60 Minutes - 3/22/2015: Iraq's Christians, Rare Earth Elements, Starstruck

Episode Date: March 23, 2015

Lara Logan reports on Iraq's Christians; Are modern life's devices under China's grip? Lesley Stahl reports; then, Charlie Rose profiles astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Jane Pauley. Listen up! Every Monday, tune in to our Sunday Morning Podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation, and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more, along with features that make you smile, because there's always something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday Morning podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Christianity in Iraq was born in small towns and villages like these. Today, some of them are deserted, abandoned because ISIS is forcing Christians out. The Islamic State marks homes the way Nazis marked the property of Jews. Archbishop Nicodemus Sharaf says he had five minutes to flee from Iraq's second largest city, Mosul. He grabbed five ancient manuscripts from his church, but had to leave other relics behind.

You had books from the first century. Of Christianity. The F-35 fighter jet is the most technologically advanced weapon system in history. Each one contains nearly a half a ton of what's called rare earth elements, almost all of which come from China. The guidance systems on weapon systems and Tomahawk cruise missile, any of the smart bombs have rare earths in them. I'd be hard pressed to name anything that we consider worth building today and going forward that would not have a rare earth component in it. Because of this, because of the monopoly on rare earths,

does China threaten our national security? Unchecked, yes. Here is something you haven't seen before, an astrophysicist on stage in a sold-out auditorium. Neil deGrasse Tyson is reigniting a fascination for the great beyond. He's succeeded Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating scientific communicator. When I was 11, I said, this is so amazing. Who wouldn't want to study the universe?

What was so amazing? The endless frontier of it all. The vastness of it. The mystery of it. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Lara Logan. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Charlie Rose. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. I'm Jane Pauley. Listen up every Monday. Tune into our Sunday morning podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation, and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more,

along with features that make you smile, because there's always something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday morning podcast on the free Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are few places on earth where Christianity is as old as it is in Iraq. Christians there trace their history to the first century apostles. But today, their existence has been threatened by the terrorist group that calls itself Islamic State. More than 125,000 Christians, men, women, and children, have been forced from their homes over the last

10 months. The Islamic State, or ISIS, stormed into Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, last summer and took control. From there, it pushed into the neighboring villages and towns across this region, known as the Nineveh Plains, a vast area that's been home to Christians since the first century after Christ. Much of what took almost 2,000 years to build has been lost in a matter of months. On the side of a mountain overlooking the Nineveh plains of ancient Mesopotamia is the monastery of St. Matthew. It's one of the oldest on earth. The voices of its monks have echoed here since the 4th century,

uttering prayers that have not changed. You do the service in Aramaic, which was the language of Jesus. Yes. Are you among the last people on earth to speak this language? We think so, because we kept this language through the language of prayers. Prayers through centuries of persecution. Father Yusuf Ibrahim is one of only seven monks left here. He told us the monastery was founded in 363

and has survived the Persian and Ottoman empires, Mongol invaders and Kurdish conquests. Today it's threatened by the Islamic State, whose fighters advanced towards St. Matthew's Gates shortly after taking Mosul last summer. Kurdish soldiers push them back to this village, where their flag still flies only four miles from the monastery. What are you most afraid of? Unknown future. Unknown future? Yes.

What do you think is going to happen? We don't know exactly, but we're expecting the worst. The road from St. Matthews brings you to the front line, just six miles from the outskirts of Mosul. Every town and village between here and the occupied city is in the hands of the Islamic State. And now, we're told, for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, there are no Christians left inside Mosul.

They take everything from us, but they cannot take the God from our hearts. They cannot. Nicodemus Sharaf is the Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Mosul, one of about 10,000 Christians who fled the city. We found him living as a refugee in the Kurdish capital Erbil. He said ISIS fighters were already inside Mosul when he escaped. I don't have any time to take anything. He told me, you have just five minutes. Just I take it, five books, they are very old. Among them, this Aramaic manuscript.

He told us it was written 500 years ago and said he left behind hundreds more, older than this one, Christian relics that may never be recovered. I think they burn all the books. And we have books from the first century of Christianity. You had books from the first century? Of Christianity. You had books from the first century? Of the Christianity. When I remember this, I cannot do.

