This fear factor, this war driver is a very strong one and it's been with the species ever since the beginning and it motivated the Great Wall of China. War can be aggressive or defensive, right? So it motivated the Great Wall of China. Our space program was reactive to Russia.

Thomas Jefferson basically secularized Jesus.

When you innovate no one else can figure out how to do what you're doing because you're too far ahead of them. And the day they do figure out, you're on to the next object, the next widget, the next concept in innovation. And so America has benefited economically from the space race even though it was driven by military.

We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.

Enjoying science shouldn't be rocket science.

Our history, in the cosmos and on planet Earth, was shaped by countless events, some obviously epic, some seemingly trivial, yet all vital in getting us to this point, here and now, the people we are today.

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.