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" 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? "

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" NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of 'planetary-protection' principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth. "

David Grinspoon

NASA

World

Principles

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

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

" Astrobiology is the science of life in the universe. It's an attempt to scientifically deal with the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe, looking at the past of life, the present of life, and the future of life. It's an interdisciplinary study incorporating astronomy, biology, and the Earth sciences. "

" Earth is going to lose its oceans in the future, just as Venus did in the past. How long planets retain their oceans is a function of distance from the sun, all other things being equal. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" We need to have a vision of the world we want to create so that we can see ourselves as collaborators with future generations in the project of shaping it. "

" 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. "

" Astrobiology is a great point of contact for science outreach. The public is naturally interested in extra-terrestrial life. Astrobiology provides an accessible point of access that leads to deeper questions. "

" 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. "

" The planet Mars - crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms - has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planetological theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. "

" Fixing global warming is more important than astronomy. "

" I will defend the NASA Earth Science Division with everything I've got. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Humanity has at least a dim, and growing, cognisance of the effects of its presence on this planet. The possibility that we might integrate that awareness into how we interface with the Earth system is one that should give us hope. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Time and time again, our species has escaped existential threats by reinventing ourselves, finding new skills not coded in our genes to survive new challenges not previously encountered. "

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

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