Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes About Today
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When NASA makes discoveries they are profound and they make headlines, everyone takes notice. It drives dialogue and, today, it would drive the blogosphere. It would drive the projects the kids do in school. So you wouldn't even need programs to try and stimulate curiosity. You wouldn't need programs to try to convince people that science literacy is good. Because they're going to want to participate on this epic adventure that we call space exploration.
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Our history, in the cosmos and on planet Earth, was shaped by countless events, some obviously epic, some seemingly trivial, yet all vital in getting us to this point, here and now, the people we are today.
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Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.
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Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.
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While we may lose track of certain goals intermittently throughout the decades, I think we as a nation can be nimble when we need to be. All the buzz today is on the need for science literacy. That is on the agenda in ways it hasn't been in previous decades.
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When you advance a frontier and you do tomorrow what's never been done today, you have to innovate to make that happen. You become an innovation culture. When I grew up, every time I turned around it was, "Oh, here's the longest bridge or the deepest tunnel or the fastest airplane." And I originally thought that was just kind of like a pissing contest with men with too much testosterone. And then I realized that to make the tallest building you have to innovate. To make the fastest train you have to design the train in a way that it's never been designed before.
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Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today.
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For me, one of the most fertile consequences of the space program is the extent to which it stimulates people to innovate because they want to create a different tomorrow than what they're living in today. And it's that culture of innovation that spawns entirely new economies.
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Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Long ago Mars was an oasis of running water.Today the Martiansurfaceis a sterile,barren desert. Here on Earth, who knows what climactic knobs we unwittingly turn,which might one day render Earth as dry and lifeless as Mars. (From the cover of Old Poison by Joan Francis)
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Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not.
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Today, in this, the 21st century, bedtime doesn't matter at all. All that matters is what you set for your DVR.
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Going into orbit around Earth - where the space station is today, and where the space shuttles and John Glenn and all those folks go-that's three-eighths of an inch above a schoolroom globe, just FYI. That's not very far from Earth. Yes, you are off Earth, but you're not really going anywhere yet. The moon was the only real destination.
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Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.
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One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.
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Need a distraction today? Not only does 12 + 1 = 11 + 2, but the letters "twelve plus one" rearrange to give you "eleven plus two."
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The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
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For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
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'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.
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Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and all the matter we know today. I know that sounds crazy, but there’s strong observational evidence to support the Big Bang theory. And it includes the amount of helium in the cosmos and the glow of radio waves left over from the explosion.
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Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.
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Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.
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I'm revealing information to people. I'm not creating it. And to the extent that people embrace it, I think they're empowered by it, because any time you have a bigger perspective today than you did yesterday, it's got to be only for the good of your mind, your body, your soul.
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There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?
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