We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.

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

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars.... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.