Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that - unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery - nearly all the intelligence that's out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.

If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the case, we are putty in their hands.

If there is life out there that's so much more advanced than we are, and they know either how to travel great distances in short amounts of time, or they're able to come from a parallel universe into ours, why don't they just come and show themselves?

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

I think human intelligence is the only one that will actually tell you intent.

The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.

Cats virtually always underestimate human intelligence just as we, perhaps, underestimate theirs.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.

I love people, 'cause people are so smart. People have done a lot of great things.

Texas Governor Rick Perry distanced himself from George W. Bush by saying, 'I went to Texas A&M. He went to Yale.' In other words, his idea of instilling confidence is by saying, 'Don't worry. I'm not as smart as George W. Bush.'

If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?

I still think we are smart enough to not destroy planet Earth, our only home.

The high IQ has become the American equivalent of the Legion of Honor, positive proof of a child's intellectual aristocracy.... It has become more important to be a smart kid than a good kid or even a healthy kid.

Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.

We might expect intelligent life and technological communities to have emerged in the universe billions of years ago. Given that human society is only a few thousand years old, and that human technological society is mere centuries old, the nature of a community with millions or even billions of years of technological and social progress cannot even be imagined. ... What would we make of a billion-year-old technological community?

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

I think humans are stupid. We fight and kill each other. I think that's dumb. Aliens would be smarter than that and wouldn't approach things on that level. I can't really fathom it being a negative thing for aliens to visit.

No man is smart, except by comparison to those who know less

Machines already are much smarter than us at so many things. I mean, try to multiply two 10-digit numbers with each other or, you know, sift through a thousand documents. So there's lots of things that machines are better at including in mental task than us. There's many more that they're not as good at, but the direction is pretty obvious and the progress is clear.

Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.