From the beginning of the Christianity, this is the first time we cannot pray in our churches. As it seeks to erase Christianity from the landscape, the Islamic State allows no Christian symbols. It just released these photographs, which show the desecration of the church at what is believed to be the monastery of Margorgis, just north of Mosul. And nothing is sacred. ISIS blew up this mosque shortly after taking control here. It's a site holy to both Christians and Muslims, because the Old Testament prophet

Jonah was said to be buried inside. Just like the Nazis marked the property of Jews, Christian homes in Mosul have been marked with this red symbol. It's the Arabic letter N for Nisara, an early Islamic term for Christians. When ISIS puts it on your home, you either convert to Islam, pay an extortion tax, or face the sword. Issa al-Kareen is one of tens of thousands who had to make that choice. He was at home with his family in the Christian village where he'd lived all his life when ISIS fighters came looking for him. He told us the fighters first took all his money,

then his wife and children. So they were telling you, convert, convert, convert? Yes, convert. In the beginning, I refused. I told them I was Christian and I had my religion and they had their religion. But they told me if you don't convert we will kill you and take your wife and children. He agreed and was taken to Mosul to convert, where he was reunited with his family. Soon ISIS fighters were asking about his young daughter.

And he told us that frightened him more than anything. They said to me that in Islam, the Sharia says girls that are 10 years old should get married. As soon as they left, my wife and I shut the door. We looked at each other, and she started to cry and pray. We were so scared they were going to take our daughter from us. They escaped in the back of a taxi. Issa says they talked their way through three ISIS checkpoints and traveled for over four hours on back roads to Erbil,

where, like Archbishop Chirac, they now live as refugees. Some 30,000 Christians were living in Erbil before this crisis, most of them Chaldean Catholics, who follow their own ancient traditions but recognize the authority of the Pope. Bashar Warda is the archbishop of this diocese. He says his congregation has swelled by more than 60,000 refugees. As Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous region in the north of Iraq, has become a safe haven for Christians fleeing the Islamic State. This is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Thousands of years old. Two thousand years old. Almost. And when you look at it today, where is that Christian community here?

Disappearing. It's dying. Archbishop Warder said Christians in Iraq ironically felt safer under Saddam Hussein. Democracy brought a new wave of persecution and prompted a mass exodus of Christians. When the U.S. withdrew completely in 2011, Archbishop Waters said the situation became even worse because Iraq's new leaders were incapable of governing without help. I think the American support was needed, needed forcefully. You cannot leave the country like this and tell them, well, we've liberated you, we cannot do the job for you.

We are walking away and this is your country. Rule it. So in your view, walking away in 2011 was just as damaging to Iraq as 2003 when the U.S. invaded. Yes. It's not blaming, but that's the reality. This is not what you came for in 2003. 4,000 sacrifices of the American soldiers was not meant to come to this day. Christianity in Iraq was born in the towns and villages of the Nineveh Plains, like this one called Tel Escof, which lies less than 20 miles north of Mosul. Christians have lived here and walked these streets for over a thousand years. But today there's no one. They're all gone, driven out by fear. And one of the most striking things you notice is the silence.

Every road was deserted. Houses and possessions abandoned. Others destroyed. Tel Asgaf had always been a refuge for Iraq's Christians until last August when Isis moved in and 7,000 Christians fled three weeks later Kurdish soldiers pushed the terrorists out But father Ronnie Hana said Isis instilled such fear here that his people won't come back He worries too, but returns for a few hours every morning to check on his church, which he said ISIS fighters used as their base.

He told us one of them called him on his cell phone to ask how to operate the church generator. They really did. They asked you that. And you gave, you told them. So I guided them to where it was located around the corner from here, he told us, and explained how to turn it on. The last thing I said was to please take care of the church. And they just hung up. cleansing of Iraq's Christians from this land is something Archbishop Sharaf believes ought to be generating a much louder cry of outrage from his Muslim friends and neighbors. Speak up. Of course there is good people in the Islam people. There is not all Muslim people they are bad. I believe. But where is the good people? Where is their voice? Nothing. Few. Few. With everything that has happened here to the Christians, what has been lost? They lost our dignity here. I'm sorry to say that we don't have dignity in our country, in our land.

Most everyone we met welcomed U.S.-led airstrikes here, but they also said it's not nearly enough. Taking back Mosul, a city of about 1.5 million people, is widely understood to be a difficult prospect. Archbishop Warder believes the Iraqi army can't do it alone. And as long as the city remains in the hands of ISIS, who he refers to as Daesh, its Arabic name, no Christians will be going home. For me, Daesh is a cancer. It's a disease. So sometimes you take some hard measures, unfortunate measures, to deal and to treat this cancer. So you want to see a major military offensive to retake Mosul? Yes, to get Iraq to its normal situation. And by getting Iraq to its normal situation, you mean restoring the border between Iraq and Syria?

