Quotes About Biosphere

The earth's biosphere could be thought of as a sort of palace. The continents are rooms in the palace; islands are smaller rooms. Each room has its own decor and unique inhabitants; many of the rooms have been sealed off for millions of years. The doors in the palace have been flung open, and the walls are coming down.

Scientists and supercomputers have amplified our ability to look ahead. For decades, experts have warned us that human numbers, technology, hyper-consumption and a global economy are altering the chemical, geological, and biological properties of the biosphere.

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.

Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.

People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things; and The Earth's biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.

while humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are 'universal constructors'.

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.

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

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

We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

Earth's biosphere gave birth to humans and our thoughts, which are now reshaping its planetary cycles. A planet with brains? Fancy that.

The true - the true economy has got to come back into balance with the very biosphere that sustains us. And I think a lot of people just see the green economy as a different way of allowing the corporate agenda to continue to flourish.

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines. Their fragrances

The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.

The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

Pero, sea inocente o arrogante, sagrada o profana, la ignorancia es la ignorancia y toda ignorancia destruye la biosfera.

We needn't be saddened with the impossible weight of managing the entire biosphere, but we must meet the challenge of living in balance with the sacred elements.

If I hadn't been inside of Biosphere 2 and really lived a biological life-support system, I definitely would not be involved in life-support systems for space.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils

The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts.

If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those "objective functions." Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.