The universe's destiny has very little to do with the near-term destiny of Earth.

When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

WhenIWasYourAge: We had to open all doors by ourselves. None of them knew we were coming.

America has an economy reversing relative to other nations in the world. And I want to turn that around. And one way I know to turn it around is to get everyone excited about what it is to innovate again.

For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.

One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.

When NASA dreams big America dreams big. People...kids say, 'I want to do that when I grow up'. Because you want to do what's visible to you.