As he rummages through the filing cabinets and swollen bookshelves lining his office at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the curator of astrobiology passes by a picture of Keith Richards tacked to the bulletin board behind his desk. It's right next to a photo of his wife of eleven years, Tory Read, and a hand-drawn picture of an alien butterfly on a pin, which a colleague from Southwestern Research Institute in Boulder dreamed up as a tongue-in-cheek call sign/mascot for him when he took the museum post in January. There's also a bumpersticker on his door that reads "Honk if Pluto Is Still a Planet," and under an inflatable alien in the back corner of the room is the yellowing electric guitar from his junior-high band, Liquid Earth. (He still plays the instrument.)
Just a few months earlier, sitting here immersed in these quirks of his personality, Grinspoon learned that on October 12, the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences would reward him with the famed Carl Sagan Medal for success in popularizing science. Considering his life, it was written in the stars.
The oldest son of a Harvard psychiatry professor, Grinspoon grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a "sterile suburb" that he and his friends abandoned for Boston as often as possible. Like most children, he had his share of idols, including sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov and popular science writer and personality Carl Sagan. However, unlike most kids, he was inspired around the dinner table by Asimov and "Uncle Carl," who were family friends. "I remember [Asimov] as the kind of adult that kids loved to be around because he was very funny and he always made you feel like you were in on the joke, maybe in some conspiracy against the rest of the adults.... The guy knew everything about everything. Maybe he was a robot, but if so, he was a quirky and lovable one."
As he reminisces, Grinspoon's computer surfs his iTunes, which is about forty gigs full. The songs are eclectic, a random sampling from his brain that ranges from obscure underground hip-hop to Zimbabwean guitar. A song from the new Blackalicious album, The Craft, comes on, then some Turkish music that he picked up in March while chasing a solar eclipse to the Mediterranean coast. "An eclipse is more powerful than you'd ever expect," he says. "Everything changes -- the light, the air. It's a very trippy experience."
Again the music changes, this time to the Grateful Dead. "I've been way into the Dead since, like, the '70s," he says. Starting after his freshman year at Brown University -- where he dual-majored in planetary science and philosophy of science and played in a band called the Geeks -- he assisted the Voyager camera team at the Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology. That was 1979, the summer of Voyager's encounter with Jupiter, and he was a fixture at JPL between trips up the coast to see Dead shows.
He was also there in '80 for the buzz run of Saturn and '86 for Uranus and '89 for Neptune. Over the years, he's seen about a hundred Dead shows and followed the Voyagers to the outer limits of the solar system. "There was this feeling of traveling along with the Voyagers as they reached farther from the sun, encountering the giant outer planets over the years as we got older and moved on with our lives."
In 1989, he received his Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Arizona at Tucson and then took a post-doctoral research job at the NASA AMES Research Facility in Silicon Valley, which he left in 1991 for a professorship in the Astrophysical and Planetary Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After spending seven years teaching at the university, Grinspoon left academia for the Southwestern Research Institute, where he found his niche studying the climate and evolution of Earth-like planets with the hope of better understanding both our own climate and what it would take to survive on others.
But in the late 1990s, he surrendered to the wormhole of scientific events -- such as Galileo's discovery of possible oceans under the ice of Jupiter's moons -- and started focusing on astrobiology, an up-and-coming area of scientific study that blends evolution, biology and astronomy with a focus on the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the universe. He published a paper with Dirk Schulze-Makuch in the Journal of Astrobiology called "Biologically Enhanced Energy and Carbon Cycling on Titan" that laid out the case for possible life under Titan's ice cap.
Of course, he says, these little green men would look nothing like the green inflatable alien hanging in a corner of his office at the DMNS, or the alien knickknacks on top of his filing cabinet.
After seven years, Grinspoon left SRI -- which he calls "probably the most intellectually stimulating place in the country for planetary research" -- to become the DMNS's (and possibly the world's) first curator of astrobiology last January. "The difference between Southwestern Research and the museum is that the museum position is defined as half research, half outreach, which seems to fit my personality better," he says.
Part of the outreach includes lecturing on the intersection of science and science fiction -- such as "What About Bodies on Other Worlds? Aliens in Science Fiction," which he presented earlier this year with Colorado Public Radio film critic Howie Movshovitz -- and expanding his literary resumé, which includes articles in the New York Times and a host of national publications, as well as two books: Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize; and Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, winner of the Pen Center Literary Award.
Grinspoon also spends time with his current band, Venus Envy, a loose arrangement of guys who play together whenever their stars align. "Performing live music allows me to connect with people on another level. Also, it brings me into contact with people that I wouldn't have otherwise met," Grinspoon says. Most recently, Venus Envy played the opening of his wife's gallery, Tory Read Studios, a showcase for her photographs from places like Samoa documenting the effects of globalization on virgin cultures. (She gets to ask, for example, how lifelong subsistence farmers adapt to grocery stores.)
While Read looks at survival on Earth, her husband is looking at survival on Mars as the associate producer of a future Sci-Fi Channel mini-series that he and some friends pitched as a side project. The working title is Outpost, and Grinspoon's responsibilities include writing, conceiving and creating everything from character to plot. (Even his cats have sci-fi names: Wookie, Dax and Kiko.) He's also the narrator of a podcast for Astrobiology Magazine titled "Astrobiology Connection with Dr. G," which consists of him talking science with a background of his original music.
But all of his pop-culture pursuits don't mean that he's given up hard science. Last month Grinspoon attended a meeting of the European Venus Express team in Cologne, Germany. One of two Americans in the group, Grinspoon received a NASA grant to study climate information sent from the European-funded spacecraft orbiting our sister planet. In addition to updating and creating climate models to better understand the climate evolution of Earth, Grinspoon is responsible for working as an ambassador between the different teams on the Venus project -- and trying to get them to work together to see the bigger picture of how their individual research fits into the whole.
In a perfect world, Grinspoon would send a lander to the sweltering depths of Venus and a robot submarine into the ocean of Europa and a dirigible into the thick, cold air of Titan. "Sooner or later," he says, "we are going to find extraterrestrial life and begin to finally learn about the cosmic context for our own existence. I'd love to be part of the team that does, or at least be alive when it happens."
But for now, he'd be happy just to find something in his office.