Yes. Getting rid of Daesh, the Islamic State? Exactly. Defeating them militarily? Please, God. The Christian community hastily set up militias to guard their deserted villages and homes along the front line. And they're getting a little help. As I'm going this way.

We were surprised to come across American Brett Felton, a Christian veteran of the Iraq war, who traveled on his own from Detroit to train Christian volunteers. And this man, Hamas, who said he came from Australia, driven to defend the land where he was born. What do you think the Islamic State intends to do with the Christians here? To wipe them out.

To be nothing, no place left that bears the name of Christian Christianity. Christians in the frontier town of Al-Khosh live in the shadow of the Islamic State. Under constant threat, the militiamen keep watch as they celebrate their faith and carry out traditions that are as old as Christianity on the Nineveh Plains. planes. chart-topping, history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge,

and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. What do cars, precision-guided missiles, and the television you're watching right now have in common? They all depend on something called rare earth elements, unusual metals that are sprinkled inside

almost every piece of high tech you can think of. Most people have never heard of them, but we have become so reliant on rare earths that a few years ago, an intense global power struggle broke out over their free flow. The reason is that one country has a virtual monopoly, roughly 90 percent of the mining, refining and processing of rare earths, China.

And in 2010 it used that power to disrupt the world supply. It's especially troubling because it was the United States that started the rare earth revolution in the first place. It all began here at this mine in Mountain Pass, California, an hour west of Las Vegas, when geologists first identified rare earth elements deep in the Mojave Desert. They were considered geological oddities until the 60s, when it was discovered that one of these elements, europium, enhanced the color red in TV sets. And soon, the rare earth industry was born.

CBS presents this program in color. Rare earth chemistry is fascinating. There's so many more things that we could be doing with rare earths. Konstantin Karianopoulos, chairman of Mollicorp, which has owned and operated the Mountain Pass mine for six decades,

took us to the heart of the operation. Is this considered a big mine? In terms of rare earth standards, yes, it's one of the biggest in the world. Are we actually walking on rare earth elements right now? We're physically on the ore body. We are right on it. It starts at the top of the mine, it comes down,

and we're walking on it, and it goes in that direction. So what are rare earth elements? If you ever took high school chemistry, you learn that they're clumped together at the end of the periodic table, atomic numbers 57 through 71. And they have difficult-to-pronounce Greek or Scandinavian names. Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, terbium. Some of them are phosphorescent.

Erbium amplifies light and is used in fiber optic cables. Gadolinium has magnetic properties and is used in MRI machines and x-rays. As for neodymium, you may be carrying some of it in your pocket. Next time your phone vibrates, think of us, because the vibration motor is a small motor that contains a tiny neodymium magnet. Carrionopolis showed us around a new model home to illustrate that rare earths are making our appliances energy efficient, like state-of-the-art refrigerators, touchscreen thermostats,

energy-efficient light bulbs, the air conditioning systems. They're also in our cars in the form of catalytic converters, sensors, and hybrid car batteries. Hybrids in particular use a lot more because they contain electric motors that would not function without rare earths. A Prius has roughly 25 pounds of rare earths, and they're hidden in plain sight in our everyday lives, in our computers and gadgets. Even the lights and cameras we use to film this story are chock full of rare earths. What I'm getting from you is that modern life depends on these elements.

Absolutely. Despite their name, rare earths are not rare. Small amounts can be found in your backyard. They're trapped in what looks like ordinary rock. But there are only a few places on earth with concentrations high enough to mine. Rare earths normally are found in very, very low concentrations. This is probably running something in the 25% grade, which is remarkable. To anyone who has ever worked with rare earths, this is a thing of beauty.

