When you're advancing a frontier it stimulates creativity to find solutions.

Science is not just a topic we can step around or ignore.

Here's the problem, when you're stargazing on a mountain top you are partially oxygen-deprived and you're in command of million dollars worth of hardware. So as much as I would like to sip wine under the stars, it's contraindicated in the instructions on operating telescopes.

It would be amazing if something completely spiritual sounding happened. Oh, my gosh! We'd be all over it. Because it's something new about the physical universe.

If NASA were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you've never seen before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You get to Mars...well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can we use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.