The StarTalks - while kids can watch them, they're actually targeted at adults. Because adults outnumber kids five to one, and adults vote, and adults wield resources, and adults are heads of agencies. So if we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.

Thomas Jefferson basically secularized Jesus.

There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There's no wild cows... You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection.

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.

With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world

Let's create a World's Fair that captures everybody's visions of tomorrow together and let's celebrate that vision. Let's have articles on it with illustrators imagining how we'd be living differently.

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.