Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.

Here's what I'm wondering: if, digitally, you can remove red-eye, smooth over wrinkles, make people look thinner, then why don't we have the technology to make me sing better?

You get to say that the Earth is flat because we live in a country that guarantees your free speech. But it's not a country that guarantees that anything you say is correct.

Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun.

If Neptune were analogized with a Chevy Impala in mass, then how big is pluto compared to that? Pluto would be a matchbox car sitting on the curb.