01c. 1958 ADIf everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, “Don’t you need a vacation?!,” and you don’t even know what the word “vacation” means because what you’re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation — that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
02c. 1958 ADYou could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
03c. 1958 ADSome of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
04c. 1958 ADI look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, 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. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
05c. 1958 ADThe cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
06c. 1958 ADWhen you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
07c. 1958 ADDoing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
08c. 1958 ADWe conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
09c. 1958 ADThe less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
10c. 1958 ADLet's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they?Nope.That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy.Nope again.High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
11c. 1958 ADA bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
12c. 1958 ADIn the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
13c. 1958 ADRobots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
14c. 1958 ADIn some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
15c. 1958 ADIf your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
16c. 1958 ADTypically, 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
18c. 1958 ADIf you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
19c. 1958 ADDo 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?Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
20c. 1958 ADSpace exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
21c. 1958 ADSpace only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
22c. 1958 ADIf 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
23c. 1958 ADPhilosophically, 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
24c. 1958 ADI'm perennially intrigued how people who lead largely evidence-based lives can, in a belief-based part of their mind, be certain that an invisible, divine entity created an entire universe just for us, or that the government is stockpiling space aliens in a secret desert location.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
