There is a major problem of unsustainability of our environment, and we're seeing it in our natural resources, peak oil is probably upon us, and it can't be sustained. We're on an unsustainable path, and at this point in history we are responsible for that. We're going to have to change our ways. We're going to have to think through this problem.

To kill a citizen of our own country is evil, but to kill a citizen of another country is 'good.'

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.

I think our science is a marvelous tool. Of course it has its politics, its failings, its mistakes, like all other human endeavors, but I think the methodology of our science - using it to postulate and to use the proper approach of creating falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them to see if they ring true, and then progressing by finding the anomalies to our theoretical structure, and then improving our theoretical structure to take care and test the anomalies - is the way to go, because that helps us discover what the universe.is all about and our relationship to it.

You get out there in space and say to yourself: that's home. That's the only home we have, and the only one we're going to have for a long time

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

The Big Bang has gone away, but as far as Super String, that is suspicious for me. It all starts out with the notion of Big Bang, which if it were true, starts out with incredibly high temperatures. So they think [we] need to get these high temperatures for this broken symmetry; all this broken symmetry reunited, and we do not have enough energy in the whole galaxy to get to those temperatures, to prove their point. To me, that is the single flaw in Super String theory.