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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fdc1603 | What are you doing behind my cornstalks? There was to be no pumpkin-pie-eating for you," said the angry voice of the spirit that lived in the scarecrow. Shaking with fear, Angus turned to face the scarecrow, and the pie fell to the earth. "I...I was hungry and didn't think Mom would mind," said Angus. But Angus's excuse only made the spirit angrier, and he shouted at Angus. "You were told to go to bed and to eat no pie." And swinging the gr.. | David Ray | ||
| e382671 | Our school bus driver was a middle-aged man named Ray, who might have shaved once a week, probably didn't bathe that often, and his huge belly rubbed against the steering wheel as he maneuvered the vehicle. Ray had a perpetual scowl on his face and seemed to be in a trance-like state of detachment most of the time. Every once in a while, however, some particularly violent outburst summoned him from his reverie, and he would yell in an extre.. | David B. Crawley | ||
| 2bc1c97 | The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. | nature transience | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 392d369 | Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos. | David Mitchell | ||
| 8105269 | climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert, one of the coauthors on the recent National Research Council report on geoengineering by solar radiation management,9 put it, trying to do this anytime soon would be "wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad." Though there are a few loud voices advocating them, there is not really very much support for these risky quick-fix geoengineering schemes, and as people look into them more carefully, this support w.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| a2cd963 | two stratigraphers asked, "Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?" In part, they argued that our presence is as yet too brief a perturbation to merit a named place in the stratigraphic column. The amount of ocean sediments laid down since World War II is less than a millimeter. And, of course, nobody knows how long the Anthropocene will last. That depends crucially on how we, collectively, respond to the novel realizat.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| d1a3c54 | We are now a part of Earth's geological record.4 No matter what we do, no matter where we go from here, we have left our mark. One of those indelible signatures will be the sudden disappearance of certain fossils. Barring some determined intervention, CO2 will remain at elevated levels for about one hundred thousand years. In addition to the direct climate effect of its infrared absorption, it dissolves in ocean water and creates carbonic a.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 28b94ba | Since, as I've indicated, we don't fully understand the mechanism by which the orbital Milankovic forcing causes large climate swings, there is a lot of uncertainty here. The last warm interglacial before the one we're in now, the Eemian, about one hundred twenty-five thousand years ago, lasted for about ten thousand years. This length is typical. Most of these warm periods persist for roughly the length that ours has already lasted. Yet th.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| b79ba1b | now nearly circular, compared to other epochs, where it is slightly more egg-shaped--we inhabit an interglacial of exceptionally long duration. Models incorporating this fact suggest that, even without us, the ice would not return for another fifty thousand years. In other words, if we don't screw it up, sending climate careering beyond the safe zone, our luck might hold for quite some time. This warm, stable climate our civilization has en.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 036b7f6 | We don't know if we live or die, so we rape the women. --Franz Wittine | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| a08136c | Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Zaitsev and his Russian colleagues continued their occasional series of messages from the Crimea to the stars. In addition to the Teen Age Message, they sent Cosmic Calls I and II, which were constructed along principles similar to those behind Drake's original Arecibo message, but contained significantly more information. | David Grinspoon | ||
| bfca7a4 | I began to see this as a series of dilemmas nested like Russian dolls. Can today's SETI community agree on a policy about active SETI? Even if collectively forged and broadly ratified, would such an agreement actually control or change global behavior, as perceived from the outside? How would you get everyone to go along? Can human society in some sense agree on active SETI? Should we, as a species, cautiously try to hide our presence, or h.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 4b78969 | States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose... This | David Grinspoon | ||
| 39d2861 | Margulis and Lovelock were more than willing to mix science with philosophy and poetry, and they didn't mind controversy; in fact, I'd say they enjoyed and courted it. Gaia, subversively, blurs the boundaries between the scientific and the nonscientific. This may be one of its most valuable aspects, but is also a big reason that the scientific establishment has had so much trouble with it. Saying that "Earth is alive" is, of course, asking .. | David Grinspoon | ||
