doug Gies.
There's me getting my doctorate.
You can see the diversity
of my Ph.D. committee.
[ Laughter ]
They were lovely to me,
I have to say.
So in my case, we'll talk
a little bit about diversity
and a little bit
about feminism and women.
I have been done
right by white guys, I'm sorry.
The people who were
my most supportive,
serious mentors in my life
were all older white men.
And they seemed, in many ways,
to mentor me more effectively
than some of the older women
that were placed as my mentors.
I thought that was
an interesting lesson.
One of the little things that,
again, kind of feeds into
feeling like a little bit
of an imposter,
I was working with this group,
and they were all hot
star scientists,
and I was about to take
an academic appointment
at the University of Montreal
that does really,
really great massive
star science.
And some of my studies
to do my dissertation
were actually in Australia.
I wanted to observe
southern sky objects,
and this is Mount Stromlo,
a beautiful observatory
not too far out of Canberra,
which unfortunately
burnt down after I --
A brush fire came through,
and this beautiful telescope
with this amazing
Coudé spectrograph.
It actually turned into a puddle
of glass on the ground.
So that was sad, but when
I was in Australia,
I had a great time in Australia.
What happened was
basically this happened.
I met this wonderful man.
He was English.
He was actually an Oxford
University astrophysicist
and he was a professor
at the University of Sydney
and he's currently in building
29 working for the LCRD Mission,
so he's somewhere over there.
We got married in Scotland.
And that's our wedding
at the castle.
[ Laughs ]
All of a sudden, I was solving
what astronomers call
the two-body problem,
two things trying
to orbit around each other.
Two people trying to have
scientific careers together.
And Andrew was an incredible --
The good thing about it,
he's one of the best
optical engineers in the world,
and so wherever I have worked,
they've snapped him up
like that.
"Oh, Michelle's coming?
Oh, my God,
will we get Andrew Booth?!"
Yes, I mean, that's what
they really want.
That was true here, by the way.
It was really funny.
I've moved around.
Andrew left a fully
tenured senior professorship
to try to come to the US
to marry a grad student.
Yeah, somebody chuckles there.
You understand
what that means.
So, he managed to get
a job at JPL,
and this was not
where I was going to do
my academic appointment.
So I went to JPL and took
a postdoc at CalTech
in not my specialty.
I did okay.
It was in infrared astronomy.
I had never done it.
But that's me at CalTech,
and that's JPL, of course.
This was another sort of knock
against me
about how much
of a failure I was.
I didn't take the academic
appointment I should have taken.
Instead, I followed my husband,
but he left his job, too.
We're just trying
to find both jobs
in the United States
in one place,
and JPL managed to hire both
of us, so that was easy.
So while I was here,
I started doing communication
I think largely
because they didn't know
what to do with me.
I was a decent scientist,
I was a woman, diversity,
they wanted to showcase that.
So I started doing videos about
our mission -- infrared mission.
That's me with a heat
telescope up there.
I just made an ice
cube mustache.
That's why I look like that.
And I started working on these
television shows I think mainly
because JPL was
so close to Hollywood,
and that was easy to do.
They needed someone to put
out front, and I enjoyed it.
I really went full time
into communications,
and for about 10 years,
when I would go
to professional
astronomy conferences,
I would really be
ashamed of that.
I would really be
embarrassed by that.
So, I mean, that was
something that my ego
is only laterally recovering
from, I'd say.
So I do a lot of TV shows.
They always make me
do uncomfortable things
like hold a small telescope,
like astronomers ever do that.
I never owned a telescope.
[ Laughter ]
This is me shooting
"How the Universe Works."
This kind of shows you
how unglamorous it is.
It's in the fifth season now.
We have millions of viewers.
I am stopped about once
every other day on the street
by a stranger, on the subway
going into work.
Yesterday, it happened
while I was having lunch.
I treated myself to a lunch
at a museum,
and someone came up
and talked to me.
We filmed the entire season,
eight episodes --
We film them in two days,
usually in New York,
and it's grueling.
They made me stand
on this box all day long.
I basically didn't have a break
because they were trying to get
the right angle with the skyline
and the cameras.
My feet hurt so damn much
at the end of the day
that I was just concentrating
on trying to look okay
while my feet were killing me.
It's hard work.
I do not get paid for this.
This is all pro bono.
I don't get any money
from the Discovery Channel
because I'm a NASA employee,
and I wouldn't do that.
So, some of the things
that I've done, though,
is taken these lessons
from trying to figure out
what works in communication
and what doesn't
and bring them back to NASA.
And one of the things that
I'm very proud of right now
is that I give a course
on science communication.
It's actually specifically
for scientists and engineers,
and we offered it
in November here at Goddard,
and we're going to offer it
again probably in October --
September or October this year.
I'd like to get to doing this
maybe twice a year.
Right now, Goddard has the
contract to run these courses.
They're offered --
I help with them,
but we also use
the Alan Alda Center.
The actor, Alan Alda, has funded
a center
of science communication
at the University
of Stony Brook.
Doc took it. I know you did.
So, I'm hoping to do
those more often.
They're all agency courses,
by the way.
People from all
different centers come,
but we've negotiated
to have Goddard
get half of the berths
because we have the most
number of scientists, so...
Okay, so what I'm doing now
is trying to bring
some of my experience
about communication. Yeah.
I'm sorry, for those of you
in the back,
the title at the bottom says,
"This is not the face
I use during meetings
with professional colleagues."
I try to get scientists
to understand what works well
for communicating
with the public.
And a lot of the lessons
that you can learn about
communicating with the public,
you can also use
for your colleagues.
But I understand
there's a difference.
Things have to be slightly
differently balanced
when you're working with other
professional scientists.
But that was me doing
some live shots.
I love doing live shots.
Have me do more
live shots, somebody.
I love that.
When I'm doing these
communication courses,
we go over some of the things
that I find are
typically problems
with scientists.
And some of them are actually
really easy
for people to figure out,
and some of them are actually
very, very difficult.
These are some things,
of course,
we talk about in the class.
Obviously, we don't want to use
any sort of
technical terminology.
Members of the public
won't know it.
Acronyms, things like that.
But I've also had a real problem
getting scientists
to let go of common
terms of speech in science.
Like talking about something
that is
the "order of magnitude,"
or "on the order of."
I was doing a training recently
where one of the scientists
keeping using the word
"discrete,"
where "discrete" means something
that's very well-defined,
as opposed to something
that's very polite.
People in the public
don't understand
the scientific usage
of the word "discrete,"
so I'm always trying
to kind of grab people
into more of a common
vernacular.
We get way hung up on accuracy,
and I'm going to talk about
this later with a short video.
