Martin Rees

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just 'virtual reality.'

I've got no religious beliefs at all.

There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.

If I hadn't been inside of Biosphere 2 and really lived a biological life-support system, I definitely would not be involved in life-support systems for space.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.