| cf8b9a4 | Cassie comes across as serious and studious, but once, after dinner in Washington with a group of NASA people, I asked her if her job title invited a lot of Men in Black questions. With little provocation, she suddenly reached into her purse, donned a pair of sleek black sunglasses, frowned seriously, and flashed a very official-looking "Planetary Protection Officer" badge at me. The fact" | David Grinspoon | ||
| 0ca8fef | How the hell could you ever know if a scientific theory had a probability of 10-6 of being wrong?" For decades we've had a running joke about our very scientific fathers, how seriously they take their own ideas and their (we think, at times) excessive faith in quantitative solutions to intractable problems. So we spent the rest of that evening saying things like "This has got to be the best vodka tonic I've ever tasted. There is only a poss.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 6a82a96 | Gazing over the countless fluctuations and transformations in Earth's multibillion-year history, I am struck by the unique strangeness of the present moment. We suddenly find ourselves sort of running a planet--a role we never anticipated or sought--without knowing how it should be done. We're at the controls, but we're not in control. This book is my view of how we got into this situation, and where that leaves us now. A child of the space.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 00bdc76 | The Anthropocene represents a braiding together of these into one inseparable narrative. This is "the end of history," and of biology and geology--at least as separate stories. Have they become irreversibly entwined? It's conceivable that there may never again be geological change without human influence. We are witnessing, and manifesting, something unprecedented and still completely unpredictable: the advent of self-aware geological chang.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 2254478 | His suggestion is that we should adopt best practices so we don't turn on our radar systems when they are pointed toward nearby stars, or intersecting the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, where there are, unavoidably, many stars in the background. It ought to be mentioned here that planetary radar is one of our main tools for learning about the properties of asteroids that may someday threaten life on Earth, and how we might mitigate against .. | David Grinspoon | ||
| cd326dd | is. I think our fundamental Anthropocene dilemma is that we have achieved global impact but have no mechanisms for global self-control. So, to the (debatable) extent that we are like some kind of global organism, we are still a pretty clumsy one, crashing around with little situational awareness, | David Grinspoon | ||
| fd8ef53 | 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. My name for this vision is Terra Sapiens, or "Wise Earth." A" | David Grinspoon | ||
| 6e07d10 | What was the question again? Is it when human activity first became detectable in the geological record? When humans first left a clear global marker, or golden spike? When human-induced change to the landscape became obvious? When we became an important agent of climate change? When we started to be the dominant geological force or pushed multiple environmental variables outside their normal ranges? Each of these would give us a different .. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 85e6d8a | He is absolutely sick and beside himself because he believes an innocent man is in the can. But Jack is a cop through and through, and he will not make any public statement that might embarrass his law-enforcement colleagues. | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| 42b6d8b | Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way. | Arthur Miller | ||
| 09b2c22 | must choose a geological deposit to mark our time, one that is uniquely human-born, I would suggest the area of Mare Tranquilitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, on the Moon, where the Apollo 11 astronauts first stepped onto the soil of another world, hopped about, did experiments, took rocks and soil, and left behind machines, flags, and footprints. Those boot marks will fade in a few million years as micrometeorites grind them into the surroun.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| fc9cbdc | These disturbances are the product of our human propensity to explore in teams, to develop new tools to expand our domain to places that are not part of our "natural" habitat." | David Grinspoon | ||
| 280a932 | Now, when you hear some people advocating or warning against "geoengineering" Earth by spraying sun-blocking aerosols into the upper atmosphere, they are proposing to induce a process that is constantly at work on Titan. I'll return to the physics, and the wisdom, of such an anti-greenhouse project in chapter 4. Climate" | David Grinspoon | ||
| b1e9524 | Wonderful, because life gained the ability to harvest sunlight for energy. What a fantastic breakthrough! Earth's biosphere learned to plug into the best power source the universe has to offer, tapping a nearby star to manufacture food from light. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 4baf4e6 | species. In this way, we've changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we've created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habita.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 9a04e5e | Linepithema humile is a species of ant native to Northern Argentina that has, with our help, become a new kind of global superorganism. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 9166623 | While ruthlessly aggressive toward other species, they are also unusually cooperative with their own kind. Ants from neighboring nests don't fight, as with other species, | David Grinspoon | ||
