Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

The day gets about one second longer every 67,000 years.

If you board an aircraft built according to science—with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong—you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.

In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence. Conditions

And the cosmos ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight.

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees

Neptune, the outermost planet. No, it's not Pluto. Get over it.

While most branches of science have ascended in this era, the field of astrophysics persistently rises to the top. I think I know why. At one time or another every one of us has looked up at the night sky and wondered: What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?

Geek e-mail sign-off: No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

After 7 or 8 billion years of such enrichment, an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born in an undistinguished region (the Orion arm) of an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo supercluster). The gas cloud from which the Sun formed contained a sufficient supply of heavy elements to spawn a few planets, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets.

Celestial happenings, however, don't limit themselves to what's convenient for the human retina.

However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.

The best colleges admit only successful students, offering no evidence the college itself forged the students' late success.

The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

dark matter is our frenemy.

As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master's thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton's math Silently along its path.

If all the molecules on Earth were stacked on each other end-to-end, everything on Earth would die.

That is, cosmic dark matter enjoys about six times the mass of all the visible matter.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us yet we can agree that no amount of tutelage will ever leave a chimp fluent in trigonometry. Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

exploration is hardly ever motivated by the desire to explore. Part the curtains of curiosity, and you'll find individuals hungry for political, cultural, or economic dominion funding the expedition.

Space exploration may pull in the talent, but war pays the bills.

But it doesn't make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.