Earth in Human Hands
Earth in Human Hands | Shaping Our Planet’s Future will be published on the ideaXme website at monthly intervals over a period of 8 months with the kind permission of Dr David Grinspoon. This is the first time that Dr Grinspoon has granted any organisation the rights to publish this wonderful book. Dr. David Grinspoon studies surface-atmospheric interactions on terrestrial planets, atmospheric evolution and habitability, and planetary-scale human influences on the Earth system.
David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist, award-winning science communicator, and prize-winning author. He is a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. His research focuses on climate evolution on Earth-like planets, potential conditions for life elsewhere in the universe, and the planetary scale impacts of human activities on Earth. He is involved with several interplanetary spacecraft missions and is currently on the science team for NASA’s DAVINCI mission which will launch to Venus in 2029.In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural Chair of Astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress where he studied the human impact on Earth systems and organized a public symposium on the Longevity of Human Civilization. He has given dozens of public lectures about climate change in the Solar System. His technical papers have been published in Nature, Science, and numerous other journals, and he has given invited keynote talks at conferences around the world. Grinspoon’s popular writing has appeared in Slate, Scientific American, Natural History, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Sky & Telescope Magazine where he is a contributing editor and writes the regular “Cosmic Relief” column. His newest book is Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, co-authored with Alan Stern.
His book Earth in Human Hands was named a Best Science Book of 2016 by NPR’s Science Friday. His previous book Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. He lectures widely, and appears frequently as a science commentator on television, radio and podcasts, including as a frequent guest and host of StarTalk Radio. Also a musician, he leads the House Band of the Universe. Grinspoon was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for Public Communication of Planetary Science by the American Astronomical Society. In 2022 he was elected as a lifetime Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.Asteroid 22410 Grinspoon, a main-belt asteroid, is named after him.
Dr David Grinspoon
“For our species and our biosphere this is a time of huge peril but also of great potential. We have the technical knowledge to prevent climate change and to integrate our activities more gracefully into the great natural cycles of planetary activity. Ultimately, we can even be a huge benefit to Earth’s biosphere by preventing asteroid impacts and other future extinction threats. But in order to do any of this have to learn to manage ourselves, to function as a healthy planetary-scale society. There are great challenges and massive opportunities. It’s time to move the human story forward, and I’m excited to work with ideaXme to help do so”.
Earth in Human Hands – Chapter Five
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