Top 96 Martin Rees Quotes

#1. 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.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #5889
#2. Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.

Martin Rees

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#3. The 'clean energy' challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.

Martin Rees

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#4. I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.

Martin Rees

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#5. 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.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #94787
#6. 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, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.

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Martin Rees Quotes #114805
#7. Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.

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#8. Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

Martin Rees

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#9. 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.

Martin Rees

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#10. 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.

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#11. As regards my own 'philosophy,' I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals - such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #224108
#12. Some of the 'aha' insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.

Martin Rees

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#13. The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage: the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive?

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#14. It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #272015
#15. An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.

Martin Rees

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#16. The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.

Martin Rees

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#17. 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.

Martin Rees

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#18. Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

Martin Rees

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#19. 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.

Martin Rees

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#20. 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.

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

Martin Rees

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#22. There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.

Martin Rees

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#23. Issues relating to global health and sustainability must stay high on the agenda if we are to cope with an ageing and ever-increasing population, with growing pressure on resources, and with rising global temperatures. The risks and dangers need to be assessed and then confronted.

Martin Rees

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#24. There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #490889
#25. Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

Martin Rees

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

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#27. It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.

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#28. Science is the one culture that's truly global - protons, proteins and Pythagoras's Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths, too.

Martin Rees

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#29. Indeed, the night sky is the part of our environment that's been common to all cultures throughout human history. All have gazed up at the 'vault of heaven' and interpreted it in their own way.

Martin Rees

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#30. The practical case for manned spacef light gets ever-weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation - indeed, as a scientist or practical man, I see little purpose in sending people into space at all. But as a human being, I'm an enthusiast for manned missions.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #662021
#31. 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.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #685336
#32. When scientists are asked what they are working on, their response is seldom 'Finding the origin of the universe' or 'Seeking to cure cancer.' Usually, they will claim to be tackling a very specific problem - a small piece of the jigsaw that builds up the big picture.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #693402
#33. 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 International Space Station.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #704858
#34. In the case of climate change, the threat is long-term and diffuse and requires broad international action for the benefit of people decades in the future. And in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and that is what makes it a very difficult and challenging issue.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #721911
#35. The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people's minds.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #776036
#36. Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime 'threats without enemies' that confront us.

Martin Rees

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#37. Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #834268
#38. 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.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #854070
#39. Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula One cars are now. Perhaps Robot Wars in space will be a lucrative spectator sport. If humans venture back to the moon, and even beyond, they may carry commercial insignia rather than national flags.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #875709
#40. 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.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #901796
#41. The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.

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#42. I'm not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.

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#43. 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 to reach them: there would be no scope for quick repartee. There might be an IQ gap.

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#44. 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.

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#45. I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.

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#46. 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.

Martin Rees

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#47. There's now, for the first time, a huge gulf between the artefacts of our everyday life and what even a single expert, let alone the average child, can comprehend. The gadgets that now pervade young people's lives, iPhones and suchlike, are baffling 'black boxes' - pure magic to most people.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #1063853
#48. Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #1070432
#49. The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy and generating it by 'clean' means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion).

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #1072005
#50. A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space and time, and the structure of our entire universe, may remain 'open frontiers' beyond human grasp.

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#51. If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed.

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#52. 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 Way.

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#53. It would be sad if the expertise built up during the 40 years of the U.S. and Russian manned programmes were allowed to dissipate. But abandoning the shuttle, and committing to new launch vehicles and propulsion systems, is actually a prerequisite for a vibrant manned programme.

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#54. Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

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#55. The advance of science spares us from irrational dread.

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#56. Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.

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#57. The universe is still a place of mystery and wonder.

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#58. Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.

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#59. I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

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#60. Most practising scientists focus on 'bite-sized' problems that are timely and tractable. The occupational risk is then to lose sight of the big picture.

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#61. All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

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

Martin Rees

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#63. Over most of history, threats have come from nature - disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We've entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.

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#64. I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it's not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.

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#65. General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.

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#66. We do not fully understand the consequences of rising populations and increasing energy consumption on the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life.

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#67. The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

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#68. 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.

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#69. 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.

Martin Rees

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#70. 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 iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

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#71. 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.

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#72. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.

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#73. 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.

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Martin Rees Quotes #1422644
#74. Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.

Martin Rees

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#75. In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.

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#76. 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.

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#77. 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.

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#78. There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

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#79. From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

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#80. 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.

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#81. It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.

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#82. One of President Obama's first acts was to give a massive boost to America's scientific community.

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#83. 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.

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#84. We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

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#85. 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.

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#86. 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."

Martin Rees

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#87. The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees Quotes #1727054
#88. We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. It may have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire galaxy. On the other hand, it may have been almost inevitable, given the right environment.

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#89. The Blair government perhaps ranks as the best the U.K. has had for 50 years. It cannot match the scale of Attlee's reforms, but has a fine record of constitutional reform and economic competence. In my own areas - science and innovation - there have been well-judged and effective changes.

Martin Rees

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#90. 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 smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

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#91. Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources.

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#92. 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.

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#93. Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.

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#94. 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.

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Martin Rees Quotes #1853345
#95. It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.

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#96. 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.

Martin Rees

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