Top 66 David Grinspoon Quotes

Part of the point of SETI has always been a search for answers about our own cosmic potential and destiny. If ‘they’ are out there, it means that there may be hope for us.

There is a real danger of unintended consequences, of encouraging people to give up. Pessimism, if it becomes a habit, can reinforce a narrative of unstoppable decline. If there is nothing we can do, that releases us from our obligations.

We’re going to get off fossil fuels, no question. We may not do it quickly enough to avoid some pain, and I’m quite worried about that. But by the 22nd century, there’s no way we’ll be on fossil fuels.

I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life.

There was a long history of people believing there was life on Venus. It was about the same size as Earth. It had clouds. It was commonly believed it was tropical – wet, hot and steamy.

The more we look at the kinds of soils and the nature of the atmosphere and the polar caps, it all adds up to tell us that some liquid, which we very much believe was water, did flow in abundance on Mars in the past.

Our most valuable resources – creativity, communication, invention, and reinvention – are, in fact, unlimited.

In my Ph.D. thesis, written in 1989, I discussed the fact that when a civilization develops the technology to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts, it marks a significant moment in the evolution of the planet.

It turns out one of my dad’s best friends was Carl Sagan when I was little. They were both Harvard professors.

As a kid, I became a total SF geek. It started in the 5th grade with Asimov’s ‘Lucky Starr’ series of what would now be called ‘young adult’ novels of adventures in the solar system.

What we should really be thinking about is what it would look like for a truly intelligent technological species to be interacting with their planet’s atmosphere.

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.

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.

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.

Earth is a stunningly lovely planet for so many reasons. Among these is the wondrous presence of curious, artful, inventive humanity.

The basic ability to not wipe oneself out, to endure, to use your technological interaction with the world in such a way that has the possibility of the likelihood of lasting and not being temporary – that seems like a pretty good definition of intelligence.

Responsible global behaviour is ultimately an act of self-preservation of, by, and for the global beast that modern technological humanity has become.

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.

I intend to apply the perspective of astrobiology, which is a deep-time way of looking at life on Earth, towards the question of the Anthropocene. What does the human phenomenon on Earth look like viewed from an interplanetary perspective?

What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start – but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?

Even cynical, selfish people will realize, one way or the other, that it’s not in their self-interest to act in self-destructive ways.

Among the radio astronomers of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – it’s only sort-of a joke that the true hallmark of intelligent life is the creation of radio astronomy.

I think that an advanced planetary civilization will modify their own planets to be more stable, to prevent asteroid impacts and dangerous climate fluctuations.

It is said that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about Western civilization, remarked, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ That’s how I feel about intelligent life on Earth, especially when I think about the question of what truly intelligent life might look like elsewhere in the universe.

I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.

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.

If we gutted NASA Earth Science, it wouldn’t be NOAA or some other agency that would take the lead. It would be the Chinese and the Europeans and the Japanese.

I’m an astrobiologist, and I come from a planetary science background, so in a very broad sense, I study the evolution of planetary environments.

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.

When you think about alien intelligences making art, you then have to think about what art is and how bound up it is in the nature of consciousness. Why do we make art? And what can we expect to have in common with other creatures in universe?

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.

We can look out on an alien landscape that no one has seen before and find it beautiful.

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.

Why should we consider defining intelligence as something global and as something that hasn’t actually yet appeared on Earth? It may be useful for envisioning the future of our own civilization and any others that may be out there among the stars. It might give us something to strive for.

I think chemists always think they know more than they know, because nature has a lot of possible pathways it can try.

Fixing global warming is more important than astronomy.

I was a science fiction geek from an early age, enthralled by the questions of life in the universe. As I got older, I learned that space exploration was real. I wanted to get involved in that. I knew I wanted to be a scientist.

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.

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.

One of the weird things about modern physics is that we do find there are apparently these other dimensions that we don’t directly experience that explain some aspects of the overall geometry and reality of our universe.

There’s something cool about being involved in new missions to other planets.

We have all this very clever technology and all these abilities to manipulate the world in all these ways, yet we are faced with the very real question of whether we can be sustainable on this planet – whether or not, in fact, we can endure.

I do comparative studies of climate evolution, and the interactions between planetary atmosphere and surfaces and their radiation environment, and try to understand the environmental factors that can affect a planet’s habitability and how they change over time.

Mars does not have an atmosphere and does not have a magnetic field today, so the planet doesn’t have the protection from radiation that our atmosphere and magnetic fields provide us on Earth.

Venus and Mars are our next of kin: they are the two most Earth-like planets that we know about. They’re the only two other very Earth-like planets in our solar system, meaning they orbit close to the sun; they have rocky surfaces and thin atmospheres.

The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.

Humans are possessed, to some degree, with the power of foresight. Yet we so often learn things the hard way, through disaster.

My high-school friends and I felt part of a community of smart, forward-looking space and technology freaks.

As a young planet, Venus was losing hydrogen rapidly to space. The oceans boiled off, and after some period of time, perhaps 600 million years, there was no surface water.

What I’m interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth’s geological history.