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.
Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.
Once humankind has been some place and found it_x000D_ entrancing, they always go back, I think in the history of the_x000D_ human race, the moon has been the first place we've gone to and said,_x000D_ 'OK, we don't need to go back there again.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.
If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
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