Philosophy

That's a very simple yet complicated question. Architecture exists to create the physical environment in which people live. Obviously that's a very simple answer, but if we deep digger we see the complexities. What is the built environment? what constitutes quality of life? how do architects determine whether something is positive, helpful or relevant for individuals and collectives?

From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

Everything you do in life that's worthwhile entails some risk, that's the nature of exploration and the nature of adventure.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

The question as to whether we are alone has been asked by humans almost since they first crawled out of the cave! For millennia we used to ask the priests, philosophers or shaman- whoever we thought was wise- how to answer that question. They always came back with a belief system. What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb 'to believe' we're trying to use the verb 'to explore'. We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. People are the ones who ultimately make language, but we feel have no control over it as it's such an emergent phenomenon. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

From the guys who started Adobe to Steve Jobs, and everyone in between…. for the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.

Businesses, or rather their leadership, is often saddled with a set of problems and daily issues that prevents them from taking an objective view of their realities…forget the trees, often there is too much leaf watching to notice they are in a forest.

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s

What is the value of asking the right question to prompt the right answer? Since it is not a narrow discipline and one with great roots in cultivating subjective experiences the integration and contribution of design is often overlooked in a silo mentality.

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s

The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres

Aging is a side-effect of being a machine with moving parts. All such machines, whether living or not, inherently create entropy in their structure. Living organisms have immensely sophisticated systems for exporting that entropy, but those systems are generally not 100% comprehensive, so aging still happens.

Biogerontologist researching aging reversal and life extension therapies

My colleague Jerry Joyce once chaired a NASA committee that defined life in a practical sense, as a self-sustaining chemical system with the potential for Darwinian evolution (the hallmark of biology). That's a perfectly adequate operational definition that is appropriate for research into the origins of life. Obviously it has nothing to do with consciousness, or even the experience of being alive.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres

All the great achievements of humankind – from building the pyramids to reaching the Moon – are based on large scale cooperation. And all large scale human cooperation is based on belief in fictions such as gods, nations, money and human rights.

Bestselling author of "Sapiens" & historian studying human civilization

You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will go to chimpanzee Heaven, and there receive countless bananas for his good deeds. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Only humans believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

Bestselling author of "Sapiens" & historian studying human civilization

Until about 70,000 years ago, humans were just another kind of animal. They weren't particularly important. Their impact on the world was not greater than that of jellyfish, fireflies, or woodpeckers. However, 70,000 years ago humans evolved new cognitive abilities that turned them into the most powerful force on the planet.

Bestselling author of "Sapiens" & historian studying human civilization