Hasta La Ideas

Pamela Conrad may seem like an anomaly; she’s a NASA scientist (an astrobiologist and mineralogist working on the Perseverance mission) as well as a reverend. In a fascinating interview with Wired, Conrad explains how she personally navigates spirituality and science—with a deep understanding of human nature. In both her jobs, she is tasked with finding answers (Is there life on Mars? What is the meaning of it all?) but she admits, “I fully concede that I am a statistical outlier. I go there because I love the questions.” She tells Noam Cohen that her two different positions actually complement each other, “The difference between a telescope, or any outward looking thing to understand the environment, and the introspection of looking inside is to say, ‘I am a universe, and also I live within a universe.’” Read the full interview at Wired.