I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.

The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality".

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains They could be staring us in the face and we just Don't recognise them. The problem is that we-re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves.