Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
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Innovations in science and technology are the engines of the 21st-century economy; if you care about the wealth and health of your nation tomorrow, then you'd better rethink how you allocate taxes to fund science. The federal budget needs to recognize this.
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I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.
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There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.
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If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.
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Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.
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When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred.
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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.
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I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.
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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.
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Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.
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Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?
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The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.
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To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow - with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present - then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that's where we're headed.
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I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.
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The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there's no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we'll see if we find that.
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People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.
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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.
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I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.
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It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism.
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Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.
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Typically, when you look for role models, you want someone who has your interests and came from the same background. Well, look how restricting that is. What people should do is take role models a la carte. If there's someone whose character you appreciated, you respect that trait.
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Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.
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I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.