There’s a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.
The chances that your tombstone will read ‘Killed by Asteroid’ are about the same as they’d be for ‘Killed in Airplane Crash.’
You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.
I’ve accomplished enough in life so that I do not fear death.
Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.
I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.
If the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
I’d rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.
There’s no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher, That might not necessarily be true. That’s never happened. There’re no scientists picketing outside of churches.
We didn’t go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we’re Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.
I don’t even understand why I have 1.7 million Twitter followers. Every day, I want to remind them and say, “Do you realize I’m an astrophysicist? Do you know what you’re doing here?”
As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.
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.
If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.
Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
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.
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.
As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.
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.