David Grinspoon Quotes

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Seriously, we should start taxing churches and have tax-exempt places for worship and study of nature and art. Charge ten bucks for Sunday services and make the Botanic Gardens free.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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?

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

In environments that are energy-rich but liquid-poor, like near the surface of Titan, natural selection may favor organisms that use their metabolic heat to melt their own watering holes.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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?

- David Grinspoon

We need visions of a future in which we have applied our infinite creativity to the task of living on a finite world, where we have embraced our role, become comfortable and proficient as planet-shapers, and learned to use our technological skills to enhance the survival prospects not just of humanity but of all life on Earth.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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

Even as a kid enthralled with science fiction, I wondered about the role of people in the long-term evolution of the Earth, the far future and the fate of humanity.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Whenever I see a nighttime picture of Earth from space, with its glowing lights, I am stirred by its beauty.

- David Grinspoon

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?

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Titan has rivers and lakes of liquid methane and ethane, methane weather systems of clouds and storms that mirror Earth's hydrologic cycle, and seasonal cycles that rival Earth's in complexity.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

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

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.

- David Grinspoon

Through space-based climate studies, my colleagues and I have learned that a stable and comfortable climate is not something to take for granted.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

The reason you see so many volcanoes on Venus is partly due to the fact that there's virtually no erosion there. So on Venus, you're seeing features, some of which are hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. On Earth, we do not see any surface features nearly that old - you only see much more recent features.

- David Grinspoon

There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.

- David Grinspoon

There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.

- David Grinspoon

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

It will be a long time, if ever, before we get to study Earth-like planets orbiting around other stars, so really, the study of Venus and Mars is the best opportunity that we have, and can imagine having anytime in the future, to understand the evolution of Earth-like planets.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Fixing global warming is more important than astronomy.

- David Grinspoon

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?

- David Grinspoon

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

- David Grinspoon

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.

- David Grinspoon

Mars does not belong to 'America,' nor to Earth, nor to human beings.

- David Grinspoon