All my life I have believed that there must be other intelligent life in the Universe.  When you gaze upon the endless starry night it seems statistically impossible that there isn’t some form of intelligent life out there.  It may not be human-like but life there must be.  In a prior column, I wrote about the fact that scientists looking for life elsewhere have redefined the definition of life as it was concluded that perhaps our earth bound definition  needs to be greatly expanded.

Last week there was an announcement that astronomers had discovered that there were five planets circling a star called 55 Cancri where it had been thought there were only four.    This makes this planetary system the most extensive found outside our own. Further, this fifth planet has some earthly characteristics relative to its distance from 55 Cancri, so that it just might have water.  This discovery came about as scientists are in transition from studying planets to studying planetary systems.  As Geoff Marcy, a professor at University of California, Berkeley said:  “We now know our Sun and its family of planets is not unusual”. 

Another way of saying this is that scientists, in their effort to locate life elsewhere have moved from looking for planets that are earth-like to solar systems that are similar to ours.  This is an obvious and logical progression.  Technology is not yet at the stage where we can find small planets.  Evidently the smallest size detectable is on the scale of Jupiter.  …

The impact that humanity is having on climate change is directly related to the fact that there are so many of us. Add on top of our shear numbers the fact that we treat the planet harshly and it is clear why we are moving toward a global crisis.

Consider some facts about the growth of human population. Humans have been on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years. It took until 1804 for our numbers to reach 1 billion. It took another 123 years to reach 2 billion in 1927. It only took another 33 years for us to reach 3 billion in 1960 and 14 years to reach 4 billion in 1974. That means that if you are older that 40 the world’s population has doubled in your lifetime. There are now 6.6 times more of us now than 200 hundred years ago. It is also during these 200 hundred years that the Industrial Revolution occurred, bringing with it the use of fossil fuels for powering our societies and economies.

It is not clear, and has been open to debate as to what the “natural” or “perfect” level of human population is for the earth. What is the global number that could be sustained indefinitely in a perfect and interrelated manner on Earth? There is no correct answer to that question. It is clear that a few hundred million of us living lives of hunters and gatherers …

We are moving toward the end of 2007 and there are still people that question whether the planet is warming up and more specifically whether humans have anything to do with it.  I have listened to and read some of the thinking of these people and it falls into several categories.  First, and this is true, there are people, Republicans mostly, that cannot stand Al Gore – they still remember his self righteous sighing in 2000 - and are therefore tying the message with the messenger.  Second, there are those that are natural contrarians, so they will naturally react negatively when every Hollywood star, starlet, celebrity and blow dried news anchor gets on the global warming soapbox again with moral self righteousness (the Polar bears are dying, what about the Polar bears?).  Third there are those that site that the earth has warmed up before, so no big deal this is just a planetary cycle.

I am so tired of all of this dialogue.  The earth is warming up and the scientific evidence is irrefutable, at least to this observer.  The question is not is there or is there not global warming.  The question is not whether we humans have anything to do with it.  The question is managing risk.  Whether there is global warming or not, as a species we should be planning for the worst.  If we don’t, hundreds of millions of us will most likely perish over the next 75 years.   Global warming, by all accounts, seems to …

It was 50 years ago this week that the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite to orbit the earth. It changed the world.  In fact, there are few, if any events of the last 50 years that had such a global impact on just about every aspect of humanity. I can still remember the night that, as a young boy standing in the front yard with my parents; we looked up at the starry sky waiting for Sputnik.  There it was, a slow man-made star moving across the sky. We listened to its’ beeping on the radio. It filled me with wonder.  I did not see it as Russian but rather as man made, that we humans had done this.  The phrase “The sky’s the limit” was now a phrase of the past. This was space!

The launch of Sputnik caused great consternation in the United States.  We had fallen behind the Russians.  We were no longer the only player at the center of the stage of human dreams and aspirations.  It has been universally acknowledged that this event triggered the space race and jump started a decades’ long emphasis on the teaching of science at all levels in the United States.  Within the context of the cold war, …