To most people in the UK, indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up US and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.

In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.

It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

The U.S., France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The U.K. has not.

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime 'threats without enemies' that confront us.