A little poetry and prose from the Blue Marble Space family

“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” — Carl Sandburg, from The Atlantic, March 1923. We are certainly in trying times. With the current global pandemic of COVID-19 disease driven by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can all use a little […]

February 13, 2019

Detectability of Future Earth

A cosmic perspective on the future of our world and the longevity of our civilization A new special issue of the journal Futures is now available and features papers that examine the future of Earth and civilization from an astrobiological perspective, particularly focused on the extent to which human activities could be detectable across interstellar distances. BMSIS Scientist Jacob Haqq-Misra edited this special issue and provides the introductory chapter. The issue also includes contributions from BMSIS Scientists Sanjoy Som, Brendan […]

October 21, 2016

Leaving Earth, in Search of a Better Home…

Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. We, Earthlings have taken our planet for granted. We have come far from realizing that the resources here are limited and finite. From the air we breathe to the water we consume, everything here are perishable. And with the geometrically growing population and the pollution we caused, the day we run out of resources is not very far. We had pushed the Earth to its […]

September 7, 2016

Talking Mars with The New Yorker

Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra was recently featured on the New Yorker Radio Hour in a segment titled “Why Do You Want to Go to Mars?” Archive editor Josh Rothman hosts a conversation with Dr. Haqq-Misra and Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, about the prospects and perils of attempting the human colonization of Mars. [listen to the segment at WNYC.org]