Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.

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.

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

But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.

The value of science is not simply what the next model of the iPod you will buy next week, but its real value comes about when it's time to distinguish reality from everything else. And to be scientifically literate is to be trained in what it is, to recognize your own frailty as a data-taking device.

I'm not writing for myself. I'm writing as an educator, I'm writing to stimulate others.