David Grinspoon Quotes

We're going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system.

Among the plausible niches for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, the clouds of Venus are among the most accessible and the least well explained.

Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan.

Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.

I'm an astrobiologist, and I come from a planetary science background, so in a very broad sense, I study the evolution of planetary environments.

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

I do definitely believe that there is life away from this planet. I mean, we've kind of established that with the fact that we found bacteria on meteorites, and we've kind of used that to backtrack and show how this Earth, this planet, could have formed the ability to sustain life in the first place.

What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.

Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

Life outside of Earth is probably going to be really hard to find.

As far as I'm concerned, Enceladus has become the go-to place in our solar system for issues bearing on extraterrestrial life. It's a great place to examine extraterrestrial organic chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.

Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

There's no doubt that the search for planets is motivated by the search for life. Humans are interested in whether or not life evolves on other planets. We'd especially like to find communicating, technological life, and we look around our own solar system, and we see that of all the planets, there's only one that's inhabited.

The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.

Theoretically, there are planets with an environment that can support life. As yet there is no evidence that there indeed is life on other planets. It's only a matter of time before we get to know.

A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.

The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.

I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.

I believe that there may be intelligent life on other planets.