Quotes from Chris Impey

Every five minutes, a pair of black holes merges somewhere in the universe, pouring gravitational waves out into space.

Yet even Newton's great intellect did not fully illuminate gravity. He couldn't explain how it operates instantaneously and invisibly across a vacuum. He admitted as much in his masterwork on gravity from 1687, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. He wrote, "I have not been able to discover the causes of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.

Nature guards its secrets zealously, and it takes grit and determination to shed light on them.

The Moon's low gravity and slow rotation mean that a space elevator could be built with materials already available. The honeycomb fiber called M5 is lighter and stronger than Kevlar; a ribbon 3 centimeters wide and 0.02 millimeter thick could support 2,000 kilograms on the lunar surface or 100 climbers with a mass of 600 kilos each, evenly spaced along the ribbon. We could build a lunar elevator right now.

Some cold, hard facts: Cold is more dangerous than heat. Toothpicks are more dangerous than lightning. Pedestrians are more dangerous than fire. Beds are more dangerous than ladders. Snakes are more dangerous than terrorists. Flammable nightwear is more dangerous than a bee sting. Coconuts are more dangerous than sharks.7

Carl Sagan put it best: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.