By the way, how much does NASA cost? It's half a penny on a dollar. Did you know that? ... The most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing, and that's making dreams come true ... How much would you pay for the universe?

In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear.

I'm often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: "Do you believe in Gravity?"

But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

It could be that these other civilizations, if they are far more advanced intellectually than we are, would not even measure our existence as a blip on the intelligence radar. They could be so advanced that we are to them what worms are to us.

God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.