Ramin Skibba

To turn the tide against climate change, on the day of his inauguration US president Joe Biden signed an executive order instituting a raft of policy changes and initiatives. One directed his team to reassess the social cost of carbon. This seemingly obscure concept puts a number on how much damage a metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted today will do in the future, in order to show how much a given climate policy would benefit the economy in the long run. More than in previous assessments, Biden’s team explicitly called for considerations of environmental justice and intergenerational equity, referring to the perils of climate change to future generations.

From blob-like jellyfish to rock-like lichens, our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognize some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. “The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,” said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The question is, will we be able to find it?”