It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

Finding intelligent life would encourage people and also of course the opportunity of learning a tremendous amount, but this is a danger. We might be so overwhelmed with knowledge and information, that we might be depressed or even become suicidal - because what's the point if they're thousands of years ahead of us? Why should we bother? - or become the ultimate couch potatoes.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.