David Grinspoon Quotes
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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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Now, humans have become a dominant force of planetary change and, thus, we may have entered an eon of post-biological evolution in which cognitive systems have gained a powerful influence on the planet.
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The future peopling of Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step of historic and spiritual importance for the human race.
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I'm an astrobiologist, and I come from a planetary science background, so in a very broad sense, I study the evolution of planetary environments.
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It turns out one of my dad's best friends was Carl Sagan when I was little. They were both Harvard professors.
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Astrobiology is the science of life in the universe. It's an attempt to scientifically deal with the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe, looking at the past of life, the present of life, and the future of life. It's an interdisciplinary study incorporating astronomy, biology, and the Earth sciences.
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I'm a strong advocate of new missions to Venus.
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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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The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.
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Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
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I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.
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There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.
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There's no question to my mind that saving our civilization and many other species is more important than our ability to do ground-based astronomy for a few decades.
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Seriously, we should start taxing churches and have tax-exempt places for worship and study of nature and art. Charge ten bucks for Sunday services and make the Botanic Gardens free.
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I think chemists always think they know more than they know, because nature has a lot of possible pathways it can try.
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There was a long history of people believing there was life on Venus. It was about the same size as Earth. It had clouds. It was commonly believed it was tropical - wet, hot and steamy.
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There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'
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We need visions of a future in which we have applied our infinite creativity to the task of living on a finite world, where we have embraced our role, become comfortable and proficient as planet-shapers, and learned to use our technological skills to enhance the survival prospects not just of humanity but of all life on Earth.
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What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.
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As a young planet, Venus was losing hydrogen rapidly to space. The oceans boiled off, and after some period of time, perhaps 600 million years, there was no surface water.
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We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.
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Whenever I see a nighttime picture of Earth from space, with its glowing lights, I am stirred by its beauty.
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Time and time again, our species has escaped existential threats by reinventing ourselves, finding new skills not coded in our genes to survive new challenges not previously encountered.
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Responsible global behaviour is ultimately an act of self-preservation of, by, and for the global beast that modern technological humanity has become.