ESP Biography
PANCHO RAMOS-STIERLE, De-professionalized Astrobiologist
Major: Astrobiology College/Employer: Casa de Paz Year of Graduation: G |
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Brief Biographical Sketch:
Pancho Ramos-Stierle has a passion for astrobiology that brought him to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D in Astrophysics. But when the U.S. government and the laboratories of the university announced they were developing "safer nuclear weapons," he decided to stop cooperating with the institution. Now as a responsible scientist, he says he is doing his "PhDO in Citizenship of the World." Pancho believes that "when the inner (r)evolution merges with the outer (r)evolution, the Total (R)evolution of the Human Spirit is imminent." Furthermore, when science and art are balanced, the beauty of life blossoms with what he calls the "New Renaissance of Humanity." In an interview with SF Refresh, he said his mission statement is "to live in radical joyous shared servanthood to unify humanity." His activism and life's focus is on issues of human rights, environmental sustainability, nonviolence, peace-building, immigration, urban agriculture and the development of a vibrant "gift economy." Ramos-Stierle has been an integral part of movements to democratize the University of California system, protect old growth trees, implement "free farms" and move beyond youth violence, among other efforts. Past Classes(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)L1911: Astrobiology: Science and the Soul in Splash! Fall 2011 (Oct. 29 - 30, 2011)
Today, the majority of scientists are specialized in a small part of the natural world and we often miss the big picture and the magnificence of the interaction among the parts that make up the whole. Without understanding the interconnectedness of life, we don’t know how we are affecting the connections and no community can exist without a unifying story. The problem is not specialization but isolation. Astrobiology is the study of life as we know it (and as we don’t know it), how it originated, how it has evolved and how it has been distributed in the Universe.
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