Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a baseball player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than other kids, and if you're bigger than other kids and you're 11 you win everything.

If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.

The only accounting we had of the origins and the structure of nature was Biblical Genesis.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

Next time you're stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.

When provoked, the itsy-bitsy invertebrates known as tardigrades can suspend their metabolism. In that state, they can survive temperatures of... 73 K for days on end, making them hardy enough to endure being stranded on Neptune. So the next time you need space travelers with the right stuff, you might want to choose yeast and tardigrades, and leave your astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts at home.

You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend.