The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'
Interpretation
This quote highlights the improbability of dying from rare events, suggesting that fear of such occurrences is often irrational.
Neil Degrasse Tyson uses this quote to illustrate the statistical unlikeliness of dying from uncommon causes, such as being killed by an asteroid or in an airplane crash. By comparing these two rare events, he encourages us to focus on the more probable risks in life, suggesting that our worries may often be misallocated to unlikely scenarios instead of more pressing concerns.
In practice
During a speech about overcoming fear, you might quote Tyson to illustrate how we often fear the wrong things.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
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