Light of the Stars Quotes

“Making progress in science often hinges on asking the right kind of question.

Without a well-posed question, discussions become little more than people talking (or yelling) past each other.

And without a well-posed question, there’s no clear path toward gathering data that will yield answers.

Finding a good question is like throwing open the shades in a dark room.

It’s the first step in finding a new way to tell is important. It tells us where we should be looking, where we should be going, and how to begin organizing our efforts to get there.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“From the exoplanet data, astronomers can now say with confidence that one out of every five stars hosts a world where life as we know it could form.

So, when you’re standing out there under the night sky, choose five random stars.

Chances are, one of them has a world in its Goldilocks zone where liquid water could be flowing across its surface and life might already exist.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Ultimately, the problem we face is confronting a twenty-third-century dilemma armed only with a thirteenth-century mind. Our project of civilization has been successful on scales we could not have imagined when we began it ten millennia ago. But with that success has come consequences that will last for centuries.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Life was not just a patchy green scruff holding a tenuous position between rock and air; instead, it was a planetary power as important as volcanoes and tides. It was an active force shaping the complex multibillion-year history of the world.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Vernadsky proposed that the study of the Earth would not be complete without understanding the central role of life as a planetary force.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“In other words, pretty much every star you see in the night sky hosts at least one planet.

The next time you find yourself outside at night, take a moment to stop and consider the implications of this result as you gaze at all those pinpricks of light.

Every one of them hosts at least one world, and most stars will have more than one planet. Solar systems are the rule and not the exception. They’re everywhere.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson said:

“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

It’s remarkable to note that, more than fifty years ago, an American president was already aware of, and acknowledging, human-created climate change.

Johnson had been briefed on the dangers of CO 2 increases by the famous climate scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle, among others.

So, not only was Johnson aware of the issue, but he was already concerned enough to raise it before Congress. That single sentence in his address gives the lie to the claims of so many climate-change deniers that global warming is some kind of recent hoax.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Sure, it is possible we’re on the only world to host life in all of cosmic history.

Science has, of course, been arguing about the existence of life on other worlds for centuries. But the explosion in our knowledge about other worlds sheds new light on this question, revealing something remarkable.

The discovery of all those new planets means we can only be unique if the laws of the universe are strongly biased against life and intelligence.

In other words, there are so many planets in the right place for life to form that the burden now falls on the pessimists.

It’s up to the naysayers to demonstrate how, with so many worlds and so many possibilities over the whole of cosmic space and time, we somehow are the first and the only.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Try to get a teenager to change his or her driving behavior only by quoting statistics about traffic fatalities, and you’re likely to be met with a blank stare. That’s because we humans need more than numbers or the rising curve on a graph to understand the world. We are fundamentally storytellers. Ask the kids in that group of troubled teens about themselves, and they’ll respond with a narrative about families and fights, their isolation at school, or the time they ran away or the day a parent skipped out on them. We all use stories to make sense of ourselves in the world. And what’s true of individuals is also true of cultures and the sweep of their history.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“The whole history of the debate about life beyond Earth is an argument between optimists and pessimists. It’s a debate that began with the opposition between Aristotle and Epicurus, extended through the 1800s to Flammarion versus Whewell, and took its modern turn with the Drake equation, through which the battle between pessimism and optimism became quantitative.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Thus, the Earth was once a jungle world, a sweltering hothouse planet devoid of snow.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“For about the first two billion years of Earth’s history, its atmosphere contained only minute traces of oxygen, even though it had long been a home to life. For”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Atmospheric scientists call these flow patterns “Rossby waves,” and they were the cause of the dreaded “polar vortex” that brought record-cold air to inhabitants on the East Coast in the winter of 2014.59”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“While the Cold War made instant annihilation a credible threat in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s some were beginning to realize that even the everyday activities of our project of civilization were not, in total, going unnoticed by the planet.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“Lowell’s observations of Martian canals had become a joke in the scientific community.25 In the early 1950s, the possibility of life and intelligence in the universe remained a question that few scientists were seriously considering.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists.

There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse.

Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves.

The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland.

In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“the classic predator-prey model.

It begins with two equations. One tracks the prey population, which could be something like the number of bunnies in a forest. The second follows the predator population, which we could imagine as the number of wolves in the same forest.

The important point for modelers to capture is that the two populations are tied together. The wolves eat the bunnies, and that changes the bunny population. But eating bunnies lets the wolves reproduce, adding to their population.

So, the bunny population affects the wolf population, too. In these linked equations, there’s a part that describes how the bunnies get eaten by wolves, and another that describes how the wolves have more babies by eating bunnies.

Eventually, the bunny population peaks as the rapidly growing number of wolves starts having its impact. After that, the bunny numbers drop and they start to grow scarce.

The wolf population, however, takes some time to feel the change. Only later do their numbers peak and then start dropping. Eventually, the wolf population gets low enough for the bunnies to recover, and the cycle begins anew.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

“In other words, what were the chances that ours is the only civilization ever? Putting in the exoplanet data, we found the answer to be 10 –22 , or one in ten billion trillion.

We called this number the “pessimism line"

To understand how to think about the pessimism line, imagine you were handed a very big bag of Goldilocks-zone planets.

Our results say the only way human beings are unique as a civilization-building species would be if you pulled out ten billion trillion planets and not one of them had a civilization.

That’s because Kepler has shown us that there must be ten billion trillion Goldilocks-zone planets in the universe.”
― Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth