Neil deGrasse Tyson is again.
In 2024 we chatted with the gracious celeb astrophysicist, lecturer, podcaster, and bestselling creator concerning “Merlin’s Tour of the Universe,” a revised and up to date version of Tyson’s very first e-book that was revealed in 1989 as a group of Q&A items initially showing as an amusing column in The McDonald Observatory’s StarDate Journal.
The fictional timeless sorcerer named “Merlin of Omniscia” from the Andromeda galaxy is back to answer a new round of questions in a new companion volume titled “Just Visiting This Planet: Further Scientific Adventures of Merlin From Omniscia” arrives Oct. 21, 2025.
“The takeaway right here is that this was the daybreak of my scientific and academic profession,” Tyson explains to Area.com. “So it was the proving floor for a way I’d in the end be bringing science to the general public. The strategies, instruments, and techniques and the persona that I imbued in Merlin had been parts that persist inside me to this right this moment. In that sense, it was vital in my life, even when to the reader it is only a assortment of cute questions and solutions.”
This new mind-expanding 350-page hardback has additionally been given a refreshed twenty first century makeover because it was supplied in 1998, and incorporates a treasure of witty responses to questions posed by most people on subjects reminiscent of planets, stars, comets, black holes, moons, galaxies and even superheroes.
“However for those who learn them, you will see they’re doing issues {that a} typical reply would not do,” he provides. “As we speak, for those who simply sort a query into ChatGPT it comes again and it is type of vacuous, it is obtained no soul, no persona. It is obtained nothing to tug you again in. And Merlin, with the quirky persona, is meant to be a car to empower folks to benefit from the studying, slightly than simply take it as if it’s important to take medication.”
With widespread layoffs and diminished funding currently sweeping the scientific community in nearly every field, “Just Visiting This Planet” and its focus on curiosity and discovery is even more relevant to remind fellow Earthlings of the absolute necessity of science to help advance our species.
“If you give up on science and the moving frontier represented in so many of the places where budgets have been cut, that comes with consequences,” Tyson notes. “People vote into office who they want, and I’m not going to get in the way of that. If the democracy you want is one that is cutting science programs, that will ultimately bite you in the ass.
“Because it’s the science that’s foundational to the innovations that many of us have taken for granted, that comes out of American industries. American industry relies on the foundational science that’s behind it, underneath it, and is supporting it. And you don’t see that because it’s done in labs in universities and it’s done by people who don’t necessarily have YouTube channels.
“This is hardworking researchers exploring the limits of our understanding of their field, and it’s government funded. If the government doesn’t fund it, nobody is going to fund it, because there is no return on the annual report. The research is too far removed from even the R&D that would be conducted by a corporation. Once it’s published and people see it and they figure it out they say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a new understanding of how nature works.’
“Then you have clever engineers coming afterwards saying that they can turn that into a product or make that commercial. That happens way down the line. What it also means is that you’re not in a position to pass judgment on a research project just because the title feels a little remote to you.”
“The fact that we have government officials poring over research paper titles and lording their decision on whether it’s frivolous or not because they can’t imagine how it’s relevant, that will have consequences, as we recede on the frontier of science research and we watch other countries who have re-doubled the role of science in their lives. China especially. We will sink lower before we rise up again and realize the folly of those decisions. Anything that gets people excited about science, that only pays dividends in the future.”
For this revised and updated version of “Just Visiting This Planet,” Tyson carefully curated the questions for a more modern readership used to extracting explanations via the internet.
“So this is 200 more questions drawn from over a thousand. Some questions I removed since you can just Google them now like, ‘How hot is the sun?’, that sort of thing. Then I added other questions that had a little more personality to them. Someone asks, ‘What happens if aliens came and blew up the moon?’ That’s kind of fun. So we can do that in ways that are more fun than ChatGPT will, I assure you. There are many more ‘If, Then’ questions in this book. Plus, my brother, who’s an artist, illustrated it. I’m delighted to declare that fact about it.”
And since this is Halloween season, we’d be remiss if we didn’t ask Tyson about growing up in New York City trick-or-treating in a huge apartment building where he and his friends would score multiple grocery bags of sugared loot. What were his favorite fun-sized candy bars? Milky Way and Mars of course!
“Just Visiting This Planet: Further Scientific Adventures of Merlin From Omniscia” drops into bookstores from Blackstone Publishing on Oct. 21, 2025.
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