Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot.
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Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.
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Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
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Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.
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Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'
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The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.
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If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.
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If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise. Because the space frontier is dangerous, and it's expensive, and it has unquantified risks. And under those conditions, you cannot establish a capital-market evaluation of that enterprise. You can't get investors.
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One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
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The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.
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You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?
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I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'
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Let me tell you something about full moons: kids don't care about full moons. They'll play in a full moon, no worries at all. They only get scared of magic or werewolves from stupid adults and their stupid adult stories.
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All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.
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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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We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'
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Just think for how long humanity was controlled by mystical, magical thinking - the diseases and suffering that led to. We managed to survive, but just barely. It wasn't pretty.
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Words that make questions may not be questions at all.
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I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.
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I like to believe that science is becoming mainstream. It should have never been something that sort of geeky people do and no one else thinks about. Whether or not, it will always be what geeky people do. It should, as a minimum, be what everybody thinks about because science is all around us.
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The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.
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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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In all civilizations we've studied, all cultures that we know of across the Earth and across time have invested some kind of attempt to understanding where where, where they come from, and where they are going.
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Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.