Nothing is a thing: it's nothing. So I can imagine a place where there's not even nothing.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.

If you're scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you.

If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.

You innovate in ways that stoke your economy. Because innovations in science and technology are the engines of 21st century economies.

We in astrophysics we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, "Stop, look at the universe."

For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.