Science

What we have isn't superior intelligence — it's superior destructive reach, enabled by technology. The story we've told ourselves that we are categorically separate from nature is the destabilising force, because every species is constrained by nature and is part of a system.

You are surrounded by an endless series of expanded layers of social networks. Your inner core is 5, which extends to 50-150, 500 and eventually out to around 1500. As you go out through the networks, the number of people included increases, the average quality of these relationships declines.

Evolutionary Psychologist Known for Dunbar's Number Theory

Climate change is a J-curve, not linear. Rates of change globally are occurring at a faster pace than the global population expects, and will impact food production.

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Right now, biological evolution is not the main engine of change in the human condition. Instead, social and technological development, which occur on shorter timescales, are the predominant change-makers. In particular, it seems that we are gaining capabilities to directly modify human nature—through genetic selection, gene therapy, cognitive enhancement drugs, life extension treatments.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, underpin modern civilization.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

We are scientifically naked in front of this threat. We do not have the diagnostics to quickly detect an MDR or XDR case. Once detected, we do not have the drugs to effectively treat the patient at reasonable cost, and we do not have a TB vaccine.

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It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.

Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

A nervous system is just a group of cells specialised in transmitting impulses from one to another. Ordinary plant cells can do this, albeit in a less efficient way. It is indisputable that there is no need of this "Holy Grail" of a nervous system to have the miracle of the transmission of electrical signals and communication.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. For me intelligence is a property of life. Even the most humble unicellular living organism must be intelligent to solve the problems of everyday life. Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

DNA is not life. A single chemical molecule has nothing to do with life. DNA is merely a storage system. Nobody would ever say that the "Divine Comedy" is the actual paper and ink on which one of its copies is printed, however many influential scientists have supported this nonsensical viewpoint.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

I made the analogy of earthquake faults- when they get aligned, they either all move, or they don't move- we also have this diversity of micro fault-lines that fail, and I think that's a huge problem.

Hedge Fund Manager & Author of "The Black Swan" Risk Management

If you use a complex system approach which doesn't have a fixed period of time in the model, it enables you to start exploring what types of animals you will see! It's classifying the elephants in the room - it may not tell you which one will come, but it will give you a better idea of what is out there in terms of risk.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

The actual actions of the people in the market are the things that determine what happens next within the market. The 'standard' financial markets model is, effectively, based on a coin toss. That is how derivatives are priced and how every exotic financial instrument is seen- they are very fancy coins, where flipping creates price changes.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.