We need to look at NASA, not as a handout, but as an investment.
Interpretation
NASA should be viewed as an investment in the future rather than a financial burden.
This quote by Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of viewing investments in scientific and technological endeavors, like those made by NASA, as essential for future progress and innovation. Rather than considering funding for such organizations as mere expenditures, it highlights the potential long-term benefits that can arise from scientific exploration and discovery.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of funding scientific research, one could use this quote to advocate for continued support.
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.
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.
The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.
In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.
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