R.I.P. Rebecca Tarbotton, Head of Rainforest Action Network

Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of Rainforest Action Network,  tragically drowned in rough surf in San Pancho, north of Puerto Vallarta, on December 28, 2012. Above, she addresses the 2012 REVEL Conference in October.

Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears

In Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, butterflies sip a yellow-spotted river turtle's tears. The mineral-rich liquid helps the insects reproduce. In exchange, the reptile gets a good eye-cleaning. (ref) Photo by Pete Oxford/Minden Pictures

Doha COP18 Ending in Failure as Super-Typhoon Bopha Ravages the Philippines

 As hopes for progress fade at COP18 in Doha, in spite of much talk about the devastation of Hurricane Sandy a few weeks ago in the U.S. and it's impact on both scientists and the general public, another super-storm, Typhoon Bopha, is devastating the Philippines, with 1000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless at last count. Bopha is the strongest typhoon ever to hit Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Phillipines.  Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes. 

 

Remember how Sandy, moving in a northeastern direction up the US coast, stopped opposite New Jersey, gained strength and wind-speed, and then punched directly west? As the projected storm track (above right) shows, after having battered the southern lands, Bopha is expected to do a similar jujitsu- after strengthening in the China sea again, it will spin down to the east and hit the northern island of Luzon, the most populous island of the Philippines.

The Phillipine's delegate to the Doha COP118 Conference broke down while pleading for action:

World Bank Now Warns of Climate Catastrophe

"A shocking new report commissioned by the World Bank is warning temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, causing devastating food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought — even if countries meet their current pledges to reduce emissions. If these promises are not met, the increase could happen even sooner." -DemocracyNow, Dec 4, 2012

New York City: Carbon Emissions Visualized

NYC carbon footprint:  At standard pressure and 59 °F a metric ton of carbon dioxide gas would fill a sphere 33 feet across (density of CO₂ = 1.87 kg/m³ (ref). If this is how New York's emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds.
54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second.
 Emissions in 2010 were 12% less than 2005 emissions. The City of New York is on track to reduce emissions by 30% by 2017 - an ambitious target. By Carbon Visuals and The Environmental Defense Fund.

Superstorm Sandy and Climate Change

Dumbo District  Flooded Oct 29, 2012

From Tom Zeller on HuffPo: "Hurricane Sandy's Storm Surge Wreaks Havoc As Its Energy And Trajectory Stun Experts":
"As Andrew Freeman at the website Climate Central noted last week -- even as Hurricane Sandy was still gathering strength in the Caribbean -- it is rather uncommon for hurricanes with Sandy's origins to move inland into the U.S. this late in the year. 'Normally, hurricanes that form in Sandy's location do head seaward, particularly in October, when strong cold fronts moving off the East Coast tend to sweep tropical weather systems away from the mainland,' Freeman said. 'In fact, there may only have been a couple of cases in the historical record dating back to the 19th century when a hurricane took a track in October similar to the one Sandy may ultimately follow.'
"Sandy followed the path it did in part because an unusual high pressure system has been parked over Greenland. That system is acting like a block, preventing anything from pushing northward through it, including Sandy, which instead took a devastating westward turn into New Jersey and onward into Pennsylvania.
"Meanwhile, the jet stream -- the steady, eastward-moving air current that undulates around the Northern Hemisphere, including across Canada and the U.S., and which would normally sweep storms along -- has been losing speed. In some areas, the drop-off has been as much as 14 percent, according to Jennifer Francis, a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. That loss of speed, Francis recently noted, could lead to storms in the East appearing to get stuck, not unlike what is now happening to Sandy over Pennsylvania.
One theory for the drop-off in jet stream speed? The steady loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming.
"'There is evidence that Arctic sea ice loss might be responsible for that sort of behavior of the jet stream,' Masters said. 'Whether it was the case for this particular block, we don't know. Our sea ice losses are a relatively new phenomenon, and we don't have a lot of years of data to study. But there certainly is a lot of potential for climate change to affect a storm like this.'" (full article here)

2012: Hottest Year Ever for the US, Arctic Sea-ice at Record Low

Some effects of sea-ice loss in the Arctic:

Heating of the arctic ocean and contiguous land masses:
-Release of methane and CO2 from permafrost areas
- Increased melt of the Greenland ice-cap. In terms of sea-level rise, this is the big one- the Greenland ice-cap, in some places 3 kilometers thick, is melting rapidly. If all that ice melts and drops into the ocean, sea-levels will rise by 7 meters.
- Reduced salinity in the North Atlantic is weakening  the Atlantic conveyor circulation at the northern end, destabilizing climate in Northern Europe
- Open seas in the arctic have oil and gas exploiters planning major drilling and extraction, the burning of this additional carbon will itself  increase atmospheric CO2 and global heating

