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" Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out. "

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" When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there's nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy. "

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Plan

Solution

" I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?' "

" No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we're not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one! "

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Life

Think

" It's actually the minority of religious people who rejects science or feel threatened by it or want to sort of undo or restrict the... where science can go. The rest, you know, are just fine with science. And it has been that way ever since the beginning. "

" I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all. "

" Perhaps we've never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there's no sign of intelligent life. "

" Many academicians don't even own a television, much less watch one. "

" Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators. "

" I like to believe that science is becoming mainstream. It should have never been something that sort of geeky people do and no one else thinks about. Whether or not, it will always be what geeky people do. It should, as a minimum, be what everybody thinks about because science is all around us. "

" The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don't-want-to-die argument. "

" Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets. "

" Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached. "

" When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for animal researchers is to come up with tests that can distinguish between the two. "

" Asteroids 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. "

" 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. "

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Important

Facts

" When you put money directly to a problem, it makes a good headline. It makes a good campaign slogan. You get to claim that you've engaged in these activities within an election cycle. But certain investments take longer than an election cycle. "

" 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. "

" I've known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, 'Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?' I would say, 'Astrophysicist.' And then they'd walk away real quickly. "

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Long

Universe

" 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. "

" There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things. "

" I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that's how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn't treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. "

" 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. "

" I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought. "

" Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives. "

" You have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not. And I don't mind if you're not scientifically literate, but just admit that to yourself, so that you'll know, and perhaps you can take a first step to try to eradicate that. "

" Even 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. "

" There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, 'I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let's go test that prediction,' and have the prediction be correct. "