Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom.

But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.