-Reduced heat differential between Arctic and mid-latitudes: reduced strength of jet stream;
    - which allows arctic air to pour down into mid-latitudes and remain there for a longer time (extreme winter cold snaps, US and Europe 2010, 2011)
    - and allows very warm air to pour into arctic areas and remain for longer (2012 flash melt of greenland ice surface)

Update, Oct 26. One of those above-mentioned arctic outpourings is underway, with our local daytime temperatures dropping 30 degrees in 2 days. This arctic blast will collide in a few days with Hurricane Sandy,  a huge storm moving up the coast toward New York City. Sandy  is  blocked from a normal northeasterly trajectory by a high pressure mass sitting over Greenland, and is expected to lurch westward directly into the most heavily populated area of North America; the resulting hybrid storm could produce severe damages and flooding. The penetration of the arctic air mass, the late season hurricane, and the high pressure mass stuck over Greenland are examples of weather effects expected to accompany climate change, and here they may hybridize and produce a real mess on the East Coast.
At the same time, the last debates of the presidential campaign of 2012 are over, and for the first time since 1988, the subject of climate change was not even broached. Instead both candidates competed in promising more drilling and oil production. 

Designer Slugs- The Beautiful Nudibranch

Extreme Skydive Felix Baumgartner Oct 8 2012

Felix Baumgartner will skydive from 120,000 feet over New Mexico on October 8th (postponed due to high winds- see Stratos website for updates).
 Felix's skydive will be broadcast live online at the RedBull Stratos site.

Update: He did it! Videos and info at the website-

HD Curiousity Mars Landing- Luke Fitch / Bard Canning

From the "Who says we can't be friends?" department.

Sloan Survey 3: 400,000 Galaxies Mapped in 3D

Each speck you see in this animation is a galaxy, and each contains  several hundred billion stars. Almost all the stars are thought to have planetary systems.  These are actual photographs of these  galaxies and their relative positions, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 3. But this is a small slice of the visible universe, with only 400,000 galaxies mapped. There are thought to be at least a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe.

Space Gopher at the Cosmodrome

A gopher lives under the rocket rails at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan. Russian Space Agency technicians set up a camera to observe him. (See an 8 minute version, different sound track)

Blue Ribbon Eel free swimming, Lembeh, Sulawesi, Indonesia

A trillion planets- what now for SETI?

Based on the findings of the Kepler planet-finder mission so far, it is now believed that there are at least 1 trillion planets in our galaxy. (There are estimated to be in excess of a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe). If even only 1 out of 1,000 planets were inhabited, that's still a billion living worlds in the Milky Way alone.  While all biospheres may develop intelligent species, not all intelligent species may be of the techno-industrial space-faring type (think dolphins, for example).  But those that are, are going to be much older than ours- and presumably also more advanced-  because ours is at the very dawn of its space-faring age, and other planetary civilizations might be as much as a billion years old.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI,  gave a talk at TED  in May about SETI's new scope, the likelihood of contact, and what might happen when we do make contact.

British Zoologist Gets Shagged By Rare Parrot

David and Severn Suzuki on Rio+20 Conference

DemocracyNow did two recent shows with the Suzukis to review the Rio+20 Conference-

June 21:

June 25:

Venus Transit 2012 - by Solar Dynamics Observatory

Wrapping my mind around the sizes and distances one is seeing here... that black disk, Venus, is the same size as Earth. And in these pictures, the sun is more than twice as far from Venus as Venus is from the Earth.
Venus is our twin planet; the same size and composition, and a close companion in our orbits around the sun. But because the bulk of its atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide, an extreme greenhouse effect has  ravaged the surface. Temperatures there can reach a scorching 870 degrees Fahrenheit (470 degrees Celsius).

Spider Rolls Up a Wasp

The Secret Life of Plankton

View the Full presentation at TED

Let’s Be Less Productive!

Something we should really think about: by measuring our society only on the one-dimensional scale of productivity and growth, are we missing the most important things?

Tim Jackson writes:

"By easing up on the gas pedal of efficiency and creating jobs in what are traditionally seen as “low productivity” sectors, we have within our grasp the means to maintain or increase employment, even when the economy stagnates. 

"At first, this may sound crazy; we’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. But there are sectors of the economy where chasing productivity growth doesn’t make sense at all. Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention. The caring professions are a good example: medicine, social work, education. Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages.

"In the first place, the time spent by these professions directly improves the quality of our lives. Making them more and more efficient is not, after a certain point, actually desirable. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour? The Royal College of Nursing in Britain warned recently that front-line staff members in the National Health Service are now being 'stretched to breaking point', in the wake of staffing cuts, while a study earlier this year in the Journal of Professional Nursing revealed a worrying decline in empathy among student nurses coping with time targets and efficiency pressures. Instead of imposing meaningless productivity targets, we should be aiming to enhance and protect not only the value of the care but also the experience of the caregiver.

