The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

I think small animals can escape from many kinds of natural disaster more easily. There are just more places for them to hide, and more ways for them to find safe habitats. So this means that rats are set up to rule the Earth, but most of us already knew that. Now you know why.

Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere.

Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life.

I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.

We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

I think it's the process of demystification, and realizing that we are not talking about some supernatural nightmare - we're talking about a natural process that the planet has gone through before, and which animals have survived before.