Martin Rees Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

On extraterrestrial life:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Martin Rees
Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.

Martin Rees
Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth (with the single exception of the catastrophic destruction of space itself). Will this happen before our technical civilisation disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it for ever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.

Martin Rees
Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.

Martin Rees
Everything astronomers observe turns out to be a small and atypical fraction of what exists.

Martin Rees
If we are to understand an everyday question like "Where did the atoms we are made of come from?" we must understand the stars.

Martin Rees
The fate of the Universe, like its present appearance, was imprinted right at the beginning, in the hot, dense fireball era. And to understand that era, and the nature of the relics it could have left behind, we enter the realm of the particle physicist.

Martin Rees
We should all oppose - as Darwin did - views manifestly in conflict with the evidence, such as creationism... But we shouldn't set up this debate as 'religion v science'; instead we should strive for peaceful coexistence with at least the less dogmatic strands of mainstream religions, which number many excellent scientists among their adherents.

Martin Rees
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.

Martin Rees