Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets for science literacy

Dan Vergano, USA TODAY | USATODAY

You've seen him explaining tides on The Colbert Report, hosting PBS astronomy shows and even answering cosmological bar trivia questions for folks on Twitter.

What is life like for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a man whose time has been in big demand the past year, debunking the end-of-the-world Maya prophecy while trying to improve overall scientific literacy?

"I'm tired," says Tyson, 54, director of Hayden Planetarium at the storied American Museum of Natural History in New York. "Fortunately, there are other colleagues of mine out there fighting the good fight as well."

Since 2000, when Tyson first made himself known by dethroning Pluto from the pantheon of planets on display at the Rose Center for Earth and Science, where his planetarium resides, he has ascended into the firmament of fame. Tyson has served on two presidential space commissions, runs a radio show and has made appearances everywhere from Comedy Central to PBS kids' cartoons in an effort to propel greater awareness of science into people's lives.

'An awesome responsibility'

Tyson added one more star to his celestial level of fame this month, notching his 1 millionth Twitter follower. In joining Twitter's millionaire club, Tyson wrote, "FYI, I tweet mostly random, occasionally coherent, cosmic brain droppings."

Some think he's a bit too modest.

"Tyson is probably the most high-profile public scientist in the U.S. today," says science communications scholar Declan Fahy of American University in Washington, D.C. "And in almost every interview and profile you read about him, the comparison with (Carl) Sagan comes up. Both are public intellectuals who advocate for the power of scientific thinking."

This year, Tyson announced he would lead a sequel to Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series on PBS in the 1980s. Tyson's will be presented on Fox by 2014. Comparisons to Sagan, who stood at the pinnacle of public awareness of science before his untimely death in 1996, are ones that Tyson acknowledges.

"I'm not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist," Tyson says. "It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don't shoulder lightly."

Despite that high profile, all those Twitter followers — more than 1,054,000 of them (a "nerd record," he jokes) — shouldn't carve his tweets in stone. "I don't want people to say something is true because Tyson says it is true. That's not critical thinking," he says. "My goal is to promote scientific literacy so people feel empowered."

For example? When a meteor blew up over central Russia last week on the same day that an asteroid passed close by our planet, Tyson took to Twitter to nudge folks to think about NASA's small budget for monitoring dangers from space. "Finally, evidence for Hollywood that not all asteroids hit major cities of the United States," he tweeted.

When daredevil Felix Baumgartner made himself famous Oct. 14 by sky-diving from 24 miles up, Tyson noted that this "edge of space" achievement would represent a millimeter's height if depicted on a schoolroom globe.

Reaching new audiences

"I just want people to see things from a new perspective, not offer an opinion on whether it is good or bad," he says. Besides, he argues, he can't simply force people to learn the tenets of scientific literacy or critical thinking — such as asking for evidence first to support new claims.

"At the height of his fame, Sagan used television to advance these ideas. What Tyson does brilliantly is communicate this idea consistently in our age of digital media," Fahy says. "He doesn't just write books or host television shows for people already interested in science — he tries to reach audiences who would not otherwise tune into scientific content, through Twitter, his radio show and in venues not typically associated with scientific content, such as The Colbert Report."

"Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance," Tyson says. "That's why I am an advocate for science."