As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars.

Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (“cognitive impairment” ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment — the kind most common among poor people in America — can do it.

Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.