Quotes from David Grinspoon

Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Zaitsev and his Russian colleagues continued their occasional series of messages from the Crimea to the stars. In addition to the Teen Age Message, they sent Cosmic Calls I and II, which were constructed along principles similar to those behind Drake's original Arecibo message, but contained significantly more information.

I began to see this as a series of dilemmas nested like Russian dolls. Can today's SETI community agree on a policy about active SETI? Even if collectively forged and broadly ratified, would such an agreement actually control or change global behavior, as perceived from the outside? How would you get everyone to go along? Can human society in some sense agree on active SETI? Should we, as a species, cautiously try to hide our presence, or hopefully announce ourselves to the universe?

This is our story, and we're not sticking to it.

States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose… This

We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or avoid the crash. We are waking up, and we can see the trends starting to turn. We are slowly rounding the corner on the related problems of poverty and overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

the number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It's not too hard to come up with metrics that have not kept pace with the Great Acceleration. Yet, in the end, this exercise in contrarian thinking only reinforces the point: any set of meaningful measures will reveal the same pattern. Venus

Science has repeatedly revealed to us that we are not unique or special — except, guess what. We are.

Cassie comes across as serious and studious, but once, after dinner in Washington with a group of NASA people, I asked her if her job title invited a lot of Men in Black questions. With little provocation, she suddenly reached into her purse, donned a pair of sleek black sunglasses, frowned seriously, and flashed a very official-looking "Planetary Protection Officer" badge at me. The fact

cities will be smarter, greener places. Over the centuries, we've made a lot of progress in learning how to urbanize. We invented plumbing and sanitation systems, learned not to stain our cities brown with coal ash, realized we don't want polluted urban rivers. We are still learning how to live well in cities. I bet twenty-second-century cities will be nice places to live. Our

Remixing Our Metaphors We're not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we've gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. A weed does not weed itself. We could.

Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet. Gaiasignatures

Also, Lovelock's radical idea—pay attention to the atmosphere and look for drastic departures from the expected mixture of gases—now forms the cornerstone of our life-detection strategies.

is. I think our fundamental Anthropocene dilemma is that we have achieved global impact but have no mechanisms for global self-control. So, to the (debatable) extent that we are like some kind of global organism, we are still a pretty clumsy one, crashing around with little situational awareness,

society. The orbital technology enabling this observation is itself one of the strange and striking aspects of the transition now gripping Earth. If up to now the defining characteristic of Earth has been planetary-scale life, then what about these planetary-scale lights? Might this spreading, luminous net be part of a new defining characteristic? Even

for the first time ever the majority of children being born today will never in their lives directly see the Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic connection has never been closer or more remote. Age

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. My name for this vision is Terra Sapiens, or "Wise Earth." A

The exact kill mechanisms are still being worked out, but the chronology has now convincingly implicated the volcanic culprit. At just the precise geological moment when most species suddenly dropped dead, a hot plume rising from the mantle caused enormous floods of volcanic magma to pour forth from the Siberian ground, warming Earth, acidifying the oceans, and creating a host of other extreme environmental changes. Most of life just couldn't cope. Whether

The modelers are starting to map out the possible climate states of exoplanets. I've participated in some workshops about this and have found it fascinating watching astronomers and terrestrial climate modelers try to talk to one another. There is a huge gulf in scale and perspective. Our knowledge of exoplanets is so sparse. Each of these worlds is known to us as, at best, a few numbers: mass, distance from a star, and in some cases vague inferences about temperature

Okay, engineering is not quite the right word, as it implies some larger degree of understanding than we have. We are perhaps engineering Earth only in the way that your infant is "engineering" your home media system when she sticks cookies in the DVD slot.

What if one characteristic of really advanced intelligence is to become less and less distinguishable from natural phenomena?

can participate in interstellar conversation. Yet there is inherent asymmetry in galactic radio discourse. It is much easier to listen than to transmit. A huge gulf yawns between the ability to build a radio telescope and the ability to mount a sustained multimillennial broadcasting and listening program. We cannot reasonably search for our equals.

These disturbances are the product of our human propensity to explore in teams, to develop new tools to expand our domain to places that are not part of our "natural" habitat.

This orbit defines another timescale that was hidden to us before the twentieth century: we complete one lap around our galaxy about every 225 million years.5 We can assemble a scrapbook of our cosmic history measured out in these galactic, or "cosmic," years. Our universe seems to have been around for about sixty-one of them,* and Earth has almost reached the galactic age of twenty-one. As a biosphere, we're still a teenager of sixteen or seventeen galactic years. We

early twentieth century seemed to see what was coming. In 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed that the growing influence of humans was causing the "Anthropozoic era," but this was largely ignored by scientists of his day. In 1877, physiologist Joseph LeConte described a similar concept, calling it the Psychozoic era. In the 1920s the French Jesuit priest Tielhard de Chardin spoke of