I did a short video
for The Atlantic magazine
about how all of our atoms
come from stars.
And I make several
scientific errors
in that that I am aware of.
People often comment to me,
"You're an astronomer.
How come you said
that the only element produced
in the big bang was hydrogen?"
Look, I know the big bang
produced hydrogen
and some helium
and a little bit of lithium.
I get it. A little bit of
beryllium, maybe.
The idea of what you say
to the public,
making it clear
and limiting it
sometimes comes up
against our ideas
of how accurate
we need to be.
And as scientists, we are
allowed to make that call.
We don't have to throw
every tiny bit of error bar
and accuracy into everything.
However, we also need to
understand what our errors are
and be able to talk
about them honestly.
There's a really
interesting tension there.
So again, exact numbers versus
rounded numbers, error bars.
Assumed prior knowledge.
Most people in the public do
not know what a comet is.
Nope.
They don't.
If you ask them what a comet is,
the fact that it's a ball of ice
and rock, maybe on the order
of a couple kilometers
to 10 kilometers across,
you know, the solar wind.
There's sublimation, blows
the gases off, you get the tail.
They don't have any idea.
They've heard the word "comet."
They may have heard
that it might be something
that could hit the Earth.
That's all they know.
They do not know
what a galaxy is.
Over and over again,
I've tried to get people
to explain to me
what a galaxy is.
How big it is,
how many stars are in it.
Do we live in a galaxy?
When you talk to educated,
intelligent,
wonderful members
of the public,
these are not terms
you can assume they know.
Obviously, graphs and figures
really leave people flat,
and this is a big problem with
talking about climate change.
I'll show you the one climate
change chart that I use
that actually
gets a good result.
You show people trends --
"Look how much the sea level
is increasing.
Look at how much carbon
dioxide is going up."
You show them a graph because
it's so damn clear to us.
"Look at that data.
Look at how beautiful it is."
Most people did not get good
graph-reading skills in school.
They do not know
what a trend means.
They don't know
what axes mean.
They don't know
what the squiggly line is
that you're showing them.
This is stuff that research
actually bears out.
So, concentrating on narrative,
and this is a big one.
This is one that I really try
to get people
to talk about seriously.
We often cram so much content
into what we're trying
to tell the public.
We do a live shot on the news,
where you talk
to the news anchors
for a couple of minutes
about something
that's cool that NASA just did.
We usually get like maybe
two minutes of time.
You're only going to get
one or two ideas,
maybe three ideas across.
That's it.
You've got to really
pare these things down.
And so often, I see people,
especially with PowerPoint,
You keep your best --
your best point to the end.
And then what happens in
presentation after presentation
is people run out of time,
and they click through
the last couple of slides.
And they think that because
you've seen graph
after graph clicking by,
that somehow communication
has happened.
So, I do a lot of talks
to Congress.
This is one of the talks.
I'm in the Rayburn Building,
if anybody recognizes that,
showing them some stuff
from our wonderful
solar dynamics observatory.
I'm really just trying
to get them to understand
the scale of the sun
and the Earth.
That's me holding up a quarter
to show them how big the Earth
is compared to the sun.
The fact that we're observing
the sun, the fact that the sun
is active, members of Congress
are not going to get
anything more than that.
You know, some thing
with even our colleagues.
This was me at AGU one year,
and I was giving a talk
at the American
Geophysical Union
to other scientists
and engineers.
So often, as somebody with
a doctorate in astrophysics,
I go to a professional general
talk and am totally lost.
I go to a plenary session,
which is supposed to be open
to all the scientists
at the convention,
and I'm lost in five minutes.
And I think that one
of the things
that's maybe different about me
and my sort of owning my sense
of not belonging
and being an imposter and slowly
getting some spine under that,
and saying, "Maybe I'm not
an idiot, after all.
Maybe I actually
do belong here."
I think I'm just a little bit
more able to sort of admit,
you know, "You've lost me now."
And I'm not an idiot.
I mean, we often cram so much
into our professional
presentations, as well,
that people don't go away
with your main point
in such a way
that they can remember it.
So, these are some of
the communication lessons
that I want to talk
a little bit about.
The first one
is really quite profound.
How interested are you
in communicating?
You might be interested
in impressing somebody
with your knowledge or throwing
out all kinds of stuff
that your colleagues
can read later.
Are you actually interested
in having somebody remember
what you said
and respond to what you said?
Are you really interested
in communicating with them?
You may chuckle,
and it's kind of funny
to think that the public
doesn't know what a comet is.
But once you grasp that,
how interested are you
in taking them
with you on this journey?
How interested are you, really,
in communicating with them?
Not talking down to them, not
thinking that they're stupid.
Really taking them with you.
Developing skills about how
to be a really good communicator
is entirely possible for anyone.
I mean, it's sort of like me
thinking there was no way
I could learn math.
I did Jackson, right?
I did graduate-level E&M.
I learned my multi-variable
calculus, and it was never easy.
I was never great at it,
but there's no reason
you can't learn the techniques
of being a good communicator.
You are far more powerful
than you know,
and this was a hard one for me.
My feelings of doubt,
and that I don't belong here
are what I would most like
to throw up in front of me,
and then have people
know about me.
And if I'm giving a public talk,
they haven't come for that.
They haven't come
for my insecurities.
They haven't come for
my apologies for being up here.
They want a show,
and they want to be inspired,
and they are looking to me
to provide that.
And there is a time and a place
to put aside your insecurities
and become this hero
that they think you are.
And that's not arrogance.
That's part of communication.
That's letting yourself be this
wonderful person, this expert,
somebody you can be fascinated
by and be inspired by.
It's not how I feel,
but there are ways
that you can cultivate
portraying this.
And I encourage you
to think about it.
It's not a bad thing to do
because in many ways,
this is where my need
and my insecurity helps me.
Your audience --
You need your audience
more than they need you.
When I give a talk,
I have this need for approval.
I have this need to rip out
a piece of my soul and say,
"Please approve this.
Please think I'm' okay."
And it's the same thing
that actors have
and that comedians have.
You can kind of sense
they need you, right?
The idea -- I mean, Robin
Williams used to make me cry
because you could tell
that that person
had some hole inside them
they were trying to fill
with all this brilliance
and all this energy,
but you could feel
the interior wasn't complete.
And this was something
I've actually learned
to kind of cultivate
in my communication,
this little bit of desperation.
"I want you to like me."
And here's something that's
really hard for scientists.
This one really gets me
because I talk a lot
about climate change.
I talk a lot about
what's going on with the world.
I talk a lot about the brilliant
discoveries that NASA is making.
And I come back to this over
and over again.
