David Grinspoon Quotes
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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.
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A lot of the science fiction that I grew up reading was written when we still thought that Venus might be an oceanic 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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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 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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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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Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
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The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.
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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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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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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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Part of the point of SETI has always been a search for answers about our own cosmic potential and destiny. If 'they' are out there, it means that there may be hope for us.
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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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It's quite possible that the end of us will not be the end of the Earth. Even if we really screw things up and things go badly for us and our civilization, the Earth is pretty resilient.
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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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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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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 definitely don't want to go through another Ice Age or another natural cycle of global warming. Both happen over a long period of time. It would be disastrous for our civilization, and not just for us but many other species.
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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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We need to have a vision of the world we want to create so that we can see ourselves as collaborators with future generations in the project of shaping it.
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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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Mars does not have an atmosphere and does not have a magnetic field today, so the planet doesn't have the protection from radiation that our atmosphere and magnetic fields provide us on Earth.
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I was a science fiction geek from an early age, enthralled by the questions of life in the universe. As I got older, I learned that space exploration was real. I wanted to get involved in that. I knew I wanted to be a scientist.