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Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.
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I don't comment on the physics errors of 'Star Wars,' all right. I just - you let that one go.
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There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.
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There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.
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Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
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NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.
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Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story.
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The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.
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Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
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If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.