There's no denying the public's appetite for cosmic discovery.

The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'

It seems that we're better at finding someone to blame for our problems than we are at finding creative solutions to fix them.

On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.

Who knows how dead Lazarus was? Was Lazarus decomposing in a six-foot grave when Jesus resurrected him? No, he wasn't.

Newton came up with Newton's laws of motion and gravity. They worked. They were working.

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.