| 672bee5 | Whatever you choose to measure, be it global population, the damming of rivers, increases in communication or transport technology, or the relentless spread of McDonald's restaurants, the pattern is similar: a gradual but accelerating influence until about 1950. After that point, everything starts shooting exponentially off the charts, in the phenomenon known to scholars of the Anthropocene as "the Great Acceleration." The next set of graph.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 96e7887 | for the next several million years? Well, it might be, but there's a hitch. Unfortunately, what Jacob's results actually show is that Earth can be expected to be stabilized for all this time in an ice-free state. We've not only stopped the climate pendulum from swinging, but we've also got it pinned at one extreme end of its range. An ice-free Earth may in itself not sound horrible, unless you're attached to the kind of planet we've always .. | David Grinspoon | ||
| ce8b032 | the number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It's not too hard to come up with metrics that have not kept pace with the Great Acceleration. Yet, in the end, this exercise in contrarian thinking only reinforces the point: any set of meaningful measures will reveal the same pattern. Venus | David Grinspoon | ||
| e395b6a | Some unknown process was, it seemed, protecting CO2 from the anticipated destruction. This unexpected and strange stability presented a puzzle, which was solved by Michael McElroy at Harvard and Ron Prinn9 at MIT, two atmospheric scientists whose careers have straddled earth and planetary science. The answer, they found, lay in the highly reactive element chlorine. Even minuscule amounts of chlorine in such an environment wreak outsize havo.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 348404e | Here, I find it useful to point out the distinction between cleverness and wisdom. Cleverness is the ability to solve problems through invention and innovation. We've got that in spades. Wisdom is the ability to apply experience, awareness of context, and prior knowledge of consequences, and fold all that into action. There, we seem to be more challenged. Even to the extent (which is rapidly growing) that we are aware of our global influenc.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 84e6d07 | The idea arose when Dan Rothman, a geochemist at MIT, was studying the graphs showing changes in the carbon cycle at the time of the Great Dying. He noticed something about the shape of the curves. He saw a pattern of extremely rapid and accelerating atmospheric and oceanic change that did not look like the simple signature of a volcanic injection of gas into the environment. Rather, it looked to him like a "superexponential" pattern, the k.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| af63b17 | this comet was much smaller, less than half a mile across, and would miss Mars by about eighty thousand miles. This was still close enough to splatter the atmosphere with hydrogen and dust, producing atmospheric effects that were observable with telescopes and spacecraft. When the close approach occurred, it provided a great opportunity to learn more about the infrequent (on human timescales) but inevitable interactions of planets with come.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 8d339c1 | We've been lulled into an illusion of stasis by unusual climate stability during our short time here. If you include the rest of our history as a species (most of it), before we started keeping continuous track of ourselves, you'll find the story is different. Over longer timescales, Earth's climate has gone through large swings and, left to its own devices, will continue to do so. Blame it on Jupiter. Climate cycles on Earth are, in large .. | David Grinspoon | ||
| e93e67e | One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life-giving water, while Venus and Mars, lifeless through most of their existence, lost theirs. If so, then life may indeed be responsible for Earth's plate tectonics. One of the original architects of plate tectonic theory, Norm Sleep from Stanford, has become thoroughly convinc.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| ed8b743 | we left Earth to its own devices for long enough, it would eventually enter another ice age. This would be much more extreme than the kinds of climate changes we are potentially facing now. During the last ice age, up until about thirteen thousand years ago, an unbroken sheet of ice two or three miles thick extended from the poles down to the latitude of Minneapolis. Sea level dropped by around three hundred feet, completely redrawing coast.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 96c6cdd | Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet. Gaiasignatures | David Grinspoon | ||
| b3bd1e4 | Organisms and species do not have cosmological life spans. Gaia does, and this is perhaps a general property of living worlds. Influenced greatly by Lovelock and Margulis, I've argued that we are unlikely to find surface life on a planet that has not severely and flagrantly altered its own atmosphere. According to this idea, a planet cannot be "slightly alive" any more than a person can (at least not for long), and an aged planet such as Ma.. | David Grinspoon | ||
| 3043f2b | Also, Lovelock's radical idea--pay attention to the atmosphere and look for drastic departures from the expected mixture of gases--now forms the cornerstone of our life-detection strategies. | David Grinspoon |