Piers Sellers, a climate scientist and former astronaut who gained fame late in life for his eloquent commentary about the earth\u2019s fragility and his own cancer diagnosis, has died. He was 61. Sellers died Friday morning in Houston of pancreatic cancer, NASA said in a statement. Sellers shared his astronaut\u2019s perspective on climate change in Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s documentary, \u201cBefore the Flood,\u201d released this fall. He told DiCaprio that seeing the earth\u2019s atmosphere as a \u201ctiny little onion skin\u201d from space helped him gain a fuller understanding of the planet\u2019s delicacy. He also wrote a New York Times op-ed about grappling with the meaning of his life\u2019s work after learning he had terminal cancer. In both the film and the op-ed, he was optimistic, arguing that he expected human ingenuity to rescue the planet from a dire future of runaway global warming. Sellers optimistic \u201cPiers devoted his life to saving the planet,\u201d NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. \u201cHis legacy will be one not only of urgency that the climate is warming but also of hope that we can yet improve humanity\u2019s stewardship of this planet.\u201d In the op-ed, Sellers wrote that the best way he could imagine spending his final months was to continue working, despite knowing he would not live to see the worst of climate change or the harnessing of possible solutions. \u201cNew technologies have a way of bettering our lives in ways we cannot anticipate. There is no convincing, demonstrated reason to believe that our evolving future will be worse than our present, assuming careful management of the challenges and risks,\u201d Sellers wrote. \u201cHistory is replete with examples of us humans getting out of tight spots.\u201d Three tours in space The British-born Sellers was deputy director for sciences and exploration at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He started working for NASA as a scientist in 1982 and joined its astronaut corps in 1996. He made three flights to the International Space Station, the last in 2010. \u201cWhen I was a kid, I watched the Apollo launches from across the ocean, and I thought NASA was the holy mountain,\u201d Sellers said earlier this year when Bolden presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal, the agency\u2019s highest honor. \u201cAs soon as I could, I came over here to see if I could climb that mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Piers Sellers, a climate scientist and former astronaut who gained fame late in life for his eloquent commentary about the earth\u2019s fragility and his own cancer diagnosis, has died. He was 61. Sellers died Friday morning in Houston of pancreatic cancer, NASA said in a statement. Sellers shared his astronaut\u2019s perspective on climate change in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20721,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}