David Grinspoon Quotes
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Thinking about the new epoch - often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity - challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.
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What if life is not carbon-based? Can life exist as a gas or a plasma? Could planets or stars in some sense be alive? What about an interstellar cloud? Could life exist on such a small or large scale, or move so fast or so slowly that we wouldn't recognize it? Could you have an intelligent virus?
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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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Even as our unwitting alterations to Earth's carbon and hydrological cycles slowly make storms more damaging, our ability to monitor our planet from space and make reliable short-term forecasts have equipped us enormously to withstand them.
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Among the plausible niches for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, the clouds of Venus are among the most accessible and the least well explained.
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The planet Mars - crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms - has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planetological theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.
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Our most valuable resources - creativity, communication, invention, and reinvention - are, in fact, unlimited.
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I will defend the NASA Earth Science Division with everything I've got.
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In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.
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The reason you see so many volcanoes on Venus is partly due to the fact that there's virtually no erosion there. So on Venus, you're seeing features, some of which are hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. On Earth, we do not see any surface features nearly that old - you only see much more recent features.
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Mars does not belong to 'America,' nor to Earth, nor to human beings.
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There's something cool about being involved in new missions to other planets.
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Ever since the environmental movement was sparked by photos of the whole Earth taken by astronauts onboard Apollo Lunar Modules, I've seen planetary exploration as an extension of a reverence and care for Earth.
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I don't see it as coincidence that the great acceleration of the Anthropocene influences on Earth came during the same decades as our first exploration of the other planets.
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You cannot study other planets without referring to Earth and without applying the techniques and the insights of Earth science. And you cannot really do a good job understanding the Earth without the insights from planetary exploration.
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I'd like to jump a couple hundred years into the future and work with the scientists who are getting back the first information from our probes to planets orbiting nearby stars.
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I'd been politically active ever since my parents wheeled me in a stroller in a 'ban the bomb' march in Boston in 1963.
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Through space-based climate studies, my colleagues and I have learned that a stable and comfortable climate is not something to take for granted.
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Even as a kid enthralled with science fiction, I wondered about the role of people in the long-term evolution of the Earth, the far future and the fate of humanity.
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The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation.
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Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.
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It's one of the big mysteries about Venus: How did it get so different from Earth when it seems likely to have started so similarly? The question becomes richer when you consider astrobiology, the possibility that Venus and Earth were very similar during the time of the origin of life on Earth.
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The mature Anthropocene begins when we acquire the ability to live sustainably and become a lasting presence on this world.
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If you were on the surface of Venus, assuming you could see the Sun, which, you know, would be hard because it's so cloudy there, but the Sun would actually rise in the west and set in the east. And, it would do so very, very slowly, because the planet rotates incredibly slowly.