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

The extreme sophistication of modern technology - wonderful though its benefits are - is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.

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.

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

Charles Darwin [is my personal favorite Fellow of the Royal Society]. I suppose as a physical scientist I ought to have chosen Newton. He would have won hands down in an IQ test, but if you ask who was the most attractive personality then Darwin is the one you'd wish to meet. Newton was solitary and reclusive, even vain and vindictive in his later years when he was president of the society.

The 'clean energy' challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.

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