Neil deGrasse
Neil deGrasse
tombstone airplane asteroids
The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'
dark law four
In terms of the most astonishing fact about which we know nothing, there is dark matter and dark energy. We don't know what either of them is. Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe. That's stunning.
moon adjectives inches
The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It's a slightly bigger moon; I ain't using the adjective 'supermoon.'
venus way eclipse
The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.
bad-ass two space
'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.
volunteer people feels
I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.
bad-ass ideas space
Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
teacher hate school
I knew Pluto was popular among elementary schoolkids, but I had no idea they would mobilize into a 'Save Pluto' campaign. I now have a drawer full of hate letters from hundreds of elementary schoolchildren (with supportive cover letters from their science teachers) pleading with me to reverse my stance on Pluto. The file includes a photograph of the entire third grade of a school posing on their front steps and holding up a banner proclaiming, 'Dr. Tyson - Pluto is a Planet!'
two funny-graduation want
I don't want to die ... I don't want to die poor. Two great motivators in the history of human cultures.
nice thinking eggs
It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.
math mind-blowing cosmos
Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.
running mind-blowing eras
With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos.
light green-plants mind-blowing
Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun's green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.
moon views mind-blowing
Next time you're stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.