I see myself in pop culture. I listen to pop music, I do pop things, and I'm also a scientist.

Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

The world, I think, has too many late-night talk shows.

For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.