We are scientists.
We love our data,
the reality of it.
The fact that the things
that we're doing
you can take pictures of,
you can measure,
you can make better
measurements.
The errors and the uncertainties
are what we love
'cause that's how you
drive science forward.
Get the error bars better,
get the uncertainties
a little bit less.
All of this wonderful detail
that we have as scientists
isn't getting
in to people's minds right now.
I'm really sick of this
fake news stuff
and the scientific
conspiracy stuff.
I'm angry, and one of the things
that I have to come back over
and over again...
And people like, you know,
a lot of our politicians,
a lot of people
that are involved
in acting know this lesson.
Sometimes it's not about
what you're saying at all,
but how you're saying it.
And as social primates,
you know, tuned by evolution
to respond to each other
and to be influenced
by each other,
we're so much more vulnerable
to somebody that seems confident
and bombastic and aggressive
than somebody
who's more retiring
and more in the details.
I've had to really change what I
do because a lot of times,
it's not what you say.
It's how you say it.
So, NASA can be
pretty good at this.
This is -- I think I'll run this
forward a little bit,
but this actually --
we talked about being
social primates.
This is footage from the day
that the Curiosity
Lander landed.
And I just want to sort of run
to the end because I think
that there's a real
interesting point here.
When you see people
excited by something,
and you see them
enjoying themselves,
and it seems to be
important to them,
as I mentioned,
we are social primates.
There might be
some psychopaths out there,
but hopefully not many of you.
When you see people
responding this way,
you want to know
what's going on.
-Touchdown confirmed.
[ Cheering ]
[ Cheering continues ]
[ Cheering continues ]
[ Cheering continues ]
-Wow!
This brings out the best in us!
-You know, events like this,
you can think they're
kind of gratuitous.
You can think they're
not that all important.
I mean, all these people
cheering.
There's scientists cheering,
and this was
the Planetary Society
meeting in Pasadena
and all that.
There's people
that are our audience,
and we know they're excited.
But you notice that
some of those people
were on Times Square
and in New York?
I mean, they just saw it on
the big Jumbotrons
that something
amazing was going on.
They saw people screaming
and jumping up and down,
and everybody excited.
And all of a sudden, they wanted
to know what was going on.
We are tuned to this.
If somebody is fascinated
by something,
if somebody is angry
about something,
if somebody is giving you
some emotional vulnerability,
some emotional experience,
our brains hone right into that.
Like I said, that is what
our ape brains do.
"What is going on here?
Is there something that's risky
that I should flee from?
Is there something wonderful
that I should be involved in?"
Showing this emotion
and this excitement benefits us
to a huge degree.
And I've been looking more into
how you sort of hack this.
How do you actually get people
to respond to you,
primate to primate,
so that they listen
to what you're saying?
Because we have some
damn important things
to talk to people about.
And this was a TED Talk.
It might be interesting.
The results are somewhat
controversial,
but I think it's definitely
worth looking at,
about body language
and how you can hack
your own body language
so people think
you're confident.
Like I said, the reason I
started out with my insecurities
was to show
you that underneath this,
it's not exactly how I feel,
but I'm trying in public
to find ways to hack this,
to actually get people
to respond to me differently.
I think a lot of you
have seen this,
that there's such a thing
that's called a power pose.
That your body,
and your body language
gets people to respond
to you in different ways.
There's the wonderful Kevin
Spacey, who is leaning forward
as the President
of the United States.
And there's things
that they call the Superman,
or I like to say
the Wonder Woman pose,
either one,
with your shoulders back
and your chest
sort of pushed out
and your hands on your hips.
The thing that we're beginning
to realize now,
and the psychologists
are working with us a lot
is that this actually changes
your body chemistry.
I mean, not only do people
visually respond to this
sort of confident body language,
it actually changes
how you are responding
to your own emotional state.
And they did some research.
They had people
in both less powerful
and more powerful poses.
So they asked them to hold
a pose for about 30 seconds.
"Do a Superman pose,
or do a confident, open pose.
And then do something different,
where you're more passive,
and you're more afraid,
and you're more closed."
When they got people after just
about 30 seconds in these poses,
they actually did saliva tests.
They swabbed their saliva
and found out that their hormone
levels had changed
while this was going on.
That if you do -- this is true
for men and women, by the way.
Both men and women
have testosterone.
If you do a high-power pose,
your testosterone levels
will adjust
in just a couple of minutes
to a higher level.
You will actually feel more
confident and more aggressive
if you hack
your own body language.
And for power poses,
testosterone levels decrease.
And the same thing is true for
the stress hormone, cortisol.
So this is the hormone
that makes us feel stressed,
makes us feel anxious.
Power posing actually
drops your cortisol levels.
And then, if you go into
the low power poses,
your cortisol levels
actually rise.
This is pretty serious.
This is your own internal
experience changing
based on your body language.
I notice this a lot -- going to
headquarters was certainly a bit
of a professional reach for me,
and I've so often
found myself in meetings
where I've been kind of lost
and confused on --
I'm not a policy person.
I don't know what they're
talking about, and I find myself
going into those
closed body postures,
and I try to get myself
right back out of that.
It's an interesting way to think
that you can hack this,
and people respond to you as
if you were more confident.
There's also TED Talks
about how to speak
so that people want to listen.
This was another good one
by Julian Treasure.
He talks about a lot
of different things.
He talks about how
to vary your pitch,
and how to vary the pace
of what you're saying.
Things that are very specific.
But thing that I really
like is he often --
he goes back to really
what people respond to
are real things
that are important.
Honesty.
How much are you putting
forth real honesty,
real authenticity, integrity,
and I'll actually talk about
love a little bit more.
This is something we actually
have to offer as scientists.
The stuff that we are
doing is noble.
It really is.
The world needs what we do,
and we get to be proud
of the work
that we do here at NASA.
Honesty is something that
we really need to cling to.
I know very well how to respond
to questions,
especially right now,
about, "Don't you think
that the president
has the wrong idea
about something?
Don't you think that
the administration's
on the wrong tack?"
As a badge-wearing
civil servant,
I cannot publicly disagree
with what the executive branch
is saying right now.
There are times when
you have to be very honest
with even your audience
and tell them that --
that, "I am a member
of the executive branch.
I definitely have
political opinions.
Boy, do I, but not here.
Here there is a high
ground of science,
and I will tell you exactly
what's going on scientifically,
and I will tell you
very much about climate change
being human-driven
and based on greenhouse gases."
And that goes back to this
honesty and authenticity.
We never have to back
away from facts.
Even when you're feeling
constrained by some
of the politics of the time,
the facts are there,
and they are real.