"The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar 'commodity.' It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.

"Care is not the only profession deserving renewed attention as a source of economic employment. Craft is another. It is the accuracy and detail inherent in crafted goods that endows them with lasting value. It is the time and attention paid by the carpenter, the seamstress and the tailor that makes this detail possible. The same is true of the cultural sector: it is the time spent practicing, rehearsing and performing that gives music, for instance, its enduring appeal. What — aside from meaningless noise — would be gained by asking the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony faster and faster each year?"

Read the full essay:"Let's Be Less Productive", at NYT Sunday Review.

Mystery Creature Identified

The creature, filmed by a surveillance camera below a deep-sea drilling platform, has been identified as, appropriately, deepstaria enigmatica, and yes, it is a species of jellyfish. There's more info on this surprising animal at Deep Sea News.

Geo-Engineering- Is there a technological solution to global warming?

"For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale- geo-engineering, as the practice is known- has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. 'There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,' David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geo-engineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. 'Nonetheless,' he added, 'it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.'
There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction."
Read Michael Specter's wide-ranging and thoughtful review of where we stand:
 The Climate Fixers, at The New Yorker online.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Walking on Air, produced for NASA using time-lapse sequences photographed by the crew of Expedition 30
aboard the International Space Station. Music by Howard Blake. (more info at NASA)

Frans de Waal: Moral Behavior in Animals

In perhaps the worst idea a Frenchman ever had, Descartes declared animals to be machine-like automatons which had no mind and felt no pain, opening the way to several centuries of cruel treatment, culminating in the industrial-scale animal-testing of the last half-century. More recently, there are some arguing today an equally absurd idea, that all morality comes from religion; animals (and "non-believers" alike) have no sense of morality. Franz De Waal shows just how wrong these notions are.

Paul Gilding at TED Conf: The Earth is Full

Middle America Is Experiencing a Massive Increase in 3.0+ Earthquakes

"A new United States Geological Survey study has found that middle America between Alabama and Montana is experiencing an 'unprecedented' and 'almost certainly man-made' increase in earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater. In 2011, there were 134 events of that size. That's six times more than were normally seen during the 20th century.
In some regions, the increase in earthquakes is even greater than six fold. For example, in Oklahoma over the past half-century, there were an average of 1.2 quakes of greater than 3.0 magnitude per year. Since 2009, there have been more than 25 per year."
"A naturally-occurring rate change of this magnitude is unprecedented outside of volcanic settings or in the absence of a main shock, of which there were neither in this region,"  scientists wrote in the study.  (source: The Atlantic)

Bat-Killing Fungus Continues Deadly Spread; Death Toll Now at 7 Million

Extinction countdown: North American Bats

"Things keep getting worse for North American bats. Nearly seven million from various species have now fallen victim to the deadly but little-understood disease known as white-nose syndrome (WNS) since it was first observed in February 2006. The fungus that causes WNS, Geomyces destructans, has quickly spread from cave to cave and state to state, and the disease itself was confirmed for the first time west of the Mississippi River this week. This makes 19 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces where the disease can now be found. WNS has a 70 to 100 percent mortality rate; it has no cure or treatment, nor is it entirely clear how it kills bats."

(Read more at  Scientific American's  Extinction Countdown blog)

U.N. High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness

The UN yesterday held the “High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm”, an effort spearheaded by Bhutan's Prime Minister, Jigme Thinley.

Here’s an excerpt from the World Happiness Report, prepared for the conference:  

"The realities of poverty, anxiety, environmental degradation, and unhappiness in the midst of great plenty should not be regarded as mere curiosities. They require our urgent attention, and especially so at this juncture in human history. For we have entered a new phase of the world, termed the Anthropocene by the world’s Earth system scientists. 

"The Anthropocene is a newly invented term that combines two Greek roots: “anthropo,” for human; and “cene,” for new, as in a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene is the new epoch in which humanity, through its technological prowess and population of 7 billion, has become the major driver of changes of the Earth’s physical systems, including the climate, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity. 

"The Anthropocene will necessarily reshape our societies. If we continue mindlessly along the current economic trajectory, we risk undermining the Earth’s life support systems – food supplies, clean water, and stable climate – necessary for human health and even survival in some places. In years or decades, conditions of life may become dire in several fragile regions of the world. We are already experiencing that deterioration of life support systems in the drylands of the Horn of Africa and parts of Central Asia. 

