Wisdom in fragments

The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too. Putting a robotic spacecraft out into space is becoming fairly routine.

Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me... And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.

44th President of the United States (2009-2017)

What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime.

Founder of Integral Institute & Author on Evolutionary Spirituality

Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.

Creator of The Wire, acclaimed HBO crime drama series

Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can't look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country.

Creator of The Wire, acclaimed HBO crime drama series

Trying to figure out how we fit into the cosmos is old, it's a basic human question.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

Although, today, the universe appears more bio-friendly than it ever was. That doesn't mean it is inhabited. We still have to prove that.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

There is a naïve form which doesn't recognise the bubble, and thinks that real-estate will go up forever. There is then a second order overconfidence where someone recognises a bubble but feels they will escape it when other people don't.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

One of the sources of overconfidence in our ability to forecast the future is the great ease with which we find explanations for the past. That's a very significant mechanism that produces overconfidence.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

Many entrepreneurs are deluded about their odds of success, that evidence is very clear. This creates problems… Should a government subsidise entrepreneurs who greatly over-estimate their chances of success?

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

You cannot understand entrepreneurial activity without understanding optimism. Research has shown that optimism and overconfidence in individuals is directly linked to their engagement in entrepreneurial activity.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.

Bubbles are driven by people piling into ideas now, that they think will make them lots and lots of money in the future. The more people that pile in, the more quickly innovation can spread... But if the capital is misallocated? then when the money meets common sense, you get a bust.