If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you’ve got to send humans.
The cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture.
When Kennedy said, ‘Let’s go to the moon,’ we didn’t yet have a vehicle that wouldn’t kill you on launch. He said we’ll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people.
Scientists in different disciplines don’t speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It’s like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.
In all civilizations we’ve studied, all cultures that we know of across the Earth and across time have invested some kind of attempt to understanding where where, where they come from, and where they are going.
The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.
When you put money directly to a problem, it makes a good headline. It makes a good campaign slogan. You get to claim that you’ve engaged in these activities within an election cycle. But certain investments take longer than an election cycle.
I’m constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page – I didn’t create the Wiki page, others did, and I’m flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it – and it said, ‘Neil deGrasse is an atheist.’
Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they’ve beaten our top human chess champions.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they’re the center of everything ends up shrinking.
If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.
While I’m a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it’s the real universe that calls to me.
With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, ‘Oh, let’s build a robot’ and what’s the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That’s so 1950s. We are so past that.
People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.
One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn’t matter where you were born, and it doesn’t matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you’ll get the same result.
Innovations in science and technology are the engines of the 21st-century economy; if you care about the wealth and health of your nation tomorrow, then you’d better rethink how you allocate taxes to fund science. The federal budget needs to recognize this.
I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about.
Pluto’s orbit is so elongated that it crosses the orbit of another planet. Now that’s… you’ve got no business doing that if you want to call yourself a planet. Come on, now! There’s something especially transgressive about that.
As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!
We define ourselves as intelligent. That’s odd, because we’re doing the definition – We’re creating our own definition and saying, ‘We are intelligent!’
I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours.
Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they’re on an unemployment line and can’t feed their families.
Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
‘Boldly going where hundreds have gone before’ does not make headlines.
I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don’t know.
Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.
The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It’s a slightly bigger moon; I ain’t using the adjective ‘supermoon.’
I don’t want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We’d be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.
I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.
I’m perennially intrigued how people who lead largely evidence-based lives can, in a belief-based part of their mind, be certain that an invisible, divine entity created an entire universe just for us, or that the government is stockpiling space aliens in a secret desert location.
In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It’s called the moon illusion.
The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there’s no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we’ll see if we find that.
All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.
Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids’ creativity.
If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we’re tackling these mysteries one by one. If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.
Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I’m merely revealing that fact. I don’t think I’m anything special for this to happen.
I’ve been a minimalist my whole life, even if you wouldn’t know it from my office.
The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.
Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I’m a scientist. But I can tell you, I’m not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It’s a slightly bigger moon; I ain’t using the adjective ‘supermoon.’
The problem is not scientifically illiterate kids; it is scientifically illiterate adults. Kids are born curious about the natural world. They are always turning over rocks, jumping with two feet into mud puddles and playing with the tablecloth and fine china.
All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had.
Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large.
For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.
It’s actually the minority of religious people who rejects science or feel threatened by it or want to sort of undo or restrict the… where science can go. The rest, you know, are just fine with science. And it has been that way ever since the beginning.
Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
Just think for how long humanity was controlled by mystical, magical thinking – the diseases and suffering that led to. We managed to survive, but just barely. It wasn’t pretty.
With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, ‘Oh, let’s build a robot’ and what’s the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That’s so 1950s. We are so past that.
In science, if you don’t do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn’t compose the ‘Ninth Symphony,’ no one else before or after is going to compose the ‘Ninth Symphony’ that he composed; no one else is going to paint ‘Starry Night’ by van Gogh.
