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" 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. "

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" 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. "

David Grinspoon

Environment

Time

Environmental

" We don't know that Venus had oceans, but there's every reason to believe it did. "

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

" 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. "

" I'd like to jump a couple hundred years into the future and work with the scientists who are getting back the first information from our probes to planets orbiting nearby stars. "

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

" The mature Anthropocene begins when we acquire the ability to live sustainably and become a lasting presence on this world. "

" 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. "

" As Earth's climate changes, we can expect more destructive hurricanes. As sea level and surface temperatures rise, more solar energy is trapped in the atmosphere, revving up the hydrological cycle of evaporation and precipitation and sometimes manifesting in terrifying storms. "

" We definitely don't want to go through another Ice Age or another natural cycle of global warming. Both happen over a long period of time. It would be disastrous for our civilization, and not just for us but many other species. "

David Grinspoon

Time

Want

" A lot of the science fiction that I grew up reading was written when we still thought that Venus might be an oceanic planet. "

David Grinspoon

Reading

Science

" 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. "

" If you were on the surface of Venus, assuming you could see the Sun, which, you know, would be hard because it's so cloudy there, but the Sun would actually rise in the west and set in the east. And, it would do so very, very slowly, because the planet rotates incredibly slowly. "

" What if life is not carbon-based? Can life exist as a gas or a plasma? Could planets or stars in some sense be alive? What about an interstellar cloud? Could life exist on such a small or large scale, or move so fast or so slowly that we wouldn't recognize it? Could you have an intelligent virus? "

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

" 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. "

" 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'm a strong advocate of new missions to Venus. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation. "

" I think the best SF writers are very aware of what we, in the scientific community, are doing, thinking, and discovering. "

" 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. "

" We're going to stop looking at Earth from orbit because we don't like what we are seeing and the conclusions that leads us to? That's nonsense. "

" 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. "

" It's quite possible there's as much lightning on Venus as on Earth. "

" Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution. "

" I'd been politically active ever since my parents wheeled me in a stroller in a 'ban the bomb' march in Boston in 1963. "

" 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. "