Neil deGrasse
Neil deGrasse
moon space community
There's an old saying in the space community: 'If God wanted us to be a spacefaring species, he would have given us a moon'.
mean space orbit
When NASA says they're going into space, they don't mean up and back. They mean orbit.
moving years earth
The chunks of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were so large, and were moving so fast, that each hit Jupiter with at least the equivalent energy of the dinosaur-killing collision between Earth and an asteroid 65 million years ago. Whatever damage Jupiter sustained, one thing is for sure: it's got no dinosaurs left.
vacation two numbers
The number of people in the world engaged in this search for catastrophic impactors totals one or two dozen. How long into the future are you willing to protect Homo sapiens on Earth? Before you answer that question, take a detour to Arizona's Meteor Crater during your next vacation.
years world earth
But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world.
knowing people feelings
There's the anti-intellectual movement in society and I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way because we all know people, I have many colleagues where you try to hang out with them and they make you feel bad for not knowing what they know. If that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that.
daughter texting potassium
Evidence my 14yr old daughter is geek-literate: In lieu of OK, one might type K while texting. She instead typed "Potassium".
science past religion
The past is another planet.
science blind-spots faithful
Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.
get-well vacation sick
Everybody's got money for vacation time. Look at how much we all spend just to get - well, I get sick on the loop-the-loop roller coasters. People pay money for that kind of experience. So I would certainly save up money, save several vacations worth of money, to go on a suborbital flight or any rocket flights.
inspirational motivational fitness
Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp.
inspirational motivational fuel
If aliens did visit us, I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy.
long environmental mars
Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.
thinking space people
Space is the ultimate frontier. I think when people historically thought of the frontier, there was where you were living and then there was some edge beyond which no one had explored.