Politics

We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We are now trapping in the Earth's atmospheric oceanic system that used to go into space dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases which is equal to four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second. Imagine for a moment if we had alien spaceships hovering above earth, dropping four Hiroshima nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything until we got rid of them.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We run the very real risk now, not of going back to the 1970s, but of going back to the 1930s or 40s with economic and financial collapse, massive pandemic, and real-world wars.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, there is uncertainty like we've never seen before. We are not only facing economic risks, but real social, political, geopolitical, technological, and environmental risks too.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

I have grey hair, I'm 64. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. When I grew-up, I never worried about nuclear war, global pandemic, technology destroying jobs, climate change destroying the world, or stable democracies being taken over by authoritarian extremists.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

Putin badly miscalculated his chances of quick success in launching his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But I think he will make a much sounder calculation of the costs to him of taking the action of using WMD.

Those anxieties have been largely invented as an answer to an internal threat Putin was facing. He knew the Russian people have been getting fed-up of Putinism, and that has to be a major factor in the invention of this external threat.

Russia always seemed to me to have a problem accepting that you have to listen to the voice of smaller countries. Russia often seemed simply to assume that you get what you want if you're bigger, and more powerful.

I've sat in front of the chief ideologue in the Moscow Kremlin, and I remember him saying to us in so many words, that 'you cannot govern Russia unless you have a one-party state: Our job in the Kremlin here and now, is not to recreate the communist party, but it's to recreate the one party which will be the natural choice'. He didn't say it would be the only choice, (but I think that's what he meant), of the Russian electorate.

I don't think it was inevitable until the point where the tanks started rolling-in. It was unstoppable at that point… But 20 years ago, would we have realised this was going to happen? My sense would be absolutely not. I say this as someone who participated in a really sincere effort to reach-out to Russia, to include Russia in the cooperative mechanisms that work for us.

People are unable to keep secrets for long – somebody tells somebody who tells somebody else, before you know it they are writing a tell-all book or going out on TV shows to talk about it! That's how it happens, that is how things are exposed.

Founder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator

The more people that must be involved, the less likely the theory is to be true. A couple of people could pull it off, hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved, and it's not likely because we would hear about it.

Founder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator

People ask why we're spending money on space exploration when we have problems here on Earth. The first reaction I have to this the fact that we've had wars, poverty, and homelessness long-before anyone went into space. It's not accurate to say, 'we're doing space exploration, and that's why we have poverty.' If we stopped space exploration, those problems wouldn't be solved, they haven't been solved in thousands of years.

Renowned Astrophysicist & Director of Hayden Planetarium

If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, it will show that democracy and the world's forces are not enough to stop him. Are we building a world where the rule of law means something? Or a world where the rule of law means nothing, and only firepower counts.

Ukrainian politician and head of Servant of the People party faction

Our story, our fight, the story of President Zelenskyy… these all come together in the story of how everyone is capable of more than the world expects of them, and what we expected of ourselves. It's only when we were asked what price we were prepared to pay that we found the truth; we were prepared to pay with our lives.

Ukrainian politician and head of Servant of the People party faction

We're afraid of living under constant terrorism, and the constant threat of a neighbour who wants to kill you and destroy everything you care about. The escalation is already here. He has already reached a point of escalation that we must not tolerate – he is already doing everything he is capable of.

Ukrainian politician and head of Servant of the People party faction