Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall. And while these rocky runts won't cause Armageddon, they could still flatten such popular hominid hangouts as Manhattan or downtown Des Moines.

What scares me? I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe they can wander around, so that scares me. But the stuff that really scares me are the catastrophic events like my husband or children or my family being harmed, or something like that.

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil.

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.

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

I had finished the first draft of 'Life As We Knew It' before Katrina hit, and it was startling to see things I wrote about actually happening in the real world.

This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

If I don't die in a plane crash or something, this country has a rare opportunity to watch a great talent grow.

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

The fact is that it is reasonable for us to say that there is going to be an emergency that happens in this country that we cannot budget for. Katrina is an example.

If you get rid of emotion for a minute and think about the threat of terrorism statistically, it's not even there. The probability that you will slip on a wet floor in your bathroom and die is a thousand times higher than the probability of you dying as a result of terrorism.

My wife's biggest fear is air pollution, living in London as we do. She's convinced that's the big problem. And my own is sink holes and the inevitability of us all, at some point, collapsing into a sink hole and never being seen again.

What we found out with Katrina is that the country is still unable to deal with disaster. God forbid this happens in San Francisco.

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

While we didn't know the dinosaurs personally, we do know that they were wiped out by an asteroid impact.

Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

Asteroids have hit the Earth millions of times. We can see them as shooting stars every night. When they get bigger, things get complicated. It is only a matter of time until a big one hits us. And since we can do something about it, we should.

Pliny the Elder perished in 79 A.D. when he refused to flee from the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, insisting that everything would be all right. It wasn't.

Fortune cures us of many faults that reason could not.