Feeling a little small? Well, in the context of the cosmos, we are small.

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

Politics will take whatever shape it needs for people to get elected. But at the end of the day, the population remains and that's really, as an educator, who I care about.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He'll go far.

We're talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe.