Earth in Human Hands Quotes

“Right now I would submit that lack of self-knowledge is an existential risk. An inability to act with global intent and consideration of multigenerational timescales is an existential risk.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“The planetary perspective provides a kind of out of body experience for us—hovering in orbit and watching ourselves sleepwalk through a slow disaster of our own making. Now, can this experience help us to shake ourselves awake? For virtually all of its history Earth has evolved without us, and we have always seen ourselves as autonomous actors on a passive planetary backdrop. But now we are beginning to see that our futures—those of humanity and of planet Earth—are tightly conjoined. If human civilization is to persist and thrive we will need a completely different view of our planet, and of ourselves, in which we acknowledge both our deep dependence and our increasing influence.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“It sometimes seems to rub people the wrong way to say anything sympathetic about humanity, positive about our potential influence on Earth or hopeful about our future. How could you not be shocked and alarmed by our jarring, accelerating influence on this planet? We rightfully feel some deep regret, and some shame, at how we have (not) managed ourselves. However, our obligation now is to move beyond just lamenting the job we’ve done as reluctant, incompetent planet-shapers. We have to face the fact that we’ve become a planetary force, and figure out how to be a better one.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Ultimately there may be no completely rational basis on which to decide. We can discuss probabilities and scenarios and continue to gather evidence, but the decision whether or not to make ourselves known may come down to what kind of universe we think we’re living in. I still feel that we cannot be frightened of the universe. I believe that we should start pursuing active SETI, reaching out to our space brethren and sistren, letting them know they are not alone and seeing if we can spark some cosmic conversation. There is no way to defend ourselves from, or hide from, some superadvanced entity that means to do us”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“invisible. Yet in our new Anthropocene science, the boundaries are not so clean. As we observe the world, the lens is part of the photograph. As I’ve discussed, climate modeling is hard enough even when the modelers are not themselves part of what is being modeled. Ecologists, accustomed to studying various biomes, or communities of organisms existing in specialized environments, are now studying “anthromes,” where human activities have become part of ecological systems. Rather than simply ignore or deplore croplands, rangelands, parks, cities, and managed forests, we can put them in our maps and models and decide how we want to integrate them into the world. The”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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 convinced that life is deeply implicated in the overall physical dynamics of Earth, including the “nonliving” interior domain. In describing the cumulative, long-term influence of life on geology, continent building, and plate tectonics, he wrote, “The net effect is Gaian. That is, life has modified Earth to its advantage.”6”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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 for it. The statement is both true and not true, profoundly insightful yet subject to infinite reinterpretation, and not a scientific statement that can be tested. Yet”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Science has repeatedly revealed to us that we are not unique or special — except, guess what. We are.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“This is our story, and we’re not sticking to it.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” that Arthur C. Clarke called, “the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“cities will be smarter, greener places. Over the centuries, we’ve made a lot of progress in learning how to urbanize. We invented plumbing and sanitation systems, learned not to stain our cities brown with coal ash, realized we don’t want polluted urban rivers. We are still learning how to live well in cities. I bet twenty-second-century cities will be nice places to live. Our”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or avoid the crash. We are waking up, and we can see the trends starting to turn. We are slowly rounding the corner on the related problems of poverty and overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Remixing Our Metaphors We’re not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we’ve gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. A weed does not weed itself. We could.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“the European Space Agency’s Copernicus program, which will provide continuous scientific observations of the health of our planet. We’ve had uninterrupted weather monitoring for decades, but scientific measurements have been more ad hoc and spotty: one satellite is up for a while, and returns some data until it fails. Our data and our records have been discontinuous, but the plan now is to keep things going. It is assumed that satellites will fail, and when they do, a replacement will be launched. Continuity of observations is built into”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Around six thousand to seven thousand years ago, sea level stabilized after a multithousand-year period of rapid rise. The first large coastal settlements on several continents all date to this period. The high-protein fish diets made possible by stable sea level and consequent coastal settlement contributed to the rise of complex societies around the world. In”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Milankovič cycles I describe in chapter 4. The wobbling of Earth’s axis and the vibrating eccentricity of its orbit, forced by the gravitational pull of the other