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.
Earth’s biosphere gave birth to humans and our thoughts, which are now reshaping its planetary cycles. A planet with brains? Fancy that.
We’ve almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we’ve survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.
In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.
It’s OK to pursue speculative ideas because we don’t want to be too cozy and safe and assume that we know everything about life in the universe. However, we have to be rigorous and careful and honest and logical and scientifically meticulous when we speculate.
The future peopling of Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step of historic and spiritual importance for the human race.
Whenever I see a nighttime picture of Earth from space, with its glowing lights, I am stirred by its beauty.
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.
There’s no question to my mind that saving our civilization and many other species is more important than our ability to do ground-based astronomy for a few decades.
I think a lot of people interested in space exploration tend to hear stories about the great missions, how they work technically, what we learned. But they don’t really hear the story of what it takes to get a mission from scratch to the launch pad and into space.
Certainly for me, as an astrobiologist, science fiction has played an important role. One of the quandaries of our field is that we are trying to study and search for something – life – that we can’t define in a rigorous way. We only have one example of a biosphere, so we can’t really give a good definition.
Now, humans have become a dominant force of planetary change and, thus, we may have entered an eon of post-biological evolution in which cognitive systems have gained a powerful influence on the planet.
We have to learn to become a new kind of entity on this world that has the maturity and the awareness to handle being a global species with the power to change our planet and use that power in a way that is conducive to the kind of global society we want to have.
It’s quite possible there’s as much lightning on Venus as on Earth.
A lot of the science fiction that I grew up reading was written when we still thought that Venus might be an oceanic planet.
Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
Pages: 1 2