But getting the rare earths out of that rock is nasty business, requiring toxic acids and lots of water. In fact, the mine was shut down by the state of California in 1998 after radioactive water seeped into the surrounding Mojave Desert from an underground pipe. The mine lay dormant for a decade, giving China an opportunity. The Chinese made a very conscious decision to enter that industry. Dan McGrudy was special assistant to President George H.W. Bush and today advises the U.S. government on critical materials. When the Mollicorp mine closed,

he says China was already well on its way to becoming the king of rare earths. There's a point at which the lines cross. The United States production declines, the Chinese production is ramping up. Those lines crossed somewhere around 1986. So how did they pull it off? What were the factors that allowed them to basically take this away from us? Well, the advantage of lower labor costs would be a place to start. Also, environmentally, very almost no environmental

constraints around mining, safety considerations for the miners doing the mining, in huge contrast to the United States. So that translates directly into lower pricing. And lower pricing can push other people out of the market. And that's basically what happened. It's basically what happened. The Chinese also had orders from the top. In a little-noticed speech in 1992, Deng Xiaoping signaled China's intention to corner the market. What exactly did he say? The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths. He actually said that, Deng Xiaoping. Yeah. I think it's fair to say at that point, people in the rest of the world would have been saying, what is he talking about? Just went right over our heads. I think so. Did we just not foresee what they foresaw?

It's extraordinary if they actually foresaw all the uses. Our designers and developers advanced the miniaturized applications for laptops and cell phones while the Chinese were going after the metals and materials out of which these things are actually built. How did they get the know-how? An enormous amount of investment. It's kind of the Chinese moonshot, the moon program. China poured billions into the industry, ignoring the consequences. We obtained this video from a freelance cameraman showing the area near Baotou, China's rare earth capital, where the air, land and water are so saturated with chemical toxins, the Chinese have had to relocate entire villages.

This is one of the few places where rare earths are turned into metals, which are then alloyed or blended into things like permanent magnets. These are magnets that once you magnetize them, they stay that way. Ed Richardson, president of the U.S. Magnetic Materials Association, says the most important use of rare earths is in magnets. Only a small amount can produce magnets able to lift a thousand times their weight. This is a cell phone. He showed us how miniaturized rare earth magnets can be. So I'm going to take it apart layer by layer, and we're going to get to the point where we can actually see the magnets,

the rare earth magnets that are inside them. Oh, let me see this. There's three little magnets in there. Oh, one, two, three. Right. And if you put the paper clip on there, you can see how it sticks. And this little tiny thing is the speaker. Right. And if you put the paper clip on there, you can see how it sticks. And this little tiny thing is the speaker. Right. This is how devices have gotten small, very powerful.

Because the magnets are so powerful, you don't have to use much of it. The U.S. developed this technology, but China bought most of it right out from under us. For instance, in 1995, China bought the biggest American rare earth magnet company, MagnaQuench, which was based in Indiana. When they bought the factory, they now had the patents, they now had the equipment, and they actually had some of the MagnaQuench employees in the United States go to China and teach the people how to make the products. Did we not understand the strategic importance of keeping that industry here?

We didn't get it. And unfortunately, the technology was transferred to China before that technology was appreciated. And now we're seeing so many, for instance, defense systems that are dependent on it. Does that make us dependent on China for our defense systems? We are very dependent on China. We are dependent on China for our defense systems? We are very dependent on China. We are dependent on China for our weaponry. Right. A prime example of that is the new F-35 fighter jet,

the most technologically advanced weapon system in history. Each one contains nearly half a ton of rare earths. Former White House official Dan McGrory says that's just for starters. The guidance systems on weapons systems and Tomahawk cruise missile, any of the smart bombs have rare earths in them, lasers. I'd be hard-pressed to name anything that we consider worth building today and going forward that would not have a rare earth component in it. Because of this, because of the monopoly on rare earths, does China threaten our national security? Unchecked, yes. What finally woke up the U.S. government was an incident at sea in 2010.

A Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coast Guard ship in a territorial dispute. The Japanese seized the boat's captain, and two weeks later, China stopped shipping rare earths to Japan. The Chinese cut them off, and for 30 to 40 days, the rare earths did not flow to Japan. So it was a real shot across the bow to the Japanese that this is something that you have to be worried with. It was a wake-up call. Finally, 20 years after Deng Xiaoping's speech, rare earths were on the U.S. radar screen. This case involves something called rare earth materials. President Obama announced a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization against China for creating shortages for foreign buyers. And last August, the WTO ruled against Beijing. No one in the Obama administration would talk to us on camera about rare earths and our dependence on China, including the Department of Energy, the Pentagon, or the U.S. Trade Representative.

