We have to learn that service to the greater good is the greatest satisfaction. That idea is at the basis of all the great traditions dating back into history. When you get inside yourself - and you really find that deep inner peace that's rooted in love - then you can't live a life that we see being manifested in the large parts of the world right now.

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

I think it laughable, frankly, that the physics community comes up with a theory for everything. There isn't one theory for everything. There is not one explanation. We may eventually have several theories that can tie things together nicely but there is not a single theory of everything.

It's rather clear that we've got to do something differently â€" and going into space and learning to utilize these resources, to think differently about ourselves, is vital right now.

I have trust that we humans can resolve the problems that we have created. There is a Sanskrit saying that I subscribe to and I like very much, that "God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in the animals, and thinks in Man."

It's been written about as "the overview effect." All I can give you is my perspective, but most all of the people who have been in space start to see the world without boundaries. You start to think about how we can keep doing these things we're doing that are destructive of the environment and destructive of the planet. It causes you to start to think things in a quite different way than we had before.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.