Chris Impey

Talking About Life - Conversations On Astrobiology

Central 576.839 T146 2010

• Timothy Ferris - Voyager disk

• p51 Neil !deGrasse Tyson: If someone's going to discover a new law of physics, it's going to be because they're hanging out at the edges of what we've already explored, not because they did something on the tabletop. No one's going to take an inclined plane and some wooden blocaks and a metal ball and come up with a new law of physics.

  • p55 economics ... glory ... war ... " we had better put a check in one of those boxes, because if we can't, we're not going.
• p60 Steve Benner: boron and ribose
  • note Martin/Lane "energy first" makes the precursors of ribose (we've tried 200 variants, only one really works)
  • p64 "extremophiles": not really - DNA requires pH near 7, Rio Tinto pH 1 furiously pumps protons out of the cell