It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annu­al ques­tion to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2013 edi­tion asks the ques­tion, “What Should We Be Wor­ried About?”. And the replies — 152 in total — fea­ture thoughts by Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb, Daniel Den­nett, Sher­ry Turkle, Lawrence Krauss, and Esther Dyson, plus the ones excerpt­ed below. If you’re will­ing to go down the rab­bit hole, you can access the com­plete col­lec­tion of respons­es here.

What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the fore­sight to face the world’s prob­lems square­ly, but will instead retreat from them into super­sti­tion and igno­rance. Con­sid­er how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being “a Ciceron­ian” rather than a Chris­t­ian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the clas­si­cal authors and to restrict him­self only to Chris­t­ian texts, how the Chris­tians of Alexan­dria mur­dered the philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Hypa­tia in 415, and real­ize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not some­thing imposed from with­out, a break­down of civ­i­liza­tion due to bar­bar­ian inva­sions, but a choice, a turn­ing away from knowl­edge and dis­cov­ery into a kind of reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism. [Read the rest here.]

–Tim O’Reil­ly, Founder and CEO of O’Reil­ly Media, Inc.

Death is what makes this cycli­cal renew­al and steady advance in organ­isms pos­si­ble. Dis­cov­ered by liv­ing things mil­lions of years ago, aging and death per­mit a species to grow and flour­ish. Because nat­ur­al selec­tion ensures that the child-who-sur­vives-to-repro­duce is bet­ter than the par­ent (albeit infin­i­tes­i­mal­ly so, for that is how evo­lu­tion works), it is bet­ter for many species that the par­ent step out of the way and allow its (supe­ri­or) child to suc­ceed in its place.… So impor­tant is death that we have, wired into our genes, a self-destruct senes­cence pro­gram that shuts down oper­a­tions once we have suc­cess­ful­ly repro­duced, so that we even­tu­al­ly die, leav­ing our children—the fresh­er, new­er, shinier ver­sions of ourselves—to car­ry on with the best of what we have giv­en them: the best genes, the best art, and the best ideas. Four bil­lion years of death has served us well. Now, all this may be com­ing to an end, for one of the things we humans, with our evolved intel­li­gence, are work­ing hard at is try­ing to erad­i­cate death.[Read the rest here.]

–Kate Jef­fery, Head, Dept. of Cog­ni­tive, Per­cep­tu­al and Brain Sci­ences, Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege, Lon­don

Most of the smart peo­ple I know want noth­ing to do with pol­i­tics. We avoid it like the plague… Is this because we feel that pol­i­tics isn’t where any­thing sig­nif­i­cant hap­pens? Or because we’re too tak­en up with what we’re doing, be it Quan­tum Physics or Sta­tis­ti­cal Genomics or Gen­er­a­tive Music? Or because we’re too polite to get into argu­ments with peo­ple? …  It’s pol­i­tics that’s bleed­ing the poor­er nations for the debts of their for­mer dic­ta­tors. It’s pol­i­tics that allows spe­cial inter­ests to run the coun­try. It’s pol­i­tics that helped the banks wreck the econ­o­my. It’s pol­i­tics that pro­hibits gay mar­riage and stem cell research but nur­tures Gaza and Guan­tanamo.… What wor­ries me is that while we’re lais­sez-ing, some­one else is faire-ing. [Read the rest here]

–Bri­an Eno, Artist, Com­pos­er, Pro­duc­er

You can dive into the full col­lec­tion at Edge.org. The pho­to above was tak­en by Katin­ka Mat­son.

What­ev­er else it is—mordant self-mock­ery, sum­ma­tion of a life’s work in thought—Friedrich Nietzsche’s last pub­lished book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, is a pro­found­ly Roman­tic text, oper­at­ing on the premise that an indi­vid­ual who suf­fers for phi­los­o­phy, for art, for truth, is hero­ic, even (or espe­cial­ly) when anti-hero­ic, brood­ing, Byron­ic. Niet­zsche states one of the pur­pos­es of his strange lit­tle book as an impre­ca­tion: Hear me! For I am such and such. Above all, do not mis­take me for some­one else!

Over a cen­tu­ry after this work’s pub­li­ca­tion, a cry of pop cul­ture with its love of sim­u­lacra might be: Please mis­take me for some­one else, espe­cial­ly some­one wealthy and famous and pret­ti­er than I am! Maybe this ethos reached its zenith with Facebook’s celebri­ty look-alike day, which inspired a site called myheritage.com to use face recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy for users who didn’t look enough like any­one famous to fig­ure out for them­selves who they want­ed to be. Sil­ly harm­less trend, yes, but a lit­tle sad too, since it shows how many peo­ple suf­fer from a sense that their iden­ti­ties are dwarfed into insignif­i­cance by a famous stranger who slight­ly resem­bles them. (Anoth­er, more humor­ous meme, goes some­thing like “Always be your­self, unless you can be Bat­man. Always be Bat­man”).

I offer these pop-soci­o­log­i­cal rumi­na­tions as con­text for the great Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response above to a ques­tion he receives quite a bit: “What can I do to be you?” On the one hand, it must be very flat­ter­ing to be asked this ques­tion, even though Tyson seems a pret­ty mod­est per­son. On the oth­er hand, the ques­tion is pathet­ic, I believe, for the rea­sons I sketched out above. Why be Neil deGrasse Tyson when you can be your­self? Unless you don’t believe you’re worth becom­ing. Tyson’s answer is also Roman­tic; he says, “I think the great­est of peo­ple in soci­ety carve nich­es that rep­re­sent a unique expres­sion of their com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents.” For Tyson that has meant tak­ing a set of aca­d­e­m­ic and career accom­plish­ments and using them as a plat­form for express­ing a com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents that only he has, which is to say that no one can be Neil deGrasse Tyson but Neil deGrasse Tyson. He uses the exam­ple of Michael Jor­dan, who honed his supe­ri­or tal­ent from nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, for sure, but who also cre­at­ed his own cat­e­go­ry through a tal­ent for being him­self, a com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al style, win­ning per­son­al­i­ty, lead­er­ship qual­i­ties, etc.

So what are we to con­clude from this?  Always be your­self, unless you can be Michael Jor­dan? Well, I think the gist of Tyson’s short talk is that there is no default or tem­plate for what you can become, or as he puts it, “what I do day-to-day is not the ful­fill­ment of some pre-exist­ing job descrip­tion.” And while “just be your­self” may sound like trite advice to peo­ple strug­gling to find an iden­ti­ty, Tyson sets it out as a task, not a fait accom­pli. “The task,” he says, “is to find the unique com­bi­na­tion of facts that apply to you. Then peo­ple will beat a path to your door.” It’s not a task to take on light­ly, or in Niet­zsche’s hyper­bol­ic words, it is “the heav­i­est demand ever put on mankind.”

The video above is an excerpt from a longer inter­view Neil deGrasse Tyson did for Big Think. The full inter­view is avail­able here.

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.