Sir Martin Rees è Astronomer Royal all'Università di Cambridge, una carica molto importante nel mondo della scienza ufficiale. The Guardian lo ha intervistato a proposito del suo ultimo libro: Our Final Century. Sir Martin pensa che a causa dell'enorme velocità del progresso scientifico, e soprattutto tecnologico, la nostra amata civiltà potrebbe scomparire entro 100 anni!....ma - da bravo scienziato - appioppa un 50% di possibilità al disastroso evento. L'intervista - tra una tazza di tè molto zuccherata, l'immancabile cane e le leziosità del 60enne curvo ma spiritato - è molto piacevole e tutta da leggere, specie per i deliziosi commenti e spiegazioni sul modo come un grande e rispettabile scienziato britannico vede le cose di noi poveri mortali....Eccovi qualche perlina:

• "We are inevitably empowering more people with the potentiality to harm on an ever growing scale. And we're in a society which is more brittle and interconnected, and I think this is something we are going to have to confront. Also some new technologies don't require very large-scale equipment. It needs a hell of a big facility to make a nuclear weapon, but it doesn't in order to tinker with a virus. So when we have people all over the world who experiment with biotech, then of course we are concerned that even one or two of them might misuse that knowledge with the possibility of disastrous outcomes. What I am saying is that a weirdo, someone with a mindset that could now make a computer virus, may one day be able to create a genetically modified real virus, which could cause thousands of fatalities."
• "It's rather amusing that we are exactly halfway in scale between an atom and a star in that it would take as many human bodies to make up the mass of the sun as there are atoms in each of us." 
• "The question of whether there is life out there is a scientific question we might one day answer, but the question of why there is something rather than nothing is a question beyond science"
• "I describe myself sometimes as a practising but non-believing Christian. I don't believe in any dogmas. But on the other hand I do believe there is a benefit and value to be gained from participating in common rituals."
• "We can't dismiss as crazy those Californian futurologists who say that we will have super-human intelligences 50 years from now. I think the main message is that the more catastrophic the potential downside is, the more careful we have to be."

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