Science lead Dave Siegel of the University of California, Santa Barbara said the team has reached out to various European partners to see if a different ship can be secured. But ultimately, some science might have to be sacrificed for the sake of expediency, since a key goal of the campaign was to provide data in support of an $800-million NASA ocean satellite slated to launch in 2022.
“Weinberg’s paper is a bit of lightning in the dark,” said Anthony Zee, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “All of a sudden a titan in the field is suddenly working again on these problems.”
“The whole reason George W. Bush shot up in the polls after 9/11 is that he projected himself as the embodiment of national unity,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Trump just seems incapable of that.”
This isn’t entirely surprising, because multicellularity has evolved many times in different lineages. In fact, most experts agree that many of the features in early green algae could have evolved independently more than once in a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. “There are only so many ways to do something,” said Susannah Porter, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