Love is a really
interesting way to lead.
I actually experienced
this kind of weirdly
firsthand having to do
with climate change.
And the story is that I was
on "Fox & Friends."
I was asked to be on
"Fox & Friends"
to talk about how NASA
is lying to people.
[ Laughter ]
Joe, were you here for this one?
You saw this one, didn't you?
Yeah.
This was an odd story.
So Steve Doocy,
wonderful Steve Doocy
there had done a long segment.
This was like a 10-minute
segment on "Fox & Friends" news
a couple days
before about how we had moved
a data point
in the 1930s
for what the average
temperatures were,
and how that proved that NASA
was lying to people.
And of course,
that wasn't the case.
No, the data was re-calibrated.
Some of the observations
were taken at different times
during the day
at different altitudes.
It was the best scientific
guess we had.
I shouldn't say
the word "guess."
It was the best scientific data
that we had,
that this point should be
moved a little bit.
But this one little point --
he did this huge thing
about NASA lying.
And then a couple days later,
they asked me to be on,
and I was terrified.
I did not sleep the day before.
I was really,
really scared to go on
"Fox & Friends"
because they just
want people to get upset.
They just want to tear you down.
They just want to attack you.
So, I worked myself the day
before into being in love
with Steve Doocy.
I did.
I watched his show over
and over again thinking,
"I love this man.
I love this man.
I love you,
Steve Doocy, I love you.
I'm here.
I'm NASA, we're your NASA.
It's me, it's Michelle.
It's NASA!
Let me tell you what happened.
I'll tell you everything
that happened,
totally, everything," you know?
And the interesting thing
was Steve was talking to me
before we went on the air,
and he was asking
all about this --
"Is climate change human-driven?
What about this point?
How was it moved?"
And I was, like, "Oh, dude,
it's so great to be --
This is what happened.
This is great. This is good."
When we actually
went on the air,
he kind of softballed me
a question
about improved air quality
and got me the hell off.
Didn't even ask me
the questions.
[ Laughter ]
He had sussed out that I wasn't
going to get angry
and that I wasn't going to put
on a good show
and they didn't want someone
from NASA to look good.
Yeah, so.
All right.
What I want to end
with a little bit is talk about
some of the questions
and some of the things --
some of the stories
I think we really have to tell.
And some of the things
that I think people
have responded to very well.
This was a little bit
of a story of a video
that I did that
actually went viral.
I think it's up to more
than 5 million views now, and --
I think a lot of you
are scientists.
Some of you are not.
So some of you may not
actually know this story
that literally every atom
in your body,
besides the hydrogen --
Honestly, we don't have much
helium in our body,
but everything besides --
The big bang 13.7 years ago
really just produced
the simplest, lightest elements.
And if you look at your body,
you're made of carbon, calcium,
oxygen, and phosphorous,
and all kinds of wonderful
not-hydrogen elements.
And so everything in your body
that isn't hydrogen
had to be actually built
inside a star.
And so here's
a star-forming region
from the Hubble Space Telescope,
the Carina Nebula,
and you see these
little pink dots
are actually new stars forming.
These dust clouds are many,
many trillions of miles across.
And this is another picture from
Hubble of a young star cluster.
So the way you get these heavier
elements that you're made of
is that, you know,
inside a star,
there's a nuclear fusion
reaction
that actually rams
hydrogen together
to make bigger and bigger atoms.
And that's the only way
you make a carbon atom
that makes up most of your body,
or a calcium atom,
is that these hydrogen atoms
have to be rammed together.
And then that star,
with all these new elements
in its core, has to die.
And some stars die
kind of gently like this one.
This is one that's unraveling.
This is kind of what
the sun will do
in about 4 billion years.
And that's how you get these
elements out into space
to form new planets.
And so everything
on the periodic table,
every chemical that you've ever
heard of, besides hydrogen
and a little bit of helium,
and a tiny little lithium,
you know,
they were all formed
inside of a star.
And telling this story
is something
that's actually
got me pretty far.
I've done a TED Talk on it now.
I did this video that
I'll show you
for The Atlantic magazine
that's very short.
It's three minutes long,
and people have really been
responding to this idea.
And I'm going
to talk to you a bit more
after it about the emotion
that I try to bring into it.
So, some things
that I'm going to mention
for you astrophysicists
out there,
I'm going to talk about how iron
in our blood sets off
a supernova reaction,
which is true.
Most of the iron
in our body is not
from that particular part
of a supernova
because all of that collapses
into the neutron star
or black hole or whatever
that's left in.
I know what R&S
processes are, right?
I do, but this is an example
of the detail
that the public wouldn't grasp,
and decisions that
over-simplify,
but actually are better
for communicating.
So, as I mentioned,
I did a TED Talk on this.
So I'm just going to stop
that presentation
so I can show you the video.
This is really funny.
When they started this video,
I was putting my water bottle
on the ground,
and I figured they would
let me settle for a few seconds,
and I would start the answer
to my question.
It turns out, the producer
liked that motion,
and so they kept me putting
my water bottle on the ground.
I have no idea why, but that's
why the video starts that way.
Come here.
[ Laughter ]
Turn it up a little bit.
We are dead stars
looking back up at the sky.
!!musiC@!!!musiC@!
Everything you are -- literally,
the iron in your blood comes
from the instant
before a star dies.
You cut yourself,
and you see that red
from the oxygenated hemoglobin,
and that was
the instant of a death
of a solar system.
!!musiC@!!!musiC@!
The universe began with only
the element hydrogen,
the very, very simplest
atom that exists,
and the only thing
in the universe
that can make
a bigger atom is a star.
The entire periodic table,
every element
you've ever heard of
was processed
inside the body of a star,
and that star then
unraveled or exploded,
and here we are.
All a star is is a dust cloud
that is collapsing
under the force of gravity.
That's it.
And when you compress gas
together, it actually heats up.
There's a time when that's hot
enough to set off
a nuclear fusion reaction,
and that actually
supports the star,
this nuclear explosion
inside supports the star
against further collapse.
But that nuclear fusion
reaction is using fuel.
It's using hydrogen.
And so eventually,
that will burn out,
and the collapse of gravity
will keep going.
In the case
of a more massive star,
the gravity crushes ever more
and more tightly,
things get hotter inside.
You create things like carbon
and oxygen and nitrogen,
until finally you get
to the element iron.
It fuses iron together, and
instead of energy coming out,
energy's actually absorbed,
and the core of
the star collapses,
and that sets off
the most violent,
brilliant reaction we know of
called a supernova reaction.
Everything outside the element
of iron, everything heavy --
all the gold, all the silver,
all the lead,
all the uranium,
that's formed in that
supernova explosion.
