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 exist...
Linepithema humile is a species of ant native to Northern Argentina that has, with our help, become a new kind of global superorganism.
Other than the external threat of asteroid and comet strikes (a common hazard throughout the solar system), all Earth’s natural hazards go hand in hand with its habitability. Indeed, Earth seems to be...
Using the techniques, perspective, and language of planetary exploration, Sagan, Toon, and Pollack published a paper in Science in 1979, long before climate change became the issue it is now, entitled...
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...
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...
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...
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 n...
Historian Charles Mann has suggested that this mashed-up new biological phase we’ve induced be called the Homogenocene, as we have blended so many evolving populations, once geographically dispersed a...
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...
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 cer...
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 Messa...
The carbon cycle has grabbed the headlines, but we’ve also seized hold of many other major geochemical cycles. Through production of fertilizers, we’ve radically altered Earth’s nitrogen cycle. The su...
Titan, by our standards, is really cold, at -290 degrees Fahrenheit. Without any methane greenhouse, it would be much colder still, by about 22 degrees. Yet, if we put all that methane into a basic cl...
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 P...
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...
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 bo...
Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet. Gaiasignatures
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.
This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial...
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