1/1,000,000,000 Doesn't sound like a big number to most... but to me.... That's the universe.

Science is seen as something that's "neat" when your young but disregarded when you're older. I find that way of thinking offensive.

We all share a piece of the universe within us.

I get a noble feeling knowing I come from the stars. The atoms in my body have traveled the universe and have been around from the beginning of time itself. I'm just "borrowing" them for a microscopic amount of time, in perspective with the universe. Once I'm done, the universe takes it back, and cycles it through something else, like a new tree or a president yet to be born.

It's amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time.

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.