If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.

If you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you're not hanging around enough people smarter than you.

I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.

Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.

If our solar system is not unusual, then there are so many planets in the universe that, for example, they outnumber the sum of all sounds and words ever uttered by every human who has ever lived. To declare that Earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably bigheaded of us.