“We should all be evangelists for new technology,” says Martin Rees. We live in a world where “the global population footprint is getting heavier. The grand global challenges can only be solved with the assistance of new technology. Our everyday lives are substantially eased by the developments of science over the past century, but we now have to look forward at areas like bio and cyber to see how technology can empower us more.
“If you look at the Covid-19 pandemic,” says the Astronomer Royal, “in enabling us to get vaccines within a year, science was our salvation.” The international co-ordination of scientific effort and manufacturing capacity of the global pharmaceutical industry that compressed the time required to bring vaccines to the public to less than a year, represents for Rees, “a good example of how science can feed into human welfare very quickly”.
Now in his 80th year – his birthday was commemorated by a special edition of ‘The Sky at Night...