Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

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.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body...are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Americans live in a free country, which allows you to believe what you want. Because you think that something is true does not require that it is objectively true. The value of science concerning itself with objective truths is that we can make decisions and statements that affect everyone, which is why legislation really should be based on objective truths, not what is going on in your head.