Single star will glow
as brightly as an entire galaxy,
as hundreds
of billions of stars
in that moment of death.
And that's what you are.
But the thing that I think
people often don't do
is put the emotional context in.
I've done two TED Talks,
and the last one
I did was on this story.
That video was done
by The Atlantic magazine,
and it went viral.
Like I said, it got
about 5 million views.
And so I was invited
to do a TED Talk
where I fleshed out the idea
a little bit more.
And one of the things
I talked about was,
"Okay, we can all say this.
Isn't this great that our atoms
were made in the stars?"
The illusion of distance
is incredible,
so we're traveling at about
half a million miles an hour
around the galaxy.
It takes us about
a quarter billion years,
about 240 million years
to go once around the Milky Way.
That's how big the Milky Way is,
even at half a million
miles an hour,
and the stars that exploded,
where your atoms came from,
some of them were actually clear
on the other side of the galaxy.
And as the solar system,
even as it was forming,
was sweeping around,
and the spiral arms
of the galaxy
were sweeping together dust.
You're probably not just
from one star.
You're from many,
and if you look at the stars
in the night sky tonight,
I think there's
a pretty good chance
that there's an atom
in one of them
that was formed
in the same supernova
as an atom of iron
in your blood.
The stars are
so intimate with us.
Things that are clear across
the galaxy, 100,000 light years
away might even share atoms
from the same exploding star
that are in your body right now.
If you want connection
to the universe,
just breathe.
You got it, right?
You don't need astrology.
You don't need any philosophy.
I mean, literally what your body
is spans the galaxy.
And so, one of the things that I
allow myself to do at the end
of these talks
is get a little emotional.
"What does this do to you?"
And the idea that we are
these brief collections
of atoms coming together
and then dispersing,
and this has been going on
for billions of years.
No offense to those of you
who are very religious,
and this is important,
but to me, I found this was
all I needed to know
about my existence
and where I came from.
And that was beautiful,
but also sad.
We're so brief, and I often
try in my personal life
to make things go too fast.
I want to pull people to me.
I don't know why we're not
embracing
in the streets
as common supernova remnants
that have become conscious
and are going to be gone
before anybody can blink an eye.
The idea of inhumanity
and cruelty,
when we're all the same...
I fall in love too fast.
I make relationships
go too fast.
I force things.
I talk about
what this did to me.
You know, astronomy wasn't
just about the science.
It was about how it
impacted me, as well.
And you know,
there are several things
that have gone really well
as far as impact recently.
The fly-by of Pluto -- we just
flew by that thing, right?
We only saw Pluto for a couple
of days, then it was gone.
And it was unbelievably
beautiful and active.
It had these glaciers
that we were not expecting,
these active glaciers.
This one gets me.
This is our spacecraft at NASA
going over the limb
of Pluto here,
and you see mountains
that are about 10,000 feet high.
Made of pure water, pure ice,
and the glaciers
are made of nitrogen
and methane ice.
And I mean, I'm sorry, when you
see something like this,
and here comes the profanity.
We show these pictures,
and it's like,
"Oh, isn't that nice?
Flew by Pluto."
Fuck!
Look at that!
Look, 10,000-foot-high
ice mountains
that we just saw two years ago!
I mean, the public responds
to excitement,
and the social-media
footprint --
This is a little bit hard
to see in the red.
One of the things I do now
is measure what the impact is
of some of our
communications products at NASA.
So our social media post, just
for that one week for four days,
actually, were 12,189,289,567.
Probably over 12 billion.
Over 12 billion.
People came back again
and again and again.
Understand, there were not
12 billion people.
Not all people
in the world saw this.
People came back
hundreds of times,
thousands of times to find out
what was going on about Pluto.
And the same thing
happened recently
with the TRAPPIST system.
So we released the discovery of
these seven Earth-sized planets,
and I have to say, as somebody
who's been involved
in exoplanet science,
I thought that this was cool,
but it was just kind of
incremental, next thing.
I mean, we had found
Earth-sized planets before.
We'd found solar systems
with many planets,
but there was something about
this that really got people,
and I think part of it was
honestly needed some good news.
People wanted to know
that NASA was doing cool stuff,
life goes on.
all of the political turmoil
right now
is maybe not
the end of the world.
Maybe things are continuing.
And obviously, these are
all artist's conceptions.
We don't have any data
that shows you
what these planets are like,
but we do know
that there are seven
Earth-sized planets
in the solar system.
And this is the kind of chart
they make me make now.
I hate this, but I just want
to show you a few things.
I'm presenting tomorrow
at headquarters about this.
We're now tracking all of
the different ways
that these new communication
products are going out,
whether it's things
like the social media,
or just your
regular media products.
I do all this gathering
now of data
and try to figure out
what actually is happening.
And here's some of the numbers
that I think
are kind of amazing,
that kind of blew me away.
In the case of
the TRAPPIST result,
it wasn't quite up to Pluto,
but we were up at 3 billion,
which is really,
really pretty good
for what I think
is an incremental result
about exoplanets.
And one of the things that
actually really surprised me --
So up on TV multimedia,
so total press conference views.
Almost 5 million people watched
our press conference at NASA.
That did not used to happen.
Our press conferences
were declining.
TV as a medium, people were kind
of losing interest in NASA.
Nobody knows where to find
NASA TV, anyway. They don't.
It really surprised me
that now that we carry
these press releases
on social media --
We do Facebook Lives,
we do YouTube broadcasts,
all kinds of Ustreams.
We're up to 5 million people
watching the damn
press conference.
I mean, these are not
horribly exciting things.
I mean, that really got to me.
So, I mean, we are now tracking
how many page views
we get in the many,
many millions.
This had a big impact,
and I mean,
just the anecdotal stuff, too.
If you remember, there were
almost 14,000 articles worldwide
just that week
on that result.
You know, everything,
the two New York papers,
the one that's
sort of intellectual,
and the one that's silly.
We got them both, right?
We've got the New York Times
and the New York Post.
And it may surprise
you to know, I mean,
the most successful
communication products
in the history of NASA
have to do with exoplanets,
and there are exoplanet
travel bureau posters.
So Dan Goods,
who's a wonderful friend
of mine out at JPL, does these.
He's an artist at JPL.
And he has turned
real exoplanets
and what we know about them
into travel bureau posters,
as if you might go
to these places.
These have been downloaded
tens of millions of times,
and they are the most successful
communication products.
This one I like.
I actually love Daniel Craig,
so that reminds me
of Daniel Craig,
so I thought
that was really good.
So this is an exoplanet
that is not around a star,
so it's always night.
It's a place where the night
life never ends.
