If the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the randomness and inefficiency of existence in relation to human life.
Neil Degrasse Tyson's quote reflects on the vastness and complexity of the universe, suggesting that if humans were the intended result of its creation, the processes involved seem remarkably inefficient. This provokes thought about our place in the universe and the nature of existence itself, questioning whether there is a specific purpose to it all or if we are simply a byproduct of an unfathomable cosmic process.
In practice
In a debate about the purpose of life, one might quote this to emphasize the random nature of existence.
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.
For what can war, but endless war, still breed?
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,_x000D_ the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
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