VIDEO: Neil deGrasse Tyson criticizes Ted Cruz’ comments during Sarasota visit

Neil deGrasse Tyson made one thing perfectly clear while speaking to a packed house at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall Monday: Pluto is still not a planet. Get over it.

“Just because I was an accessory in the demotion of Pluto, doesn't mean I don’t love Pluto,” Tyson said at the latest installment of the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall Lecture Series. The astrophysicist discussed the latest feats mankind has accomplished in space travel — including NASA’s New Horizons mission to study the icy dwarf planet.

Tyson made another thing clear during his lecture, which he dissected during a roundtable discussion before the talk: the United States is falling behind in space exploration and politicians should take note.
 

"If you're going to ignore Earth — and no one else is paying attention to Earth the way NASA is — you could be planting the seeds of your own extinction,” Tyson said. “So, it seems to me it’s a good thing to know what’s going on on Earth as seen from space."

Ted Cruz, who serves as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness and plans to run for president, criticized the amount of funding NASA commits to studying Earth sciences during a subcommittee hearing last week. Tyson noted that NASA's charter specifically calls for the organization to study Earth and atmospheric sciences, and doing away with that component could be doom mankind.

"If you're going to ignore Earth — and no one else is paying attention to Earth the way NASA is — you could be planting the seeds of your own extinction,” Tyson said. “So, it seems to me it’s a good thing to know what’s going on on Earth as seen from space."

Tyson lamented that "emergent scientific truths," such as climate change, have no precedent for constructive political discussion.

"When you say 'let's debate whether or not humans are influencing climate' you are losing time that you could be debating what do in the face of that fact," Tyson said.

But, it wasn't all gloomy dialogue at the Van Wezel during the rainy morning, Tyson theorized that "science is trending." With recent films featuring prominent scientists, such as the Imitation Game and the Theory of Everything, cleaning up at the Academy Awards, and Tyson's own Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey drawing millions of televeision viewers from around the world, he said it is an unprecendeted time for science in pop culture.

"I wanted to higlight this fact as a sign of what is going on in our culture," Tyson said.

Tyson, who serves as director of the Hayden Planetarium, took the audience through the latest accomplishments in the sphere of astrophysics, including the Orion capsule launch out of Cape Canaveral in December and the Mars Curiosity rover, both of which are NASA projects. But, he warned that Europe's progress in space exploration is beginning to eclipse that of the U.S.

"It's a little awkward for me to admit we're trailing the world, not leading it," Tyson said.