Quote collection
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"I'd like - inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization."
"The miniaturization of electronics, which ultimately was driven by the marketplace, was started by NASA, because it costs money to get something into orbit. So you want to trim your electronics, miniaturize your electronics, miniaturize your satellites."
"For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains."
"When you are a hammer, all of your problems will look like nails to you."
"If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians."
"It's a weird state to be in to go to the Bible and try to invoke science, right?"
"The cosmic calendar is quite a fertile mode for communicating how small we are over time and space."
"We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology."
"Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not."
"Nature is not here to keep you alive. It has just as many ways to kill you as it does to sustain you. And if you cherry-pick this fact, you are left thinking that earth is some haven for life, but 96, 97 percent of all species that ever lived on earth are now extinct from the actions of the earth itself and an occasional asteroid to stir the pot."
"Scientific truth is not what any one scientist puts forth. It can be that, but it is generally not. It is the sum of multiple studies that all lean in the same direction in their results conducted by different people at different times of different nationalities with different competitive urges who all end up getting the same result. Then you have an emerging scientific truth, and then you put that in the textbooks, and that will never be shown to be wrong later on."
"If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist."
"You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows."
"Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do."
"The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end."
"All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet."
"There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe."
"The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps."
"I've accomplished enough in life so that I do not fear death."
"Curiosity is a self-driven motivation to explore and to learn. Learning is like... you know, you have to take your medicine. And that is what it has become. And that's unfortunate."