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Neil deGrasse Tyson is back.
In 2024 we chatted with the gracious celebrity astrophysicist, lecturer, podcaster, and bestselling author regarding “Merlin’s Tour of the Universe,” a revised and updated edition of Tyson’s very first book that was published in 1989 as a collection of Q&A pieces initially appearing as an amusing column in The McDonald Observatory’s StarDate Magazine.
The fictional timeless sorcerer named “Merlin of Omniscia” from the Andromeda galaxy is back to answer a new round of questions in a new companion volume titled “Just Visiting This Planet: Further Scientific Adventures of Merlin From Omniscia” arrives Oct. 21, 2025.
“The takeaway here is that this was the dawn of my scientific and educational career,” Tyson explains to Space.com. “So it was the proving ground for how I would ultimately be bringing science to the public. The methods, tools, and tactics and the personality that I imbued in Merlin were elements that persist within me to this today. In that sense, it was significant in my life, even if to the reader it’s just a collection of cute questions and answers.”
This new mind-expanding 350-page hardback has also been given a refreshed 21st century makeover since it was offered in 1998, and contains a treasure of witty responses to questions posed by the general public on topics such as planets, stars, comets, black holes, moons, galaxies and even superheroes.
“But if you read them, you’ll see they’re doing things that a typical answer wouldn’t do,” he adds. “Today, if you just type a question into ChatGPT it comes back and it’s kind of vacuous, it’s got no soul, no personality. It’s got nothing to pull you back in. And Merlin, with the quirky personality, is intended to be a vehicle to empower people to enjoy the learning, rather than just take it as though you have to take medicine.”
With widespread layoffs and diminished funding currently sweeping the scientific community in nearly every field, “Just Visiting This Planet” and its focus on curiosity and discovery is even more relevant to remind fellow Earthlings of the absolute necessity of science to help advance our species.
“If you give up on science and the moving frontier represented in so many of the places where budgets have been cut, that comes with consequences,” Tyson notes. “People vote into office who they want, and I’m not going to get in the way of that. If the democracy you want is one that is cutting science programs, that will ultimately bite you in the ass.
“Because it’s the science that’s foundational to the innovations that many of us have taken for granted, that comes out of American industries. American industry relies on the foundational science that’s behind it, underneath it, and is supporting it. And you don’t see that because it’s done in labs in universities and it’s done by people who don’t necessarily have YouTube channels.
“This is hardworking researchers exploring the limits of our understanding of their field, and it’s government funded. If the government doesn’t fund it, nobody is going to fund it, because there is no return on the annual report. The research is too far removed from even the R&D that would be conducted by a corporation. Once it’s published and people see it and they figure it out they say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a new understanding of how nature works.’
“Then you have clever engineers coming afterwards saying that they can turn that into a product or make that commercial. That happens way down the line. What it also means is that you’re not in a position to pass judgment on a research project just because the title feels a little remote to you.”
“The fact that we have government officials poring over research paper titles and lording their decision on whether it’s frivolous or not because they can’t imagine how it’s relevant, that will have consequences, as we recede on the frontier of science research and we watch other countries who have re-doubled the role of science in their lives. China especially. We will sink lower before we rise up again and realize the folly of those decisions. Anything that gets people excited about science, that only pays dividends in the future.”
For this revised and updated version of “Just Visiting This Planet,” Tyson carefully curated the questions for a more modern readership used to extracting explanations via the internet.
“So this is 200 more questions drawn from over a thousand. Some questions I removed since you can just Google them now like, ‘How hot is the sun?’, that sort of thing. Then I added other questions that had a little more personality to them. Someone asks, ‘What happens if aliens came and blew up the moon?’ That’s kind of fun. So we can do that in ways that are more fun than ChatGPT will, I assure you. There are many more ‘If, Then’ questions in this book. Plus, my brother, who’s an artist, illustrated it. I’m delighted to declare that fact about it.”
And since this is Halloween season, we’d be remiss if we didn’t ask Tyson about growing up in New York City trick-or-treating in a huge apartment building where he and his friends would score multiple grocery bags of sugared loot. What were his favorite fun-sized candy bars? Milky Way and Mars of course!
“Just Visiting This Planet: Further Scientific Adventures of Merlin From Omniscia” drops into bookstores from Blackstone Publishing on Oct. 21, 2025.
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