I try to speak plainly and be sympathetic to the idea of religions where people gather in community. They get a sense of people looking out for each other. My claim is that we have a tendency to look out for each other whether or not there is a religion involved.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.

Talk about science with everyone you meet. Especially talk about climate change. It needs to become a part of our everyday conversation (the way it is everywhere else in the world).

The future of commerce is going to be all electronic. The gold standard was a fine idea, but electronic changes of funds and credits will be the future.

For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.