“There’s this old maxim that if you lose your keys at night, the first place you look is under the lamppost,” says Johnson, who is now an associate professor at Georgetown University. If Johnson’s musings are correct, the current focus of the hunt for aliens-searching for life as we know it-might not work for finding biology in the beyond. “Even places that seem familiar-like Mars, a place that we think we know intimately-can completely throw us for a loop,” she says. Inside its pages, she probed the idea that other planets were truly other, and so their inhabitants might be very different, at a fundamental and chemical level, from anything on this world. Her typed musings would later turn into the 2020 popular science book The Sirens of Mars. Johnson found the work exciting (the future alien genome project!), but it also made her wonder: What if extraterrestrial life didn’t have DNA or RNA or other nucleic acids? What if their cells got instructions in some other biochemical way?Īs an outlet for heretical thoughts like this, Johnson started writing in a style too lyrical and philosophical for scientific journals. As an astronomy postdoc at Harvard University in the late 2000s and early 2010s she investigated how astronomers might use genetic sequencing-detecting and identifying DNA and RNA-to find evidence of aliens. Later, Johnson became a professional at looking. “It was on that trip that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” Johnson says. The thought opened up the cosmic real estate, and the variety of life, she imagined might be beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Even if a landscape seemed strange and harsh from a human perspective, other kinds of life might find it quite comfortable. Her true epiphany, though, wasn’t about the hardiness of life on Earth or the hardships of being human: It was about aliens. “It felt like it stood for all of us, huddled under that rock, existing against the odds,” Johnson says. To her surprise, a tiny fern lived underneath it, having sprouted from ash and cinder cones. Looking down, she turned over a rock with the toe of her boot. Johnson wandered away from the other young researchers she was with and toward a distant ridge of the 13,800-foot summit. Its dried lava surface was so different from the eroded, tree-draped mountains of her home state of Kentucky. Like its Web site says, "If you don't have time to download and use this software then you really need it.Sarah Stewart Johnson was a college sophomore when she first stood atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. If your to-do lists are eating you alive and you're snowed under by email, read David Allen's book, then check out this software. Becoming a member will set you back $25 for six months, or $40 per year. Thinking Rock is free to use, but developers also offer an optional membership that includes an early look at beta versions, priority support, shared project templates, and more. Running an app like this locally right on your machine makes it easy to unplug and stay away from distractions. I think that's a bonus because, although it's tempting to use online GTD tools, the Internet is the last place you should be when you need to be seriously productive. Unlike many other apps that help users implement the GTD, Thinking Rock is not Web-based. A large empty window helps you collect your thoughts and ideas, then plug them into the correct lists via a drop-down menu. Once you set up your contexts it's dead simple to process your actionable items and create to-do lists. Licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), it works on Linux, Windows, and Mac - perfect if you run different operating systems at work and home. Thinking Rock is a great open source app for implementing the GTD system. Predictably, the book has spawned loads of computer-based applications to help you organize your life based on Allen's methods and principles. If the terms "next action", "someday/maybe list", and "tickler file" mean something to you then you know about David Allen and his popular productivity how-to book, "Getting Things Done" (GTD).
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