If I could take some liberty and propose a generality based on my own experience, I would say that scientists live internally with fundamentals, harm… - Susan Kieffer

Furthermore, in the current intellectual climate, and with the large numbers of scientists in the world today, there are few measures of creativity. We measure productivity, not not simple numerical counting, or even measures of “impact.” Perhaps as a community, we need a new form of peer evaluations of individuals within that context.

If we want to improve our odds of surviving disaster, we need to do two things. First, we need to be prepared for the rarest, biggest events. Currently we invest in infrastructure to protect us from the smaller events — be they tornados, eruptions, earthquakes or even small tsunamis that can be shut out by common storm wave barriers on exposed coastlines. But, we rarely have made the costly investments necessary to protect us from the rare, but truly devastating, big events.

I think the only thing that has a broader range of scales than geology is astronomy. Geologists really look at things from the atomic scale to the solar system scale, and we potentially think about planets beyond the solar system.