"On the other hand, if we act wisely, we can protect the Earth while raising quality of life broadly around the world. We can do this by adopting lifestyles and technologies that improve happiness (or life satisfaction) while reducing human damage to the environment. “Sustainable Development” is the term given to the combination of human well-being, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. We can say that the quest for happiness is intimately linked to the quest for sustainable development."

 NYTimes Dot Earth coverage of the conference
 
Jigme Thinley:  
Bhutan Rails Against World's 'Suicidal Path' (Guardian UK 4/1/12)

U.N. Happiness Project- Timothy Ryback, NYTimes

Re-appraising Aquatic Ape Theory in Light of New Findings

Elaine Morgan reviews Aquatic Ape Theory in light of new discoveries and findings. I've always found this idea compelling, even more so now. (TED 2009)

The Immortal Worm- Update

Dr Aziz Aboobaker on his latest breakthrough studying planarians - or immortal worms.
 Read his paper at the National Academies of Science.

James Hansen at TED Conference, March 2012

Ocean's Doom- The End of Jack Mackerel

"It’s going fast," he said as he looked at the 57-foot boat. "We've got to fish harder before it's all gone." And that is what is happening, and not only with the small-scale fishermen, but with mega-scale fishing as well. Now, one would think that when fish began disappearing, fishermen would back off long enough for stocks to replenish. But the agenda- and the pace of destruction- is set by the fishing industry, and there, apparently, the logic doesn't apply. Exploitive industries never back off. Read "In Mackerel's Plunder, Hints of Epic Fish Collapse", an investigation supported by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of The Center for Public Integrity.

Resource Depletion and the End of Growth

Great film from Incubate Pictures

Hi-Res Earth 2

Click for enlargement

NASA has released a second high-res image of the Earth.

New Hi-Res Earth Photo From NASA

(click for 1600 x 1200 desktop-size image)

Extreme Green

Bilal Bomani wants to create a biofuel that is "extreme green"-  sustainable, alternative and renewable. At NASA's GreenLab Research Facility, he uses algae and halophytes to create a self sustaining, renewable energy ecosystem that doesn't consume arable land or fresh water.

Solar Blasts Bring Big Auroras

click to enlarge

The sun has been sending large CMEs
(Coronal Mass Ejections) in our direction these last weeks. Beyond screwing up communications, these blasts make for beautiful auroras- like this one photographed by Bjorn Jorgensen in Norway. See his other photos here.

The Cosmic Perspective

Let's start the New Year with a thoughtful essay from Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dircetor of New York City's Hayden Planetarium...

The Cosmic Perspective
By Neil deGrasse Tyson
From Natural History magazine, April 2007

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [ their ] low contracted prejudices.
-James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics (1757)

 Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker . Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation's needs or wants.

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

* * *

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called “Passport to the Universe,” which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. “Passport to the Universe,” he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

Allow me to suggest that it's the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I . . . until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

* * *

I know what you're thinking: we're smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he's slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

* * *

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It's simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world's water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth's observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we're made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

* * *

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.

First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks' nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.

Those findings mean it's conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia . So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the “ multiverse ,” in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.

* * *

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.

The cosmic perspective is humble.

The cosmic perspective is spiritual — even redemptive — but not religious.

The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.

The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.

The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.

The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.

The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

* * *

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. His most recent book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (W.W. Norton, 2007), is a collection of his favorite Natural History essays from the past dozen years.

Amazing Slow-mo Owl Video

"Wind Lens": Big Boost to Windpower

Japanese engineers discover a simple lensing rim affixed to the rotor assembly can double windpower output. (ref) With that kind of efficiency in windpower, and similar advances in efficiency and cost in solar, we could be sustainable and self-sufficient in energy in the US, if we set our minds to it. And we've just begun- there's still cold fusion (NASA is doing it now), and my favorite, hamster power.

Gorilla Encounter

Gorilla troupe checking out a human.

Climate Dawn: Tenacity Wins

"Tenacity is the Rodney Dangerfield of virtues- we underestimate it. It maintains a peculiar relationship to time. Unlike bravery or generosity, fed by crisis or sudden opportunity, tenacity must hang on during long fallow seasons and droughts, when it almost seems pointless. Tenacity is the ultimate expression of hope and faith. And just as the scientists warn us that reversing climate disruption will take a long time, and that the price for the pollution we have already unleashed will be with us for many lifetimes, so too the path for reversing our climate folly has a long arc, something we often lose track of.
"In the last quarter of 2011 that arc of common sense broke through to the surface-  because important chunks of the human community have been sticking at the task of climate rescue.
So here's to tenacity- the virtue we need more of. May the year 2012 be filled with it."

read the full article: "Climate Dawn" by Carl Pope, Executive Chairman, Sierra Club