Like Stephen Jay Gould and David Attenborough, Neil Degrasse Tyson is one of the great communicators of science to the public.  If you weren’t familiar with him from his many spots on The Colbert Report or NovaScienceNOW which he hosts for PBS, he is an astrophysicist from New York City who runs the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and is a rumored candidate to be the next head of NASA.  That being said.

In this short clip entitled “Stupid Design”, Tyson speaks about not only all of the things in the universe that want to kill you (meteors, volcanoes, radiation, malevolent microbes, and so forth) but some of the imperfections in nature that prove no sentient designer could have or logically would have come up with. Tyson makes a solid argument for some ontological humility, but not just to scare the audience, also as a reminder that what we really understand is still vastly limited, and that it is very clear what we do have is precious and how we have been thinking about it is a little megalomaniacal. (to put it lightly).

The idea is that the more we understand about the natural world, the more we can begin to understand out place within it.  The size and violent temperment of the universe doesn’t need to be terrifying, it can equally be awe-inspiring.  There is a reason once a month Conan O’Brien has Jack Hannah or Jeff Corwin on the show with a cavalcade of animals, people never lose that natural curosity for all things well, natural.

The milky way is on a crash course with the andromeda galaxy, the sun will go red giant and engulf the earth in 5 billion years, and oh yeah, who would put a theme park next to a waste management facility (you’ll have to watch the end of the video to understand that one).

I hope that this video impresses upon you that the stars that matter don’t have Academy Awards, enjoy the clip.