Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, weve got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, its one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe its countless other universes.

Im 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.

The 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.

There 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.

Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, youve got to send humans.

I claim that space is part of our culture. Youve 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 dont believe that for a minute.

The 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.

Space in general gave us GPS - thats not specifically NASA, but its investments in space.

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because Im a scientist. But I can tell you, Im not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didnt have a space program, so theyre not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I dont 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.

If 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.

Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. Its not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.

Whether 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 its that innovation in the 21st century that will drive tomorrows economies.

I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and thats 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 peoples windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.

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.

Theres 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.

Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, theyve beaten our top human chess champions.

Im 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 dont shoulder lightly.

The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. Thats 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 dont wait until theyre dead.