The chances that your tombstone will read ‘Killed by Asteroid’ are about the same as they’d be for ‘Killed in Airplane Crash.’
The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don’t expect.
Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do.
You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists – we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth.
Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we’re still at the mercy of nature.
There’s something about witnessing something in the sky that makes people think they’re seeing something unique or special. I don’t really understand the psychology of it, to be honest.
There’s a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.
There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.
I don’t comment on the physics errors of ‘Star Wars,’ all right. I just – you let that one go.
You’ve never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.
In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you’re surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear.
It’s always interesting just to see how the human mind is relating to the natural universe, and what we try to make of it just so we can believe we understand what’s going on.
We live on this speck called Earth – think about what you might do, today or tomorrow – and make the most of it.
The idea that science is just some luxury that you’ll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself.
You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.
The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
It may be that our cosmic curiosity… is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
I’m often asked – and occasionally in an accusatory way – ‘Are you atheist?’ And it’s like, ‘You know, the only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist, all right?’ I don’t associate with movements. I’m not an ‘ism.’ I just – I think for myself.
It’s the great tragedy – people employed in ways that don’t fully tap everything they do best in life.
In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.
I don’t know anybody who said, ‘I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,’ or ‘Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.’ That’s not what people want to talk about. It’s not what influences people in one profession or another.
Being at the top of your game intellectually, philosophically, politically, is not a forever thing.
For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.
Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It’s not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.
It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.
There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.
Fortunately, there’s another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward – as an investment in our economy.
It’s part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.
‘Cosmos’ wouldn’t deserve its place in primetime evening network television were it not a landscape on which compelling stories were told. People, when they watch TV in the evening, want to see stories, and science simply tells the best stories.
No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we’re not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!
The center line of science literacy – which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point – is how you think.
Where there’s water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it’s bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology.
There’s a lot to do in space. I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.
You have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not. And I don’t mind if you’re not scientifically literate, but just admit that to yourself, so that you’ll know, and perhaps you can take a first step to try to eradicate that.
If we find life out there, and it’s not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that’s vastly more intelligent than we are. If that’s the case, we are putty in their hands.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don’t need justification.
I said that if an alien came to visit, I’d be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They’d be like, ‘What?’
Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.
Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
Fortunately, there’s another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward – as an investment in our economy.
I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don’t understand how science works. That’s what I claim. And if they did, they’d be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.
I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.
The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don’t-want-to-die argument.
All of the full moons for the entire year are special in that they have particular names.