Even the private sector didn't want to discuss the problem. We tried to get interviews with heads of companies that use the magnets and other products coming out of China, and they would not talk to us. Is there fear in high-tech companies that if they say something negative, maybe China won't sell them what they need? I think that there is grave concern in these companies, but perhaps not a willingness to talk about that on the street corner. So what is the U.S. doing to restore the industry here? Out in California, Mollicorp was allowed to reopen

after it developed new technology that protects the environment. But even when it's at full capacity, the mine will only produce a fraction of the world's supply of rare earths. The Pentagon has begun stockpiling rare earths, and industry is researching new technologies that would replace them. Do you get any help from the U.S. government? They want to have a rare earth industry here. Encouragement, yeah.

Encouragement. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. The government is not offering incentives, like breaks or subsidies that would lure businesses into the market. What needs to change to bring more of the industry back to the United States? Well, first of all, we need to take a long-term view. It took 20 years to lose the dominant position at least 20 years, and it's probably going to take us 10, 15 years,

if we execute, for some of these supply chains to start coming back. But trouble is once again looming for the U.S. rare earth industry. Since restarting operations two years ago, Mollicorp's Mountain Pass mine has yet to turn a profit and is so deeply in debt that just last week its own auditor warned it may not be able to stay in business. Forty-five years ago, astronauts landed on the moon and space travel captured the country's imagination. But NASA isn't launching astronauts anymore, and America's fascination with space has come down to Earth.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a one-man mission to change that. He wants to get people so interested in the universe that they look up every time they go out. Tyson is reigniting a fascination for the great beyond. He succeeded Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating scientific communicator. Here's something you haven't seen before, an astrophysicist on stage in a sold-out auditorium. His following has grown as he has mastered many mediums, including television, Twitter, and radio. The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

We caught up with him in Seattle, where he said a cosmic perspective could improve life on Earth. We in astrophysics, we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective, you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, stop, look at the universe. So you've become a superstar of the universe. The status that you refer to is, I'm shocked by it every day.

Just every day. Every day I wake up and I look at my Twitter feed. Two million, by the way. Two and a half million. Two and a half. Two and a half million. I'm thinking, I need to remind these people, hey, look, I'm an astrophysicist. Did I tell you that? There's still time to back out. But for me as an educator and as a scientist, what it tells me is that there really is an underserved curiosity in adults.

To spark that curiosity, he told us this is the most mind-altering picture ever taken, shot 46 years ago from Apollo 8 while orbiting the moon. This was the first time any of us had seen Earth the way nature had intended, with oceans and land and clouds. So many of us had only ever seen Earth on a schoolroom globe. And so this is the birth of a cosmic perspective. And that idea should change our world. Back then, that idea did change our world. Earth Day was founded.

Leaded gas was banned. DDT was banned. All of a sudden, people were thinking about Earth as a world, that we're all in it together. We're thinking we're exploring the moon, and we discovered the Earth for the first time. He's the head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and lives in the city with his wife and two children. Tyson received his doctorate from Columbia. He says there are so few astrophysicists that there are literally one in a million.

Please tell me what is an astrophysicist? In astrophysics, we care about how matter, motion, and energy manifest in objects and phenomenon in the universe. Stars are born, they live out their lives, they die. Some of the ones that die explode. Our sun will not be one of those, but it will die and it'll take Earth with us. So we make sure we have other destinations in mind when that happens. And I've got it on my calendar. When is this going to happen? Because I want to make plans. In about five billion years. And so we probably have other issues to concern ourselves with for our survival between now and then. You said, I am, we are stardust. Yes.

What does that mean? For me, the most astonishing fact is that the molecules that comprise our body are traceable, are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars that manufactured these elements from lighter versions of themselves and then exploded, scattering this enrichment across the galaxy into gas clouds that would later collapse to form next generation star systems. One of those star systems was ours. These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And we are not only figuratively, but literally stardust. Tyson became most widely known hosting the television series Cosmos. When we try to look even farther into the universe,

we come to what appears to be the end of space. But actually, it's the beginning of time. Fans line up down the block to watch him record his radio show, StarTalk. The sun keeps all the planets on their appointed orbits, yet somehow manages to ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the world to do. Galileo. StarTalk Radio. Thank you.

Next month, Star Talk Radio will also become a weekly cable television show. He is not in movies yet, but he becomes a movie critic when he spots a scene that's supposed to be scientifically accurate, but isn't. You saw the movie Titanic. Yes. And it was a scene in which they're looking up at the stars and you see it. It wasn't just a scene. The ship is sinking at a longitude, latitude, time, date. We know and there's only one sky should have been over that sinking ship. And it wasn't.

