Martin Rees Quotes & Sayings (Page 10)

“The U.S., France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The U.K. has not.”

“It is mistaken to claim that global problems will be solved more quickly if only researchers would abandon their quest to understand the universe and knuckle down to work on an agenda of public or political concerns. These are not 'either/or' options - indeed, there is a positive symbiosis between them.”

“Space doesn't offer an escape from Earth's problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection, but by design.”

“The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising - mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It's agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate.”

“Darwin and his successors taught us how our biosphere evolved, and thereby transformed our conception of humanity's place in nature. In the twenty-first century, space scientists are setting Darwin in a grander cosmic context - probing the origins of Earth, stars, atoms and the universe itself.”

“If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.”

“Indeed, evolutionists don't agree on how divergently our own biosphere could have developed if such contingencies as ice ages and meteorite impacts had happened differently.”

“Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a 'tribal Christian,' happy to attend church services.”

“Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is 'grainy' - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right).”

“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.”