Brief Answers to the Big Questions

It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to. Although, if there were such a God, I would like to ask however did he think of anything as complicated as M-theory in eleven dimensions.

If a superior alien civilisation sent us a text message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here, we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with AI.

I discount suggestions that UFOs contain beings from outer space, as I think that any visits by aliens would be much more obvious - and probably also much more unpleasant.

[Planck] said instead [of possibility that amount of radiation could have just any value] that radiation came only in packets or quanta of a certain size. It is a bit like saying that you can't buy sugar loose in the supermarket, it has to be in kilogram bags.

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation even has its own law, the so-called second law of thermodynamics.

With current technology interstellar travel is utterly impractical. Alpha Centauri can never become a holiday destination.

If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel.

It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.

I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years which, as geological time goes, is the mere blink of an eye. By then I hope and believe that our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.