Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

This is a book everyone should read. It looks at life on earth from a cosmic perspective and emphasizes our commonality rather than our differences. With an emphasis on scientific thinking, it makes a case for evidence vs. opinion and the importance of facts.

I got this as a first reads right before I moved and it sat in my old house for a year, but I finally got around to reading it. Tyson is a good writer even if he's a bit smug sometimes. But he's also smug in a way I generally agree with, so overall I enjoyed the volume. I think I was hoping for a bit more "cosmic" from the title when the key word is actually "perspective." He does a wonderful job of parsing higher level statistical thinking for a lay audience. Sadly, I'm not the person who needs to read this book, and most of the people who do need to read it, won't. But if you want to hear Tyson's voice in your head narrating thoughtful essays on humans and their place on earth and in the cosmos, it's worth a read.

As always, Neil deGrasse Tyson amazes you with a tsunami of facts not just in astrophysics but in all aspects of the natural world.

It spurred some conversation with my partner, at least, but overall I was disappointed. I think more point could be made. Some stats and info bits were interesting, but overall I'm just irked at his oversimplification of veganism. He picks one point of reason for it and tears it to pieces, glossing over legit reasons, and encourages dairy consumption because it doesn't kill... Which actually makes it one of the LEAST humane options. I would have liked to have seen this balanced by good reasoning and not just latching onto tropes. If one of his points is that life is complex, there's so much he could have done here.

I don't care that he ate a squirrel, I don't conceptually mind hunting. Factory farming is bad for the planet and for health. Sure, where is the cutoff for meat? Fine conversation. But he didn't even touch how comparable cannibalism might be, and I think most of us who have chosen this lifestyle have faced his line of questioning plenty of times. I was well aware of my hypocrisy as a vegetarian before going vegan. The conversation of values vs amount of sacrifice one is willing to make is relevant and interesting, why not go there?

Two things bother me most:
1) his big point is about how biased we are as humans, and yet on this topic he doesn't acknowledge his own bias. (Whether that is thinking veganism is stupid, or he just likes meat, I can't say).
2) I don't know how balanced he presented other topics, but this was the one place he seemed to be advocating for something, that I heard.. and it's a destructive thing for our planet, so I don't take kindly to that. And I'm so sick of the beaten to death a hundred times joke that vegetarians are plant slaughterers. You like numbers, Neil? It takes a third of the farmland to feed a vegetarian compared to an omnivore since we eat the plants directly and don't filter it through a cow. So we still kill fewer living things than you. See? It's not even “funny because it's true”.

I also question his conclusion about the LD ranking of glyphosate. Is salt more deadly per dose, maybe...but I'm pretty sure our bodies know how to process small doses of it, where maybe small doses of glyphosate build up in the body unprocessed, and then cause harm?

I didn't know what to expect picking this book up, other than “Ooh, NDT, this could be interesting”. But overall outside or being bugged by the oversimplifications, I just didn't find it that interesting. It won't be the Christmas gift for my parents I was hoping for.