The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“We have cracked open the door to what is possible for life elsewhere in the universe,” Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and U.S. Geological Survey, who led a headline-grabbing 2010 NASA study about arsenic-based life discovery at Mono Lake that was subsequently severely challenged by the world’s scientific community.
“I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,” says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein.
“This shows that even when biology on Earth is comprised entirely of microbes, you can still have what could be considered an enormous die-off event that otherwise is not recorded in the fossil record,” said Stanford University’s Malcolm Hodgskiss about clues from Canadian rocks formed billions of year ago that reveal a previously unknown loss of life when oxygen levels plummeted, resulting in a die-off likely greater than the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“We were stunned when the astronauts revealed in 1969 the beauty of our planet seen from space. It took Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer and inventor, to observe how wrong it was to call this planet Earth when, clearly, it is Ocean,” says futurist James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory that views Earth as a living organism. “Despite being fifty years ago, this discovery that we live on an ocean planet is only just beginning to penetrate the dusty science of geology. It is shameful that we know far more about the surface of Mars and its atmosphere than we know about parts of our oceans. It is also risky.”
“Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” says famed British environmentalist and futurist, James Lovelock describing cyborgs as self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today’s robots and artificial intelligence systems in the emerging era of the Novacene. “I think of cyborgs as another kingdom of life,” he says. “They will stand to us in much the same way as we ourselves, as a kingdom of animals, stand to plants. ”
