Quotes from Adam Frank

From the exoplanet data, astronomers can now say with confidence that one out of every five stars hosts a world where life as we know it could form. So, when you're standing out there under the night sky, choose five random stars. Chances are, one of them has a world in its Goldilocks zone where liquid water could be flowing across its surface and life might already exist.

In other words, pretty much every star you see in the night sky hosts at least one planet. The next time you find yourself outside at night, take a moment to stop and consider the implications of this result as you gaze at all those pinpricks of light. Every one of them hosts at least one world, and most stars will have more than one planet. Solar systems are the rule and not the exception. They're everywhere.

Vernadsky proposed that the study of the Earth would not be complete without understanding the central role of life as a planetary force.

Life was not just a patchy green scruff holding a tenuous position between rock and air; instead, it was a planetary power as important as volcanoes and tides. It was an active force shaping the complex multibillion-year history of the world.

Ultimately, the problem we face is confronting a twenty-third-century dilemma armed only with a thirteenth-century mind. Our project of civilization has been successful on scales we could not have imagined when we began it ten millennia ago. But with that success has come consequences that will last for centuries.

Lowell's observations of Martian canals had become a joke in the scientific community.25 In the early 1950s, the possibility of life and intelligence in the universe remained a question that few scientists were seriously considering.

For about the first two billion years of Earth's history, its atmosphere contained only minute traces of oxygen, even though it had long been a home to life. For

Thus, the Earth was once a jungle world, a sweltering hothouse planet devoid of snow.

Atmospheric scientists call these flow patterns "Rossby waves," and they were the cause of the dreaded "polar vortex" that brought record-cold air to inhabitants on the East Coast in the winter of 2014.59

While the Cold War made instant annihilation a credible threat in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s some were beginning to realize that even the everyday activities of our project of civilization were not, in total, going unnoticed by the planet.

The whole history of the debate about life beyond Earth is an argument between optimists and pessimists. It's a debate that began with the opposition between Aristotle and Epicurus, extended through the 1800s to Flammarion versus Whewell, and took its modern turn with the Drake equation, through which the battle between pessimism and optimism became quantitative.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what's deeper.