Science & Tech Quote by Steven Squyres

There is an almost disarming bluntness in Squyres's line, and that is the point. A Mars-rover scientist could have reached for loftier language about humanity's destiny, public investment, the majesty of the cosmos. Instead he pulls science down to its human engine: curiosity plus persistence. "Just trying to figure stuff out" sounds casual, even childlike, but it quietly rejects the myth that science is a priesthood of geniuses dispensing truths from on high. It frames research as a practice, not a personality.

The subtext is a defense against two common distortions. One is the technocratic aura that makes science feel remote, inaccessible, performed by people who speak in equations and grant acronyms. The other is the politicized demand that science justify itself only through immediate utility. Squyres implies that the core motive isn't profit or policy; it's the disciplined pleasure of reducing ignorance. That "I like" matters: it admits desire. Science is not just method, it's appetite.

Context sharpens it. Squyres, as a public face of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, spent years translating painstaking work - calibration, failure analysis, incremental inference - into a story audiences could hold. The quote works because it sneaks the grandeur in through a side door: if science is "figuring stuff out", then anyone who has ever obsessively chased an answer recognizes the feeling. It makes exploration feel less like a distant national project and more like an everyday impulse scaled up with robots, budgets, and time.