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" It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Up
Curiosity
Force
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" It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Long
Discipline
Data
" 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. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Risk
Try
Space
" I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science
Understand
Claim
" I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Know
Love
People
" Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
World
Children
Curious
" Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they're on an unemployment line and can't feed their families. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Need
Political
People
" I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Tree
Think
Life
" We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Universe
Accounting
Gravity
" 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. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Care
Magic
Me
" The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Problem
Go
People
" In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You
Nature
Science
" Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Thoughts
People
Way
" Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Path
Ideas
Focus
" Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Know
Earth
Bad
" For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People
Myself
Me
" 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. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Night
Universe
Sun
" We live on this speck called Earth - think about what you might do, today or tomorrow - and make the most of it. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Earth
Live
You
" Do 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
Space
Fall
Black
" The first colony on Mars is not going to be built by a private company. How are you going to make money? You're not. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You
First
Money
" 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. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Government
Risks
Space
" If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Mystery
Conversation
God
" In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Bigger
City
Moon
" If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Life
Been
Making
" The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Solar
New
Need
" I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Driving
Night
Time
" Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Day
Curiosity
Me
" When Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the moon,' we didn't yet have a vehicle that wouldn't kill you on launch. He said we'll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Moon
Goal
American
" When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Budget
Promises
Problem
" You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Perspective
War
You
" You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won't. Especially not astrophysicists - we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Earth
Battle
You