I have a chapter towards the end of the book where I complain about the fact that we are living through innovation famine, not an innovation feast, particularly in areas other than digital.

One of the reasons for this is the power of the environmental movement to oppose new technologies, which are often good for the environment.

I detail the case of genetically modified organisms where you make a plant insect resistant have the capacity to wean agriculture off chemical pesticides.

This has been proven to work and is now being used in India, Brazil and North America as well, but not in Europe and Africa where an entire technology has effectively been rejected by the pressure of environmentalists.

My good friend Mark Linus was one of the most prominent campaigners against this technology in the 1990s and did a lot of the protesting, a lot of the writing about it and then changed his mind and says we were doing the wrong thing, but it's almost too late.

It's very hard to see how Europe now changes its mind and adopts this new technology.

The best hope is that with the next technology that comes along, which is genome editing through things like crisper, a lot of the concerns of environmentalists can be set to one side because this is not a technology that involves bringing foreign genetic material from other creatures, whatever that means into plants.

So it's possible that we can leapfrog into some cleaner technologies there.

The end point must be that the more we innovate, the fewer resources we need, the less land we need, the more land we can give back to nature, the more we can make people prosperous and that results in them cutting their birthrated also results in them planting more trees.

There is a possible soft landing for humanity later in this century if we do plenty more innovation where we end up with eight and nine billion people living lives that are much more benign towards the natural environment and that enable most of us to have greenery around us.

The covid pandemic has shown us quite starkly that we have not been doing enough innovation we've not been developing enough vaccines we've not been finding ways of developing vaccines faster we've not been developing enough diagnostic devices when you look at why not you find that there is 20 to 70 months of delay to get a license to sell a new diagnostic device this is enough to deter most entrepreneurs from even trying to go.

I do hope that one message people take is if we can do more innovation we are not going to destroy the planet quite the reverse it's the safest way of saving the planet it's the poorest countries that are seeing the most damage to the environment at the moment.

One of the things that David doich does in his works he often talks about how anything that is possible or not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible for us to create technology and science and as universal explainers humans are capable of understanding anything that any being or any theoretical creatures capable of understanding all we have to do is figure out how to reconfigure the existing items and particles out there to do what we want within the laws of physics which are quite generous and quite broad.

In that sense all failures in all sins are just ignorance it's just a lack of knowledge if we were to speed up the accumulation of the application of knowledge through innovation we would be able to solve all of humanity's problems and we're always at the beginning of this infinity as he says because there's an infinite amount of progress to be made there's so far to go that when you look at where we are at any given point on that curve there is an infinity stretching out in front of you I find that extremely hopeful but as you point out we can be our own world.

It's a very important part of rational optimism that we are not saying the world is perfect quite the reverse that's what the word optimism meant when it was kind by Voltaire you thought the world was perfect couldn't be improved anymore that's not what people like me and David doich are saying we're saying there is an incredible amount of improvement that we haven't even yet begun to imagine we are at the start of a very long run on Broadway as a species.

We're not towards the end we are going to see some amazing novelties in the current century so one of my beef with a lot of the environmental movement not as you say the conservation movement that deals with local greenery but the planet one is that it imagines that we're not going to be able to invent very much and if we do invent things they will do harm and it doesn't feel to me that that is right we've hardly scraped the surface of different ways of combining and reconvening.

The atoms and elements of the world Paul Roma talked about how many different compounds of the minerals in the periodic table could be made it's an astronomical number and we've hardly explored the properties of half of them like you I'm a fan of fusion energy and I think that could make a huge difference within our lifetimes there's all sorts of things that we're going to be able to do in this century to improve humanity but also to make it a livable place.

This spaceship earth metaphor that a lot of people latch on to instinctively because seductive that earth is this very fragile precious blue marble it gives us everything that we want and when we destroy our home that there's no place else left we can't get off spaceship earth it treats earth as a zero sum game.

But on closer examination sort of falls apart even earth is hostile to the idea of seven billion humans living on it the only way seven billion humans live on earth is through innovation through technology and through modifying the environment the challenges how to do it in a sustainable way and then figure out how to do it on other planets and terraform Mars and the moon and make them live up it requires a careful examination of this spaceship earth metaphor which most people instinctively believe but upon examination turns out to be incorrect.

You mentioned knowledge as being potentially infinite knowledge is a distributed and collective phenomenon I go back to this wonderful little essay that was written by Leonard Reed in the 1950s called I pencil in which a pencil works out how it came into existence and discovers that millions of people contributed to its manufacturer from people cutting down trees.

For the wood to people mining graphite for the lead and the important point is that not one of them knows how to make a pencil we are capable of making objects even our simplest objects that are beyond the capability of one human mind to comprehend it requires lots of human minds to collaborate to make them and to accumulate the knowledge of how to invent them as well at this point I begin to sound a bit like a Marxist because I start talking about collective humanity.

It's way of rescuing collaboration cooperation and partnership from a communist perspective and restoring it to a much more voluntary and the political spectrum if you like.

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