Reddit interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Question: What do you believe will be the biggest technical innovation within the next 20 years and why?
Tyson: These are always hard to predict. Who would have thought 20 years ago that the smart phone would out-perform every handheld device ever portrayed in a science fiction story, even those taking place centuries into our future. With that caveat, I'd say machine-brain implants that connect the internet directly to our neurophysiology. That'll be fun. Perhaps then we can beat Watson on Jeopardy.
Question: If a space traveling entity approached you with an opportunity to visit any celestial object from any distance and allow you bring one scientific instrument of your choosing, where would you go and what would you bring? The size of the instrument does not matter, but keep in mind the farther away your object of choice is, the more it may have changed (i.e. if you hoped to visit the recently discovered supernova SN 2011fe, you would arrive 21 million years after the event).
Tyson: I'd bring my iPhone, as the most compact representation of modern culture there is. And I'd visit a civilization on a galaxy 65 million light years away. Assuming I can get there instantaneously, I would look back to Earth with their presumably super telescopes and witness the extinction of the dinosaurs - the light of which is just now reach them.

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