Real space movies have to involve zero gravity and a world without up or down.

It is true that, with TV, a writer gets a great deal more respect.

Everything I learn about the world, whether it's the simple arcana of how commercial products are manufactured and designed and how they reach our shelves and where the chips come from and who does the code, to more profound things like whether or not a black hole might be penetrable as a wormhole, whether or not universes might be accessible from here, whether space can be stretched and compressed to enable faster-than-light travel without violating physical law - all of those things have tremendous story potential.

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.

Real vectoring in space, real orbital mechanics, is very counterintuitive, very strange, and very hard to render. It's expensive, and there's a learning curve. Some of it is about raising audience literacy to the point where they understand that.

I will never probably have the mathematical foundation to truly understand what string theorists are talking about, but it feels good, just for its own sake, to get as close to an understanding as you can.

Making the right choices on the worlds we explore is going to be our biggest challenge.