It was the wrong sky. But it was not only the wrong sky, they like made it up. And the left half of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right. So it's not only the wrong sky, it was a lazy sky. It's a movie. You really want to take me there? You want to say it again? Let me hear it. It's a movie.

Okay. They found the Titanic. They photographed the Titanic. They knew what the state ruins looked like and the China patterns. So they set the standard. They required of me that I analyze it at that level. Instead of the fake sky, Tyson said the real sky would have looked like this. So in a later release, director James Cameron changed the sky to Tyson's specifications.

Over there is the... And as for what's falling from the sky, he showed me a piece of an asteroid that he keeps in his office. And this is a rock from space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can feel just the weight of this thing. And this was part of a much larger asteroid that collided with Earth about 50,000 years ago. And so now imagine this about a million times larger going 40,000 miles an hour colliding with Earth. And you get a sense of the energy of what is out there. And that Earth is in a shooting gallery. This is why we have to worry about asteroids. I should think so.

Tyson first became interested in the stars staring up at them from the roof of his apartment building. Now his playground is the Hayden Planetarium. The Milky Way is actually visible behind me here. This is the planetarium that changed his life when he was just nine years old. You'd seen the sky from your rooftop. From my roof in the Bronx, and I saw all dozen stars that are visible. On a good night, maybe 14 stars, and I come in here, and then they dim the light, and I said, wow. And it was the universe.

When you walked out of this planetarium, I mean, were you a different person because you were overwhelmed by the experience? You put your finger on it. I spent my entire life never knowing that such a sky existed. And then to be struck by it, to be star struck by it. And after that day, I said, I want to learn more about it. Children keep changing their minds about what they want to be. But Tyson stuck with the stars. And if you ask me, as a kid at age 11, that annoying question that adults always ask kids,

what is it? What do you want to do when you grow up? What do you want to do when you grow up? I would say astrophysicist. And that pretty much shut everybody up in the room. The universe is so amazing and so limitless. And who wouldn't want to study the universe? What was so amazing?

The endless frontier of it all. The vastness of it. The mystery of it. But Tyson had to fight societal stereotypes to reach his goal. Because he is black, he said, teachers pushed him towards athletics, not astrophysics, which he called the path of most resistance. When I needed to overcome the low expectations of others or the bias that would be expressed in one circumstance or another, I'd keep on keeping on. And I'd climb

over the obstacle, go around it, dig under it, fly over it. That's what kept me going. Otherwise, I would have never been an astrophysicist. At age 56, Tyson is still starstruck by both the sky and the planetarium that brought it to life. So imprinted was I by that sky that to this day, I go to mountaintops where the finest observatories in the world are located. And I say to myself, that reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. And when you walk outside, wherever you are, do you look up every time you walk outdoors? Anytime I exit a building, I look up. I can tell you that kids, kids will look up when they come out and adults just stop. They've, you know, we stopped catching snowflakes in our mouth. We stop jumping into puddles. And I don't want to ever lose that. In life and in the universe, it's always best to keep looking up.

Uplifting and upbeat, he is as ebullient backstage as he is on it. Everyone should, their mind should be blown at least once a day. We're moments away from opening the house, which is a half-hour call to the top of the show. I am ready. The ceiling has spoken. He relates easily to everybody. Watch how he connected to this questioner. I saw you a couple of years ago in Houston.

Houston, the first word ever spoken from the surface of the moon. And, uh, yeah. the first word ever spoken from the surface of the moon. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed. But Tyson upset a lot of people when he argued, in part, that Pluto was too small and insignificant to qualify as a planet, despite what we'd learned in school. I didn't kill Pluto, but I was an accessory. Yeah, you were complicit. No, I was, yeah, I drove the getaway car, perhaps. That's all I'll admit to.

He got hate mail from elementary school students, including this letter he read during his performance in Seattle. Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist, then they don't have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive, because I can't read cursive. His big finish is often this picture of Earth, taken from the Cassini spacecraft,

showing Earth as a tiny dot under Saturn's rings. Carl Sagan would ultimately write a book called The Pale Blue Dot, where he waxed poetic about its meaning and significance. I want to end the recitation from the book of Carl. If you look at Earth

from space, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Thank you all. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. I'm Jane Pauley. Listen up every Monday. Tune into our Sunday morning podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation, and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more, along with features that make you smile, because there's always

something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday morning podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.