David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published […]
Astronomy
This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water. This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, […]
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons: Local space history may recorded in its rocks, which are about as old as the formation of the solar system. It is carbon-rich and scientists think […]
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018. “Someone was telling me […]
Curve of silver, Scythe becoming, Calends pass as you appear Bowing toward Venus. The evening star gleams just beyond your embrace, And you curtsy to it, reaching Like a dancer, arms outstretched and back bent, arching While Jupiter, behind, tries to catch you And in a few nights, will succeed. Twilight sky full of […]
My boys and I have gone to the sun and back. Not literally, of course. We’ve been on the curve of the Earth the whole time. But we’ve been on a mission, 20 nights on the road traveling north toward the longest day of the year. Our trip started in Colorado near the 40th […]
Ok, I thought, I’m an astro writer, I got this. For one thing, you wouldn’t use astroseismology to look at the pulses of a pulsating white dwarf: pulses are relatively long, astroseismology looks for little jitters. For another, AG spelled it “asteroseismology,” laughably wrong. After further investigation, the astro writer learns a lesson: never second-guess […]
After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, […]
