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Category: Martin Rees

Advances in technology – hugely beneficial though they are – render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.

Technology, Power, World

To ensure continuing prosperity in the global economy, nothing is more important than the development and application of knowledge and skills.

Economy, Development, Skills

The extreme sophistication of modern technology – wonderful though its benefits are – is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.

Work, Technology, People

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things – even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best ‘special effects’ in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.

Best, Power, World

The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.

Religion, Fight, Peaceful

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

Waves, Birds, Enlightenment

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just ‘virtual reality.’

Education, Reality

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

Achieve, Human, Will

Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that’s atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become.

Future, Powerful, Weather

Maybe the search for life shouldn’t restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

Life, Science, Ideas

The images of Earth’s delicate biosphere, contrasting with the sterile moonscape where the astronauts left their footsteps, have become iconic for environmentalists: these may indeed be the Apollo programme’s most enduring legacy.

Legacy, Earth, May

We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time – and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.

Time, Future, Long