Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

Yet every now and then, even a scientist can't help thinking of the Periodic Table as a zoo of one-of-a-kind animals conceived by Dr. Seuss.

We begin with the stars, then ascend up and away out to the galaxy, the universe, and beyond. What did Buzz Lightyear say in Toy Story? "To Infinity and Beyond!" It's a big universe. I

My life is what I make of it.

Instead of the White House, why not take our visiting space alien to ComicCon. We'd have legitimate concerns that nobody would notice an actual alien camouflaged among those pretending to be one. The upside? Our alien visitor phones home and instead reports—"They're just like us!

People who navigate by the stars know that the altitude of Polaris you observe is equal to your latitude on Earth.

The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits space resources on asteroids, on comets...

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. JAMES FERGUSON, 1757†

Between 1 and 10 quadrillion ants live on (and in) Earth

You can picture the universe as an enormous loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven

iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table—two cubic feet of it weighs as much as a Buick, which makes iridium one of the world's best paperweights, able to defy all known office fans.

If you feed a black hole, its event horizon (that boundary beyond which light cannot escape) grows in direct proportion to its mass, which means that as a black hole's mass increases, the average density within its event horizon actually decreases. Meanwhile, as far as we can tell from our equations, the material content of a black hole has collapsed to a single point of near-infinite density at its center.

however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

As a scientist, you must embrace the inconstancy of knowledge.

In the current Christian-based Gregorian calendar the year 1 B.C. was followed by the year A.D. 1—there was no year zero. Century reckoning is therefore shifted by one year. Before

Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve.

In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun's mass.

don't count things, but instead count the ways things can happen.

The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled. After all that, you'd think only one definition for truth should exist in this world, but no.

The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us. That

Merlin prefers to think of space as the regions between all the particles of all the atoms of the universe.

Can space exist in the absence of matter, if matter defines the edge of space?" Merlin