Lord Martin Rees: The Future of Humanity

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have Lord Martin Rees to thank for much of what we understand about black holes, quasars, and other distant objects in the night sky. He is England’s Astronomer Royal, and has spent the past fifty years looking deep into the past, to understand the origins of the universe. But for the past two decades he’s also been asking the most difficult questions about the future of humankind, a future made uncertain because of tremendous advancements in science and technology. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2018

Transcript

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0:00.0	I need to admit one thing before I dive into today's episode.
0:05.0	I can't really tell you in my own words what our very accomplished guest has achieved in his career, not in any detail.
0:17.2	And that's because I am not conversant, surprise, surprise, Martin Reese has contributed a good deal to our current understanding of the universe.
0:36.0	I think when the history of science is written, one of the highlights is going to be understanding the place of our Earth in the broader
0:45.3	cosmos and setting the whole Earth and the whole solar system in a grand evolutionary scheme
0:50.7	tracing right back to the time when the whole universe was only a second old.
0:54.7	It's amazing that we can talk with a straight face about this, but I think we can.
0:58.7	Martin Reese, since the 1960s, has worked to understand quasars, black holes, the Big Bang, and the mysterious
1:07.4	period between the Big Bang and the emergence of stars. He is Astronomer Royal of England, top dog in other words, and has been since 1995. He's the former president of the Royal Society, the UK's National Science Academy.
1:26.0	He's a former master of Trinity College at Cambridge, and he's also been knighted and elevated to the House of Lords.
1:35.0	He's even got an asteroid named after him.
1:38.3	The list of prizes and publications
1:40.8	could take up the whole podcast, but I'll leave it at this. Lord Martin Reese
1:46.1	is a big-think kind of guy who ponders the history of the universe going back billions of years and the future of our planet and the
1:56.7	humans who live here.
1:58.7	Science deepens our sense of mystery and wonder about the world around us, but also it allows us to change the world
2:05.0	around us and we've got to make sure we change it in benign ways and minimize the downsides.
2:10.2	And so that's been something I've been concerned about certainly in the last decade or two.
2:14.0	So here we go to infinity and beyond and back down to earth.
2:20.0	On this episode of What It Takes, a podcast about Passion, Vision. on this Winkler. Adam made, this child is gifted and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.
2:37.0	If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity and you don't take it, you may never have another job.
2:43.0	It all was so clear.
	...

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