One of the world's most famous cosmologists, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has made a passionate plea for governments including Australia's to invest more in science — particularly pure science.

The well-known science communicator, who is in Australia for a speaking tour, was asked by PM's Mark Colvin about the position many governments and businesses are taking, which is that pure science is not worth investing in.

Increasingly there is demand for short-term results from applied science, rather than longer-term investment in fields of science like physics.

Dr Tyson said it would be "disastrous" if more funding was cut from those areas of science.

"It would be disastrous in ways that you cannot even measure," he said.

"In the 1920s, a whole frontier of physics was discovered, it was quantum physics.

"If the same set of legislators [around today] were around back then, they would be telling people and academics: 'Why are you studying the structure of what's inside the atom, you can't even see an atom, who cares about atoms? You are wasting taxpayers' money.'

"Yet 50 year later — yes it would take 50 years — 50 years later, quantum physics would be the foundation of our information technology revolution.

"By some measures, one third of the world's GDP is traceable to the creation, storage and retrieval of information as we now perform it in the digital era.

"You could not have predicted it back then."

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Dr Tyson went on to give the example of the ground-breaking work Albert Einstein was publishing in the early part of the 20th century.

Einstein was born in 1879, and by the late 1920s was publishing theoretical papers into what is now known as stimulated emission.

While it took more research into the phenomenon in later years, Einstein's theory paved the way for the development of a multi-billion-dollar industry.

It was all down to lasers, or Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, now used every day from tattoo removal to communications to the scanning of retail products at the supermarket.

"If you go back to the later part of the 1920s into the 1930s, Einstein publishes a paper called the stimulated emission of radiation, a really obscure result at the time," Dr Tyson said.

"Physicists were deeply interested in it as a phenomenon of physics, but did anyone else care? No. That was the founding paper of lasers.

"Are you saying 'no, I don't know how you would ever use this research, so let's not do it because I have to know right now what the eternal application of this discovery will be'? That is short-sighted.

"What you are doing is you are burying, you are destroying the seed corn or truly revolutionary science and technology that could take this country into the next century and lead the world.

"Without it you will dance the tune played by others who have the insight of how to make those kinds of investments."

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Later on Q&A, Dr Tyson reiterated the importance of science funding in response to an audience question, "Where do you think we will be in the next 100 years?"

"In this, the 21st century, without creative investment in science and technology, we are not going to have a 21st century," Dr Tyson said.

He said somebody walking on Mars was an ambition of a nation.

"If you go to Mars, you are breaching frontiers of astrophysics, geophysics, you will be looking for life while you are there," he said.

"In 100 years ... all wars over limited resources are over because we have access to the unlimited resources of our backyard, and that new backyard is our solar system."