If aliens did visit us, I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy.

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

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?

After 50 years of television, there's no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.

I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.