Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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I've been a minimalist my whole life, even if you wouldn't know it from my office.
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Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
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People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I'm merely revealing that fact. I don't think I'm anything special for this to happen.
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Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.
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I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.
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I'm optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren't still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you're in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for having done so.
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The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.
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The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.
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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.
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My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.
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There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, 'I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let's go test that prediction,' and have the prediction be correct.
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You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.
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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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People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.
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Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. 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.
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If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something - for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars - I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you.
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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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I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.
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There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.
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While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.
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Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.
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The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites.
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It's the great tragedy - people employed in ways that don't fully tap everything they do best in life.
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It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.