From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
Arguably, though, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.
Art is a universal communicator, it is one of the ways that allows me to engage with audiences that might not otherwise think about what we're doing in space every day that's helping improve life here on Earth. And it's a way to help them consider the view from space and do a little bit of Earthling and Earth appreciation.
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.
Music can help us heal and achieve therapeutic outcomes by tapping into various neurochemical circuits that influence mood and behaviour. Ours was the first lab to show that listening to music releases the brain's natural pain relievers—opioids. Relaxing music can modulate prolactin, a soothing, tranquilizing hormone. Music also releases dopamine which helps us to focus and motivates us to stay on task.
What makes HIV so challenging is its ability to integrate into the host genome and establish latency. This is why we haven't been able to cure it yet - the virus literally becomes part of us.
Ageing is not separate from Alzheimer's or heart disease. The leading causes of those diseases is the ageing process, which we can now control. Based on what we're doing in the lab, we know that if you turn the clock back, those diseases go away- that's a revolution. We've been working on a band aid system trying to fix the diseases that are already there, while ignoring the main cause.
Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen. Birds learn when they're young to look at this night sky and learn which bits of the sky don't rotate.
Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock.
There are significant distinctions between what we perceive to be reality and the cold, hard, molecular world we inhabit. Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in.
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.
Lack of sleep is like a broken water pipe in your home, it leaks water into every nook and cranny, and erodes the fabric of your DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.