There's one where the gravity
would be much stronger.
It's a super Earth,
so the gravity
would be like three times
the gravity of Earth.
Great skydiving.
Pshoo!
Just think about
the acceleration, huh?
And one where your shadow
always has company
around a binary star,
where you have two stars
and two shadows.
So, the one they did for
TRAPPIST was --
TRAPPIST is amazing
because these planets
are so close to each other.
The seven planets are well
within the orbit of
where Mercury is
in our solar system.
So seven planets crammed
in inside of Mercury.
They're so close together
that you would actually
see the planets in the sky
looking like the moon.
You wouldn't see them
as little bits of light,
like Jupiter or Mars.
You would see other surfaces.
And so there's this travel
poster of sort of planet hop.
Hop from one to the other.
They're so close you can get
to them really, really easily.
All right, well, I think
what I'll do is I'm going
to just go ahead
a little bit
and wrap up with some ideas
about how we as scientists
maybe need to communicate things
a little better.
One of the things
that I'm really,
really fighting is the idea
of scientists being arrogant.
And this is a cultural thing
going on right now
that is something we need
to really pay attention to.
The idea is, "How come
I don't trust scientists?
They're so arrogant."
Well, plumbers know more about
plumbing than you do, right?
And mechanics know more
about cars than you do,
so why is it that scientists
are arrogant and wrong,
and why is it that
we're perpetuating
these horrible lies
and conspiracies?
This is something that's been
deliberately done to us
by some political factions.
And it's something we really
need to fight against.
And the enthusiasm,
the emotions,
the love is part of that.
I find a lot of that here
at Goddard.
I often talk to people about
what a scientist is like.
And I'll use an example
like our Alex Young,
whose office is full of toys.
I mean, nobody would think
Alex would lie to you.
Alex is a good guy, right?
I mean, when you actually
get to know us,
you break down this myth,
he's got the best toys, right?
I mean, go to his office.
I've never seen Sergeant
Pepper action figures before.
This is just a shot
from Alex's office.
This is from my office,
actually.
This is my customized
Lego Death Star.
I customized it for NASA
because Chris Hadfield's
about to sneak up on Darth Vader
and hit him with a guitar.
Canadian Space Agency represent.
And then we've got
the Apollo 13 guy, Gene Kranz,
distracting Grand Moff Tarkin
with the plan for Apollo 13,
and then Carl Sagan's
got his telescope over here.
They're all good.
And of course, Lego has
all kinds of jokes.
I think we can own the humor
and own the geekiness.
Lego Academics -- "Research?
Dr. Gold's current grant
only pays
for the time she spends
applying for
other grants," yes.
Having fun and embracing
our reality and our geekiness,
you know, this is
one of the things --
We're all still
messing Pierce, right?
Huge, huge loss to us.
Pierce made working at NASA
fun and exciting and emotional.
And he spent the last years
of life breaking --
sorry, last months
of his life
breaking down this idea
that scientists were not
emotionally involved in things
like climate change.
And he's a huge
inspiration to me.
So, this is a JPL costume party.
This is me with my wonderful
13th Doctor cosplay.
Embracing
the humanity of it all --
astronauts have been
doing this for a while.
They've actually been
making their own --
and funded by themselves,
not by government money --
these mission posters
that are a little more fun
than the typical,
boring NASA mission folder.
They're getting good at it.
This was Mission 42,
for those of you
that like "Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy."
These are all characters
from "The Hitchhiker's Guide."
And I love this one.
I happen to luckily be friends
with Kjell Lindgren,
and Kjell's a wonderful man.
He's a doctor, and I asked him,
"Do you realize
you have a red
lightsaber," right?
He's like, "Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I know what a red
lightsaber means."
[ Laughter ]
I think this is going to help us
a little bit
with climate change.
I routinely let myself, when I'm
talking about climate science,
show them I'm scared.
I show them I am really,
really concerned.
I actually don't have children.
Strangely enough, that was one
of the considerations
not have children.
I'm a little worried about
where the Earth is going.
Those people that have children,
you know that your kids
are going to be involved
in a changing world.
The changes may be
starting slowly now,
but they're going
to start accelerating.
And in a couple centuries,
we're going to deal
with a very
different-looking planet.
We've already bought that.
Right now, there
are different scenarios
where we could choose better
and worse scenarios.
Right now is a time for a huge
amount of action and activism.
We also have bought
a different coastline.
It's just going to happen.
And I let people
feel the anxiety.
The only chart I have
ever found effective
with the public is this one.
This was done with data
from the Goddard Institute
of Space Studies,
and it was actually published
by Bloomberg magazine.
One of the things that I find
when addressing climate deniers
is to actually take
their questions seriously.
They'll ask you, "Well,
we've heard it's the sun.
The sun is getting warmer,
so there's nothing
we can do about it.
We've heard that
maybe it's volcanos.
Volcanos change the climate."
They're constantly bombarded
with this fake scientific data,
this scientific-sounding data.
And instead of reacting
with rage and with condemnation
and talking about
how stupid you are,
like I said, normally graphs
don't do much for people,
but this one actually
has people responding to it.
It takes everybody's
arguments very seriously.
So, let me run this.
This is actually an animation.
So, we know that the temperature
trend is changing.
We measured that.
You can see from 1880 to 2014,
the temperature is changing.
So what's causing the change?
Could it be the Earth's orbit?
They've heard that, the Earth's
orbit causes ice ages.
It's just that
that trend is so tiny.
Could it be the sun?
The solar output
has changed and varied,
and that does affect
the Earth's climate.
Could it be volcanoes?
Volcanoes cause massive drops
in the temperature.
Things -- all those three
combined, that's not the trend.
That's not the trend we observe.
So what about other human
sources like deforestation.
That's an important part
of climate science,
and climate change, or ozone.
So, they show people
what the measured data is
for all these things
they've heard might be
causing climate change.
Is it this?
Is it that?
All these things that they've
basically misled them with.
Here's the data just
for greenhouse gases.
So just given the greenhouse
gases we've been releasing,
that's what the
temperature would be.
You notice that's actually
higher than observed,
so you put 'em
all together.
And here's where it
gets a little scary.
Put 'em all together,
it's exactly the trend.
Right?
There are factors
due to the Earth's
orbit and aerosols
and volcanoes.
We know that.
It's not that you're stupid.
It's not that you've heard
something that's actually wrong,
but you've been misled in terms
of how important that is.
And this is the one chart that
I have seen people responding to
where they realize we took
their questions seriously.
We know about those
things you've heard.
This is really what's going on.
So, I'm going to end with
a little more profanity.
