We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.

We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.