14 Quotes by Penelope Boston

We'll be looking at Earth from the outside, looking at how we study our own planet.

On Earth, the bottoms of these cracks can house organisms in a much more pleasant environment than the surface at large. Obviously, if such communities thrive or thrived on Mars, some of the evidence may well be at the bottom of these cracks. We have much imaging evidence of these terrains on Mars for comparison to the similar terrains here on Earth, not just at the poles but many other high latitude and high altitude places.

I think we'll come out of this with unique technology and units that we can test in the lava tube caves here. We've already done some testing to look at the size of the units and how they would bounce on a rugged surface.

I want to try and get into those kinds of places. It's very important to make devices for life detection on Mars, for example. ... Any planet or moon with a solid surface will do.

My overall fossil-hunting bias is heavily weighted to natural caves and fissures and overhangs. I know from personal experience how these environments serve as both original home for organisms and as great places to preserve the evidence.

With adequate funding, we think we could do this in six or seven years.

The way communal insects behave with respect to each other produces very elaborate, complex behavior of the total, but the actual rules that any individual uses to relate to its fellows can be very simple. The critical thing is how does the swarm behave? Can we direct the individuals enough that the overall motion of the entire swarm is in the direction we want to proceed?

The scope of the course is really enormously broad, from the earliest conditions that can lead to life, to higher-level questions about finding intelligent life.

That kind of a no-doubt-about-it pond with minimal shallow excavation could be a goldmine of microfossil material! I'd want to sample its beautiful rims ... and do a small core down through the middle somewhere.