Lord Martin Rees: ‘Long term, humans won’t exist they’ll evolve into something digital’ – The Telegraph

Engagingly, he does not wring his hands about this, nor thumb his nose from on high. Instead, he thinks practically about how to shape public discourse for the good. The evidence suggests to him that nowadays a tiny number of influencers can change everything. Not social media influencers but rather people who can reach huge popular audiences and animate them about unsexy, long-term problems. He names the Pope, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and Bill Gates. On long-term climate and health issues, he says all in different ways have had great influence.

And they are needed. Unless a crisis is imminent, he says, its hard to focus ministerial attention onto even the most important long-term policy issues. On this list, Lord Rees puts energy supply, securing the internet, supply chains for essential goods and resilience against extreme weather. Rather than having too much influence on politicians, scientific advisors hardly have any clout on these issues. I know because I know some of them, he says.

When public debate gets poisoned, Lord Rees suggests, everyone loses. The botched introduction of GM crops in Europe two decades ago saw them dubbed Frankenfoods and banned, for example, even though they have been usefully grown and consumed in the US ever since. By contrast, the UK has a balanced regulatory policy on stem cell research prohibited to public funding in America that is regarded as world-leading. Lord Rees regards it as an example of scientific advance, politics and public opinion being successfully balanced for the long-term benefit of all.

Yet in our age of ever-more fractious culture wars, balancing competing interests even in the short term is tricky enough. How much harder then, are the intergenerational trade-offs that come with long-term decisions? Or as Lord Rees puts it: How much should we sacrifice now to ensure that the world is no worse when our grandchildren grow old? Even on climate change, about which he is very concerned, those advising the government, themselves have a range of opinions on what the best policies should be. And even there, they should express these views as citizens and not claim special weight for them.

Its at this point that I go back a bit in our conversation and ask him about the Pope: what is Martin Rees, secular scientist, explainer of creation rather than creationist, doing saluting the Popes contribution to science? It turns out that he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and its meetings require him to travel to the Vatican, where he stays in the Santa Marta residence that the Pope inhabits and they occasionally bump into each other. The fact that Lord Rees cant believe in the resurrection or any of that, is no bar to his membership. He is there because he is spreading his own good word that of the evangelical scientist.

And it works. In 2015, academy advice on the environment contributed to Pope Franciss second Encyclical, Laudato si , a statement that swayed hundreds of millions of Catholics in Latin America, Africa and East Asia to pressurise their leaders to sign up to the Paris Agreement in December 2015.

Lord Rees admits he appreciates the music and beauty of the chapel at Trinity and describes himself as a practising, non-believing Christian, content to sing hymns about a God whose existence he does not accept, valuing them as a glorious ritual.

Cambridge has been his home ever since he was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in 1973, aged just 30. It was an appointment that, for all Lord Reess modesty, underscores his academic brilliance. His parents were both teachers, setting up a school in the midst of the war on the south Shropshire border with Wales, where Lord Rees had a happy childhood, though a rather lonely one.

From there he went to Shrewsbury School and Cambridge, taking maths a choice, he admits, motivated as much by being bad at foreign languages as by enthusiasm for the sciences. Then, as now, he bridled against the narrowness of English education. He thinks a broader baccalaureate would be better than A-levels, and US-style major and minor studies better than single university degrees. Breadth, he says, is especially important today so that schoolchildren do not give up on science and can develop a feel for it that will stop them being bamboozled by propaganda and bad statistics.

Lord Rees refers to poor UK performance in educational league tables as a depressing augury for the Wests future, blaming the lack of good science teachers. He describes himself as Old Left, adding, I think you need higher taxes and better public services. I guess youd call me part of the public sector establishment. He is certainly no Liz Truss fan.

But just as his appreciation of ritual overcomes his atheism, so, too, his politics do not prevent him admitting the allure of the private sector. He sits on the board of a venture capital firm in Cambridge, and laments that the investment in UK start-ups does not match that in Silicon Valley. He admires the revolving door that shuttles staff between private enterprise and government in the US, seeding ideas between the two, and wishes it was replicated in the much more siloed system here.

The balance of public and private also animates him when it comes to manned spaceflight. He is excited by the prospect of humans venturing into that great beyond which he has spent his lifetime studying. However, he thinks it is madness that Nasa is spending many billions doing it. Leave it to adventurous plutocrats such as Elon Musk, a 21st-century Brunel, or Jeff Bezos, he argues. He reckons Nasas Artemis programme, which has been repeatedly delayed, is very expensive and probably mismanaged.

Ultimately, he says, thats because the American public wont accept imposing high risks on publicly-funded astronauts, given that human spaceflight will just be an expensive spectator sport of no practical use. The result will be a costly project, bloated by endless safety measures. By contrast, we would cheer on the private adventurer having a crack at the Red Planet. So might Mars provide a lifeboat a Planet B as some describe it to a humankind which has wrecked Earth? The answer is an emphatic no. Its a dangerous illusion, he says. The process of terraforming Mars, or making it Earthlike, and so habitable for billions, is a doddle compared to dealing with climate change.

Not that Lord Rees, author in 2003 of Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century, and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, thinks climate change is the only risk we face. Pandemics obviously, he says. But he also worries about a population explosion trapping Africa in poverty, with the agriculture required to feed everyone destroying both the environment and biodiversity.

Read more:

Lord Martin Rees: 'Long term, humans won't exist they'll evolve into something digital' - The Telegraph