The more you learn about the real vastness of space and the real challenges of space travel, the more completely you appreciate the necessity of taking very good care of this world and being good stewards of it.

I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

The reality of space travel I think is somewhere in the middle. We will get there, it will be hard, it will take a long time, and in the end, the most extraordinary thing we will find when we get there will be ourselves.

Once you've written a good script, it will get made or not get made, according to variables you cannot control, like stars getting interested, and the superstitions in Hollywood rising or falling around what is over and done with versus what's in.

You need a human story to intersect those points of interest with real stakes on the line, and then things start to be fun, where you can see the ramifications, you see the impact on people's lives of big changes - like taking a man of science, like a surgeon, and robbing him of his understanding of the universe and forcing him into a newer and wider understanding.

The multiverse as a real physical construct within physics overlapping with a more mystical understanding of many possible worlds - the notion of there being a root down at the quantum level between intention and reality, between consciousness and existence - it's not a matter of trying to explain the mystery of magic away with a pat mechanism of a pseudoscience, it's just a matter of trying to ground it in a domain.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.