planets, leads to phases of high and low climate variability. At times, Africa has experienced extreme and rapid fluctuation between dry and wet conditions, forcing extinctions and rapid adaptations. What Rick and his colleagues have found is that all the major genera in our family tree, including Australopithecus (around 4 million years ago), Paranthropus (2.7 million years ago), and our own genus, Homo (about 2.8 million years ago), first appeared during these periods of erratic climate change. Periods”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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 them. So any serious curtailment of this technology to avoid one suspected existential risk might cause increased vulnerability to a known one. Gertz’s radical anti-METI”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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 possibility of 10-6 that it is not.” All”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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 hopefully announce ourselves to the universe?”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“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, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“The conflict came to a boil in October 2006, at a SETI meeting in Valencia, Spain, where there was a debate over active SETI and a contentious vote over new guidelines for initiating broadcasts from Earth. Later that month, Nature published a scolding editorial criticizing the SETI community for a lack of openness. According to the Nature editors, the risk posed by active SETI is real. It is not obvious that all extraterrestrial civilizations will be benign—or that contact with even a benign one would not have serious repercussions for people here on Earth… yet the Valencia meeting voted against trying to set up any process for deliberating over the style or content of any spontaneous outgoing messages. In effect, anyone with a big enough dish can appoint themselves ambassador for Earth. The SETI community should assess [the risks] in a discussion that is open and transparent enough for outsiders to listen to and, if so moved, to actively participate. As a lifelong SETI enthusiast, I found it disconcerting to see the field so publicly chewed out.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“can participate in interstellar conversation. Yet there is inherent asymmetry in galactic radio discourse. It is much easier to listen than to transmit. A huge gulf yawns between the ability to build a radio telescope and the ability to mount a sustained multimillennial broadcasting and listening program. We cannot reasonably search for our equals.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“What if one characteristic of really advanced intelligence is to become less and less distinguishable from natural phenomena?”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“The Soviet counterpart to the Green Bank meeting, the First All-Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Interstellar Communication, was held in May 1964, at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia. Perhaps less concerned about the “ridicule barrier” and any public threat to research funding in their more centralized scientific enterprise, the Soviet scientists were eager to publish their papers. So this is the first SETI meeting for which published proceedings exist. The”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“At the Green Bank meeting, Drake encouraged the participants to come up with a consensus estimate for every factor in the equation. They estimated that half of all stars have planets (a little low, we now know) and that the average number of habitable planets orbiting each of these stars is between one and five (probably a little high). They figured the probability of life forming on one of these planets is 100 percent. This seems optimistic, but sixty years later, we still don’t have any empirical purchase on this number.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“In 1961, Frank Drake hosted the first SETI conference at Green Bank. There were only eleven in attendance, including Philip Morrison; Carl Sagan; Melvin Calvin (who, during this conference, received a call awarding him a Nobel Prize!); astronomer Su-Shu Huang, who invented the notion of habitable zones around stars; and neuroscientist John Lilly. Swept up in optimism and camaraderie, the participants formed a whimsical organization called the Order of the Dolphin, after Lilly’s work toward communicating with these sleek, bright creatures who seemed to encourage our hope for conversing with other intelligent species.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Yet another recent and distinct species of humans, the Red Deer Cave People, lived in China until at least around eleven thousand years ago. Hints of other recent human species have also been found, and it’s clear that we don’t really know how widely peopled Earth was, until very recently, with alien humanoids. Twenty thousand years ago, Earth may have been home to a wide range of distinct human species. We don’t know what happened to all these close cousins, but it seems likely that in various ways, they fell victim to the great success of our species as we spread around the globe. What a strange and different world it would be if multiple species of humans had survived to the present day.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future

“Welcome to the Sapiezoic Eon Some see the concept of an Anthropocene epoch as grandiose. They wonder if the coming of humanity is really so important, seen against the immense backdrop of Earth history. They worry that we are thinking too big. Yet I think the opposite is true. Maybe in thinking of it as only a new epoch we are thinking way too small. A shift to a new epoch is not that rare. An epoch typically lasts for a few million years, which, for Earth, means it’s no big deal. Yet this is not merely another geological shift among many in Earth’s long, ever-changing history.”
― David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future