Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

The nice thing about asteroids is that once you've found them, and once you have a good solid orbit on them, you can predict a hundred years ahead of time whether there is a likelihood of an impact with Earth.

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.

Asteroid detection, tracking, and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously.

People have to take seriously the threat coming from asteroids and what it represents. As Chelyabinsk reminded us, we have to take asteroids as a serious scientific concern, as well as a concern for protection of mankind and survival of the planet. This is not some kook policy. It's the protection of the interests of every single individual life on this planet.

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.

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.

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

I don't want people to spend their nights worrying about getting hit by asteroids. But I do want them to encourage their political leaders to invest in the insurance, which will allow us to prevent it from happening.

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.

In the short term, some deadly virus might be more important, but in the long run there is hardly anything more important than asteroids.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.

We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.

In so many and such important ways, then, do the planets bear witness to the earth's mobility.

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.

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

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.

Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect.

There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

Space is dark but, of course, when we're on the sun side of the Earth, we're in full illumination and we have all the reflection of the Earth below us, beautiful blue Earth and we're in daylight. Only on the back side, opposite side of the sun, it seems like night to us, too.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

There's no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets - together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor - seem dynamic.

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.