I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Earth: mostly harmless