Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

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.

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true