Quotes from David Grinspoon

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.

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

Literally, my earliest memory, my earliest vivid memory, is the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Yeah, I was in fourth grade, and I was just so captivated. And I think you'll find a lot of space scientists of my generation will say the same thing. Apollo was a big event for them.

Mars does not belong to 'America,' nor to Earth, nor to human beings.

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.

As long as we can imagine a better path, of course we are obligated to seek it. This is why unwarranted pessimism about our future is actually irresponsible.

When I first went to college, I went into physics, and my goal was to help perfect nuclear fusion so I could solve the energy crisis and global warming. I probably would have done it, too, if I'd stuck to it.

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.

Fixing global warming is more important than astronomy.

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.

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.

Right now I would submit that lack of self-knowledge is an existential risk. An inability to act with global intent and consideration of multigenerational timescales is an existential risk.

In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled "The World, The Flesh and the Devil" that Arthur C. Clarke called, "the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made.

DNA analyses of modern people suggest that the human population declined dramatically, to perhaps only a few hundred. When we talk about all men and women being brothers and sisters, and people of all types being closely related, we are not just being poetic and romantic. Compared to other species, humans exhibit very little genetic diversity, a trait that stems back to that time, not too long ago, when a small band of survivors had to repopulate humanity. We

Wonderful, because life gained the ability to harvest sunlight for energy. What a fantastic breakthrough! Earth's biosphere learned to plug into the best power source the universe has to offer, tapping a nearby star to manufacture food from light.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft. Though

Tsiolkovsky's most well-known quote expresses this sentiment: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever." Awakenings

this way, we've changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we've created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habitat. Some

Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate revolution, when the texture and chemistry of the seafloor (at that time, the entire habitable surface of the planet) was rapidly remade by a spurt of biological innovation that caused both mass death and fantastic new evolutionary opportunity. This

celled. Then a catastrophe occurred (in the sense of sudden change), a dramatic increase in biodiversity, an anti-extinction, if you will. In a flash, there were not just some animal forms, but all of them. In the fossil record, all modern body types appear together at this moment. We don't know why this happened when it did. It's likely that the explosion had to wait until oxygen levels rose high enough to support the greater energy needs of larger bodies,

species. In this way, we've changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we've created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habitat. Some

Linepithema humile is a species of ant native to Northern Argentina that has, with our help, become a new kind of global superorganism.

While ruthlessly aggressive toward other species, they are also unusually cooperative with their own kind. Ants from neighboring nests don't fight, as with other species,

work, Jacob was not claiming to make a detailed and correct prediction of climate changes over the next several hundred thousand years, only to determine whether our influence could be strong enough to interrupt the Milankovi? oscillations over the coming millennia. His first model results suggest that the answer is yes.