If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.

The brain, being analog, is able to grasp images so much better. The brain is just designed for comparing images and some patterns - patterns in space and patterns in time - which we do amazingly well. Computers can do it, too, but not in anything like the same kind of flexibility.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.