I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.
The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.
Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.
It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