[ Laughter ]
I have the --
I have the wonderful pleasure
of being friends
with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He actually is a lovely --
Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
I mean, sometimes
you just need
to resort to swearing.
I've been asked so many times
recently about the flat Earth.
I've been asked about
the hollow moon, and sometimes
you just got to say,
"What the fuck are you
talking about," right?
So with that,
thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
-So, Michelle,
I noticed you used,
in the Atlantic story,
you said oxygenated hemoglobin.
-I knew he was going
to ask that.
-No, but I think
you did that right.
Sometimes you want to drop
a little science bomb to --
Remind them they're scientists
or that --
-I think you can -- I think that
that term kind of escaped me.
When I watch that video,
I kind of cringe
when I say
"oxygenated hemoglobin."
I think you're right.
That wasn't the focus
of the video.
That wasn't the focus
of the message,
and I think the idea
that I am a little geeky,
I am a scientist comes across,
so that can be a positive.
And at the same time,
it wasn't --
it didn't stop the message
of where I was trying to get to.
I mean, you're an incredible
communicator.
You're somebody that I really
admire for your communication.
You know best when you can throw
in some of the technical jargon
as fun, but you don't
lose sight
of the message
you want to convey.
-Sometimes it's more effective.
You talk about the big bangs,
this adiabatic expansion of
quark-gluon plasma.
[ Laughter ]
-People can go, "Wow!"
-That's what you call
the big bang.
Right?
It shows that science
and language
are a little bit
interchangeable.
-As a kid, one of the things
that fascinated me
were the things I didn't know.
Somebody would give a lecture
about the big bang,
and they'd say
something like that.
"An adiabatic expansion
of the quark-gluon plasma" --
And I'd go,
"I've got to figure out
what that is.
I've got to learn that.
Some day, I'm going to
understand that."
It never happened, but --
For him it does, so, yeah.
I think you can use
your judgment,
and you can definitely
throw in some terminology,
as long as it isn't getting
in the way
of what you're trying to say.
Question?
-Think about the slide where
you say,
"You trust the mechanic,
the plumber.
Why don't you
trust the scientists?"
Thinking back on Carl Sagan
and everything,
I think people don't trust
the scientists
because science is seen
as rejecting religion.
And many people are quite
confident that religion is true,
at least some parts
of their religion are true.
And so if scientists
reject that,
then the scientists are somehow
missing something.
And so they are suspect.
-I think you're very,
very right.
There's been research done
about when you challenge
somebody's core beliefs,
that when you offer evidence
contrary to the core belief,
I mean, it's basically
a biblical test, right?
You grab ever more closely
to your core beliefs
when they're challenged.
This is a hard one,
and I personally do it
a number of different ways.
I'm actually -- I've done this
talk before a number of times,
but I'm very good friends
with the director
of the Vatican Observatory,
Brother Guy Consolmagno,
and Brother Guy and I
are going to do another talk
at the University of Colorado
in a couple weeks,
where we basically link
arms, sometimes physically.
We're very good friends,
and we talk about
our view of the universe,
If you do a Venn diagram,
is almost entirely intersecting.
He's a Jesuit priest.
I guess he's actually a brother,
and I'm actually
a publicly avowed atheist,
but we have the idea of humanity
and the commonality
and the fact
that he interprets these things
through his spiritual lens,
and I interpret them through --
In my way, I'll sometimes
use the word "spiritual"
because it's so emotional
to me about what I think
I know about the universe.
I was the person back
in the mid-'90s
that they sent to address
the Kansas City school board
about why you shouldn't have
intelligent design as science.
And that was a really
interesting piece
of communication for me
because I spent a lot of time
staying in people's homes.
Instead of getting a hotel room,
I would stay as a guest
of the mayor in their guest room
or guest of the school
board president or whatever.
And they just have to deal
with the idea of Michelle
over breakfast, right?
You know?
This whole idea
that I could not tell them
in my conscience
that science
was intelligent design,
that that should be represented
in science classrooms.
I appealed to their emotions
that I wasn't a threat,
and I didn't mean to
threaten their way of life.
But that there's a difference.
Science has huge limitations.
Scientists actually don't
answer many of the questions
people most want to know.
You know, it's a way
of attacking a problem.
It's a way of interpreting data.
It's not an answer.
And I think that when
I showed them my own limitations
and what I think science
can or cannot do,
I helped explain to them
why science is a thing
that can be taught,
and you shouldn't worry so much
about the religious impact.
People are never
going to agree on that.
They really aren't.
I've tried my own kind of
personal ways
of dealing with it.
I think you're right.
It's hugely important.
I don't have an answer
for what the best way is.
Those are some
of the ways I've tried.
-Can you talk
a little bit about
when you put yourself out there,
you have to deal
with the reactions
on YouTube comments or people
sending you things
and that type of thing?
-Totally.
-Yeah, yeah.
-Don't read the comments.
-Yeah, yeah, okay.
There are tremendously
good things
about being in the public eye.
I'm often lonely,
and these days,
it's more often than not --
I was in Starbucks
the other day,
and someone sits down
right beside me,
and they want to talk
about gravitational radiation.
I had never met
this person before.
I was, like, "Hot damn,
I'm not alone. Yes!"
You know, but the other thing --
the shadow side of that,
the dark side is the
the trolling and the comments.
I get many, many pictures
of genitalia
and threats and rape threats.
Yeah, that's part of being
in the public eye.
And it has impacted me.
I find --
I'll just lay it out there.
I'm having a lot of body
image problems right now.
I'm feeling very overweight
and old and ugly,
and that's because
I'm told that.
You know, people take time
out of their day,
who I've never met,
to send me an e-mail
telling me how fat I am.
Great, thank you.
I can't lie to you and say
that's had no impact on me.
I think that's one of the things
that maybe
we can talk about together
as people that are
in the public eye.
I've talked to Neil deGrasse
Tyson and Phil Plait about this.
They don't get
the same type of comments.
They get, "You're an idiot.
I want to kill you."
They get bad things, too,
but they don't get --
Neil's not thin, right?
He's a good, solid guy,
but the last season
of "How the Universe Works,"
I don't think
it's actually that bad,
but the lighting made
my hair look kind of yellow.
I've gotten so many
damn comments
about how bad my hair is.
I'm, like, again, "You took time
out of your day
to tell me how bad my hair is.
What about Michio Kaku?
He's got white --
Yeah, he's got hair."
You know, I mean, so the --
I think the thing to own
is that it has affected me.
I wish I could be this really
strong person
that that just rolled
right off of,
but it hurts every single time.
But that is a small part
of what I've experienced.
The vast majority means
that we hang onto the negative.
The negative affects us much
more than the positive does.
