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Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us.... Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 5
Actor
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Physicist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Teacher
Trekkie
The Bronx
New York City
Neil Tyson
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Anywhere
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Else
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More quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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This universe knows about me and my crops.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.
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The school system is constructed to praise you if you get high grades. And if you get straight A's, you're the one that everyone puts forward, and they prognosticate that the straight-A person is the one most likely to succeed, because that's the way the school system is constructed and conceived.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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When I grew up I assembled my role models à la cart. I wanted to be an astrophysicist. If I tried to find a role model who grew up in the Bronx with my skin color who was an astrophysicist, I would never have become an astrophysicist.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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
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When I would lose matches, I fully respected the person who beat me, because they beat me. I can't blame anybody.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We went to the moon and discovered Earth.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I bet most of the crowd does not know that there are six moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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That is a big question we all have: are we alone in the universe? And exoplanets confirm the suspicion that planets are not rare.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I'm a little fatigued of adults saying we've got to worry about the kids. And these are the same adults that don't know science and are running things and wielding resources and legislation.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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95, 96 percent of all that drives the universe has no known origin.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.
Neil deGrasse Tyson