01c. 1958 ADThe urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
02c. 1958 ADThere 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
03c. 1958 ADSpace enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
04c. 1958 ADIf you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
05c. 1958 ADI claim that space is part of our culture. You've heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don't believe that for a minute.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
06c. 1958 ADThe partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
07c. 1958 ADSpace in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
08c. 1958 ADAs a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
09c. 1958 ADAsteroids 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
10c. 1958 ADIf the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
11c. 1958 ADPrivate enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It's not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
12c. 1958 ADWhether or not people go into space or serve the space industry, they will have the sensitivity to those fields necessary to stimulate unending innovation in the technological fields, and it's that innovation in the 21st century that will drive tomorrow's economies.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
13c. 1958 ADI was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
14c. 1958 ADThere 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
15c. 1958 ADThere's a lot to do in space. I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
16c. 1958 ADComputers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
17c. 1958 ADI'm not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist. It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don't shoulder lightly.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
18c. 1958 ADThe caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That's just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don't wait until they're dead.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
19c. 1958 ADEven 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
20c. 1958 ADThe very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
21c. 1958 ADOnce you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
22c. 1958 ADThere 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.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
24c. 1958 ADScience literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow.Neil deGrasse Tyson / quote ↗
