Neil deGrasse Tyson
Perhaps we've never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there's no sign of intelligent life.
If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special', you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.
No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers — poets, actors, journalists — they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.
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.
Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.
Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.
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.
Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy'.
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