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 unli...
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 ar...
Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet. Gaiasignatures
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 stratigra...
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...
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...
The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated o...
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 adv...
Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate...
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 a...
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.
Work, Jacob was not claiming to make a detailed and correct prediction of climate changes over the next several hundred thousand years, only to determine whether our influence could be strong enough t...
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...
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...
Celled. Then a catastrophe occurred (in the sense of sudden change), a dramatic increase in biodiversity, an anti-extinction, if you will. In a flash, there were not just some animal forms, but all of...
Yet among the multiple animal inventions at the dawn of the Cambrian were new forms of mobility. A number of critters began burrowing into these mats and braving the toxic soils beneath them. These di...
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...
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 contin...
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-shape...
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...