As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

Many people are unhappy because there was some point in their past where there was some glory day, and as they get older they're not creating more glory days. They reflect on a time that they will never reach again, and it brings some level of dissatisfaction into their lives. I have circumvented that by simply making incumbent upon myself to always be productive in ways that are consistent with my physical body, my mental state of knowledge, but more important, my presumed growth in wisdom that would come with age.

If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature.

So much of what we understand comes from knowing what something is and what that something used to be, which allows us to figure out, or at least imagine, what happened in between.

I would rather enlighten the electorate so that when it's time for them to put somebody in Congress, it will be self-evident that they will embrace the message and tools and discovery of science in a way that can transform our culture and even our civilization.

If you seek only easy problems to solve, then ultimately, there'll be nothing about you to distinguish yourself from others.