Neil deGrasse Tyson

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.

In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.

A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.

Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they?Nope.That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy.Nope again.High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.

The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree.

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don__ know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer__ system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up__any people feel small, because they__e small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

You could also ask who__ in charge. Lots of people think, well, we__e humans; we__e the most intelligent and accomplished species; we__e in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That__ what__ going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. _ If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can__ help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you__l be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, __on__ you need a vacation?!,_ and you don__ even know what the word __acation_ means because what you__e doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation _ that__ the state of mind of somebody who__ doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.

Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery__he frontier that drives the economies of the future__ould be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.