Somebody giving me a compliment
is nowhere near as much
of an impact
as when somebody insults you.
So, I mean, all I can say
is it's affected me.
I'm curious a little bit
about legality
because they're now
sending the stuff
to me at my NASA account,
and I think
that might be illegal.
Okay, so one of the things
we should talk about.
I contacted the security manager
at headquarters
a couple weeks ago,
and then because I am busy,
I just didn't have time.
I didn't want to spend my time
trying to start
an investigation about this.
'Cause I don't think it's
actually really dangerous.
I think when these people
threaten you,
they're just wasting their time.
But I didn't want to spend
my time dealing with it.
I need to know what I'm supposed
to do, and I don't.
-I'm the social media
person here.
I have to read the comments.
[ Laughter ]
And we now delete --
and we try --
We monitor all the comments,
and we also delete
pretty much anything
about anybody's appearance.
We started to delete
the negative stuff,
and then I was like,
"That's not really fair."
-I don't want
the positive stuff, either.
I don't know how to respond to,
"You're so beautiful."
I was coming as a scientist
to this, right, and that just --
that got me out of my groove.
Am I supposed to say thank you?
Am I supposed to be grateful?
Am I supposed to just ignore it?
Am I supposed to be offended?
I don't know.
So, you know, I mean,
when people --
and I understand
they're offering a compliment.
They're not meaning to be bad,
but it's not
how I wanted to be reacted to.
-The physical threats
to an employee of NASA
is something that I know
who to send it to at security.
You send it to communications,
and they'll send it to me.
And also, we get sort of a,
"I'm going to come blow up
your center."
We sent that to security.
I don't know what they do
with them, but there's also --
We're supposed to be open
to the public,
but we do block, hide.
-And racial. And racial, too.
-Racial, too.
All of that we will report.
And just know
who to send it to.
-I work a lot
with Hakeem Oluseyi.
And he gets horrible
racist comments.
-I was hoping
you were not going to let that
dissuade people from coming --
when I come to them and say,
"Can I do a video with you?"
-No, no.
Oh, my God, no, no.
I have so much fun.
Did you have a comment on this?
-Yeah, I was wondering.
This is so new to me.
Why exactly would
anybody threaten you?
Why?
What did you do wrong?
-Well, okay.
-I don't know.
-There's a question, huh?
I'm a --
I think it has something --
I think it comes from,
unfortunately,
from men who feel
disenfranchised
and isolated in society,
and they look at me,
an apparently successful woman,
and I'm an object of attack.
-I thought it was something
you did wrong.
-No. Oh, no.
I occasionally
get factual corrections.
I've told you, most of those,
they're kind of annoying
'cause it's like, "Yes,
I know about the "R" process
and the fact that the iron in
the core didn't" --
I know that, but, no,
these have nothing to do
with scientific commentary.
They're just
personal attacks, yeah.
If you are in the media,
you'll get some of these.
Like I said, it has been
hugely positive,
but that does affect me still.
Yeah? Question?
-Yeah, if the scientists
in the room
will forgive an IT geek --
-Oh, you're putting yourself
down already.
Why, why?
You're fabulous.
I need you.
-And I need you.
You talked about the stars
and how the different
elements are formed.
How did that come to be me?
-Oh, isn't that cool?
Okay, so I could tell you
the whole story.
I hate to do this.
If you Google "TedX, Michelle
Thaller, We Are Dead Stars,"
you'll see I did a whole
20-minute lecture on it.
-Terrific, thanks.
-So yeah, because what happened,
basically,
is all that debris gets
thrown out between the stars,
and then gravity brings it
together to form new stars
and solar systems.
And that's how we get the iron
and the calcium.
The star blows up,
the debris spreads around,
and then gravity stars
to make new planets out of that.
So, if you want to do
the whole TedX talk,
it's a whole
20-minute talk on that.
-I think one more.
-One more, and then I better
let you go.
Yes, question.
-This is again about the slide
about trusting
the plumber and the mechanic.
So, I was thinking
about that a little bit,
and it seems that scientists
are viewed as arrogant
because we're forced
to keep saying,
"No, I'm right, you're wrong.
You need to trust me."
And so it seems like a Catch-22,
where you just keep propagating
that idea that you're arrogant,
and you keep
having to defend it --
defending that you're right.
Is there any way
out of that that you see?
-Yeah, that goes back
to the culture of science,
which to me was a problem.
Being raised in the Midwest,
directly disagreeing
with somebody
was really not
culturally acceptable.
And I had a lot of problems
in science trying to work myself
into this more
aggressive confrontational.
It's meant in the best way.
As scientists, we get to say,
"No, my data's better.
Defend your idea."
And it seems very
confrontational to outsiders.
That is one of the main
reasons we seem arrogant.
I often do a lot
of science apologists.
I actually did this --
our wonderful social media
lead at headquarters,
Jason Townsend, he's amazing.
He's a media expert,
a communications expert.
And he was giving
a talk about social media
to the heads of the science
directorates.
And immediately, they peppered
him with, "What's your data?
Can you prove that?
Can you show this?
Can you show that?"
And Jason was great.
He had really good data,
really good backup,
but that's not
the world he's from.
The world he's from,
it is not acceptable
to interrupt
somebody's talk and say,
"Bullshit. Tell me
why you believe that."
So I actually went up to him
afterwards, and he was fine,
but I said,
"I'm kind of sorry about that."
Why is our culture,
even to outsiders,
this aggressive a culture?
That's one of the reasons
I think people do interact
with us as arrogant.
They respond as arrogant.
When I was in college, I had
to work myself into a character.
I actually used acting when I
was going into a study session.
People would be working
on problems together.
I couldn't handle
the direct confrontation,
so I actually
just became someone else.
I worked myself up
into a character
that could deal with that.
And then that became
so ingrained in me
that when I went back home,
people all of a sudden think
I'm very pushy and very arrogant
because that became part of me,
that confrontation.
That's something as scientists,
we all --
we sort of lose sight of.
We do it so often.
We don't even notice it anymore,
but we forget that,
for most people in the public,
that is not an acceptable way
to respond to each other.
I mean, like I said, I really
have to apologize a lot.
I run around
after people afterwards
when they come into the science
directorate at headquarters
and get that sort of treatment,
and the scientists
all think it's cool.
They're like, "Oh, I got that."
But I don't like it,
and I do think it is one thing
we need to think about if
we're serious about diversity.
Are women statistically
less comfortable?
I'm a ball buster now.
Now I've got it.
It was hard for me
getting into it,
and are people from
different cultures,
with different cultural training
being kept out of science
because of that?
I think it's something
to really think about.
-Let's thank Michelle
one more time.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
