Martin Rees

“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.”

“Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the...”

“If we ever established contact with intelligent life on another world, there would be barriers to communication. First, they would be many light years away, so signals would take many years...”

“In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed...”

“Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the...”

“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 b...”

“Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.”

“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 pub...”

“The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the i...”

“To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower ri...”

“I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.”

“We are 'nuclear waste' from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Wa...”

“Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from...”

“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 e...”

“There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are...”

“Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.”

“Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.”

“I've got no religious beliefs at all.”

“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...”

“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...”