David Grinspoon Quotes
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We're pretty sure there's plenty of organic material on Pluto. The atmosphere is largely methane, and in sunlight, methane builds organic molecules. We see reddish stuff on the surface that we think is organic material.
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Astrobiology is a great point of contact for science outreach. The public is naturally interested in extra-terrestrial life. Astrobiology provides an accessible point of access that leads to deeper questions.
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In environments that are energy-rich but liquid-poor, like near the surface of Titan, natural selection may favor organisms that use their metabolic heat to melt their own watering holes.
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It is said that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about Western civilization, remarked, 'I think it would be a good idea.' That's how I feel about intelligent life on Earth, especially when I think about the question of what truly intelligent life might look like elsewhere in the universe.
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I think that an advanced planetary civilization will modify their own planets to be more stable, to prevent asteroid impacts and dangerous climate fluctuations.
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The more we look at the kinds of soils and the nature of the atmosphere and the polar caps, it all adds up to tell us that some liquid, which we very much believe was water, did flow in abundance on Mars in the past.
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I intend to apply the perspective of astrobiology, which is a deep-time way of looking at life on Earth, towards the question of the Anthropocene. What does the human phenomenon on Earth look like viewed from an interplanetary perspective?
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As a kid, I became a total SF geek. It started in the 5th grade with Asimov's 'Lucky Starr' series of what would now be called 'young adult' novels of adventures in the solar system.
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There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.
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We're going to get off fossil fuels, no question. We may not do it quickly enough to avoid some pain, and I'm quite worried about that. But by the 22nd century, there's no way we'll be on fossil fuels.
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We have to learn to become a new kind of entity on this world that has the maturity and the awareness to handle being a global species with the power to change our planet and use that power in a way that is conducive to the kind of global society we want to have.
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I think a lot of people interested in space exploration tend to hear stories about the great missions, how they work technically, what we learned. But they don't really hear the story of what it takes to get a mission from scratch to the launch pad and into space.
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What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start - but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?
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Humans are possessed, to some degree, with the power of foresight. Yet we so often learn things the hard way, through disaster.
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I do comparative studies of climate evolution, and the interactions between planetary atmosphere and surfaces and their radiation environment, and try to understand the environmental factors that can affect a planet's habitability and how they change over time.
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We can look out on an alien landscape that no one has seen before and find it beautiful.
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Among the radio astronomers of SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - it's only sort-of a joke that the true hallmark of intelligent life is the creation of radio astronomy.
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Venus and Mars are our next of kin: they are the two most Earth-like planets that we know about. They're the only two other very Earth-like planets in our solar system, meaning they orbit close to the sun; they have rocky surfaces and thin atmospheres.
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My high-school friends and I felt part of a community of smart, forward-looking space and technology freaks.
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I'm a strong advocate of new missions to Venus.
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Fixing global warming is more important than astronomy.
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Certainly for me, as an astrobiologist, science fiction has played an important role. One of the quandaries of our field is that we are trying to study and search for something - life - that we can't define in a rigorous way. We only have one example of a biosphere, so we can't really give a good definition.
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What we should really be thinking about is what it would look like for a truly intelligent technological species to be interacting with their planet's atmosphere.
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Earth's biosphere gave birth to humans and our thoughts, which are now reshaping its planetary cycles. A planet with brains? Fancy that.