People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

We still don't know for sure what the trigger was, but since we've discovered meteorites with supernova dust, we do know that a violent explosion rocked our cosmic neighborhood at the time of our birth, and it's quite possible that without it, our stable, stately solar system would never exist at all.

I've found that no one complains about pop culture being a source of someone lecturing to them. If someone's telling you about Kim Kardashian, you're not going to accuse them of lecturing to you. If I can explore an intersection between pop culture and science literacy, then it generally will not come across as a lecture.

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

If you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you're not hanging around enough people smarter than you.

Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

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.