So much of what we understand comes from knowing what something is and what that something used to be, which allows us to figure out, or at least imagine, what happened in between.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Most science fiction is about tomorrow, a tomorrow brought to you by innovations in science and technology, and China was worried that if they just have everybody learning what is, they're not going to be in a position to invent a tomorrow because their brain isn't even wired to go in that direction.

If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.

While we may lose track of certain goals intermittently throughout the decades, I think we as a nation can be nimble when we need to be. All the buzz today is on the need for science literacy. That is on the agenda in ways it hasn't been in previous decades.

One of the most significant events in our distant past is still perhaps the greatest mystery: the origins of life itself.

We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.