David Grinspoon Quotes

As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

My perspective is the Earth will be here. It just may not be habitable to our life form. We get confused. We think we're the center of everything.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

I don't think we are going to become extinct. We're very clever and extremely resourceful - and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I'm sure. But whether our lives will be as rich as they are now is another question.

Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.

It's hard for us to imagine, as humans, that we'll become less powerful. But it'll be healthier for the planet and for the eco-system if that does happen. If humans are going to merge with machines, then let's get on with it. I love humans, but I also love dinosaurs - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted them to die out, either.

That's standard for being a Green: standing up for a long-term future, which is a much more clear view of where the world is going to and where this country should be going there than either of the old parties have.

We have all this very clever technology and all these abilities to manipulate the world in all these ways, yet we are faced with the very real question of whether we can be sustainable on this planet - whether or not, in fact, we can endure.

I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb.

Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

To my mind, to say that says to young people "and you probably are not going to get out of debt, and you probably do not have a climate that's going to be here come 2050." And, in my view, the point is not necessarily to win now but it's to begin building our power.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

There's so many things happening with computers and what-not, where we may be able to live until 150 and even longer, but if the planet's not here for us to live on it, if we burn ourselves out from global warming and everything else, if we don't figure that out, if we don't figure out an alternative form of energy, I think we're in big, fat trouble.

Capitalism is destroying Mother Earth, and to destroy Mother Earth is to destroy humanity.

Nature's message is clear: we can't keep doing what we're doing now.

In China's thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today.