StarTalk Quotes

“it would take much, much less energy to repair our world than for all of us to travel to another one.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“One degree Celsius won’t feel like much on any given day to any given person, but totaled across the globe, it’s enough extra heat energy to power hundreds more hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and blizzards every year.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“The seven largest emitters of fossil fuels—the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, India, and China”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“In Uganda, for example, where abortion is illegal and sex education focuses on abstinence, the abortion rate is more than twice the rate in the United States and four times that of western Europe, where both abortion and contraception are legal and widely available. ■”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“The Sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air. Visible light hits Earth and heats it. Earth reradiates that same energy as infrared, and it’s the infrared that gets trapped by the greenhouse gases.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“It’s not always the smartest person who makes a good astronaut. It’s personality. You need to be able to live with someone for a long time—be unflappable and easy to get along with because you’re confined in a small space for years.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Have more car tunnels, [and you] alleviate congestion completely.” —ELON MUSK,”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“We will have very smart cities by the year 2020…”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Because I wanted to save women when mean people were trying to harm them.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Almost all of the big epidemics that we’ve seen in the last decade-plus have come from fruit bats that normally pollinate the rain forest. And as the rain forest is under stress and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock, and eventually to us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“If you parked next to Arcturus tonight, which is up in our sky, you would be hearing radio broadcasts or TV from 40 years ago,”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“You don’t work anymore 12 hours”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“The Moon’s gravity mattered, too; many biologists hypothesize that tides created ecosystems that continually changed from wet to dry, fostering the evolution of land animals as they transitioned from living in water.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“What’s Joe Rogan’s Big Bang Machine?”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“On the subject of climate change, the data clearly show that Earth is warming up, and that humans are contributing to the warming. That’s the fairest assessment of the evidence.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“If you talk to the big polluters, they’ll tell you that we have to choose between economic prosperity on one hand and environmental protection on the other, and that’s a false choice.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“the balance of carbon in our atmosphere is disrupted when we take carbon from a place where it has been buried for millions of years and introduce it into the stable balance of carbon in our atmosphere today.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Humans, though, have managed to double the carbon dioxide level in less than two centuries—a hundred times faster than it would happen in nature without humanity’s help.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Frozen water is less dense than liquid water…and ice floats. In the winter, the top surface [of a lake] gets cold. The top water will freeze, and not drop, thereby insulating the liquid water below, protecting the fishes through the winter months. It’s a remarkable feature of water.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Parts of Mars’ surface is very close to the triple point of water, when it can be solid, liquid, and steam at the same time.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“you take a swig of water…It contains water molecules that have passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln, of Genghis Khan, of Jesus…”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“JWST will be sensitive to both optical and infrared light. Its adaptive optics will be able to pick out infant galaxies as well as planets orbiting distant stars.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined…It is an ego-dismantling device,”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Twinkling happens when the light from a distant point travels through that atmosphere; its light beam dances ever so slightly in random directions many times—sometimes thousands of times—each second.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“typical human adults constantly experience nearly 20 tons of force on their bodies, just from Earth’s atmosphere!”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“Meteor Crater A 150-foot-wide metallic meteor struck the Mogollon Rim in modern-day Arizona 50,000 years ago, leaving a mile-wide hole that’s 60 stories deep.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“If you can’t have ownership, no one’s going to go out there and extract the materials, and the loser is humanity.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond

“It’s kind of a continuum…We used to think that they were two totally different things, and now we know that there’s a gray area in between…”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond