It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us - but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War.

There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.