Martin Rees
Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.
Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.
And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.
In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.Collection: Science
All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.Collection: Stars
Let me say that I don't see any conflict between science and religion. I go to church as many other scientists do. I share with most religious people a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe and I want to participate in religious ritual and practices because they're something that all humans can share.Collection: Religious
Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.Collection: Nuclear
Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality".Collection: Real
It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.Collection: Years
The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure.Collection: Moving
I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, "I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder."Collection: Thinking
The universe is still a place of mystery and wonder.Collection: Mystery
Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.Collection: Science
An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.Collection: Stars
If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.Collection: Stars
I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains They could be staring us in the face and we just Don't recognise them. The problem is that we-re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.Collection: Technology
It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science-it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.Collection: Fun
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.Collection: God
We should all oppose - as Darwin did - views manifestly in conflict with the evidence, such as creationism... But we shouldn't set up this debate as 'religion v science'; instead we should strive for peaceful coexistence with at least the less dogmatic strands of mainstream religions, which number many excellent scientists among their adherents.Collection: Views
Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.Collection: Together
The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.Collection: Atmosphere
It used to be controversial whether smoking caused lung cancer, it used to be controversial whether HIV caused AIDS. Now, there are a few mavericks who deny those things. In the case of climate change, I think the debate is going the same way in that there is a strong consensus that it is a serious matter.Collection: Strong
The politics is far harder than the science. And even if we accept the science we have a big issue of how to deal with it.Collection: Issues
The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.Collection: Mean
I'm not a specialist in the science but I have followed it fairly closely and it seems to me that there is among the experts a clear consensus that potential climate change is something to worry about.Collection: Worry
In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves.Collection: Technology
Charles Darwin [is my personal favorite Fellow of the Royal Society]. I suppose as a physical scientist I ought to have chosen Newton. He would have won hands down in an IQ test, but if you ask who was the most attractive personality then Darwin is the one you'd wish to meet. Newton was solitary and reclusive, even vain and vindictive in his later years when he was president of the society.Collection: Years
There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.Collection: Life
Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity's role in nature. One thing we've learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.Collection: Lying
It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.Collection: Stars
To most people in the UK, indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up US and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.Collection: War
I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.Collection: Life
I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.Collection: Country
One of the computer models for a four degree temperature rise would give rise to a 10 degree temperature rise in Africa. And bear in mind also that in the depth of an ice age the mean temperature drop compared to the present was five degrees.Collection: Mean
Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos.Collection: Moon