On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)
Interpretation
This quote humorously highlights the extreme heat on Venus, illustrating how conditions there are dramatically different from Earth.
Neil Degrasse Tyson's quote uses a playful example to convey the intense atmospheric conditions on Venus, where temperatures are so high that a pizza could be cooked in a mere seven seconds just by exposing it to the air. This whimsical proposition not only captures the reader's imagination but also presents a fascinating fact about planetary science, showcasing how other planets can have environments vastly dissimilar to our own.
In practice
In a science class discussion about planetary atmospheres.
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.
Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, 'This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I'm really here, I'm really here!'
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.
But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.
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.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
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