As dazzling as the HAL 9000, as entertaining as Woody Allen - April 1 - 3.37pm - 2022

Professor Lord Martin Rees discusses the prospects for humanity

Somehow it seemed appropriate that on the way to The Sheldonian to hear Lord Martin Rees speak, Oxford’s History of Science Museum was advertising on a sandwich board outside that it was the ‘Home of Einstein’s Blackboard’… Now there’s Royalty and there’s science royalty and then there’s Lord Rees whom, if intellect could be measured geographically, is probably the size of the entire Western Hemisphere. Astronomer Royal, former director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and President of The Royal Society, he’s clearly no slouch. But I hadn’t truly appreciated just how large his brain was until today. The talk was entitled ‘On the Future: Prospects for Humanity and The End of Astronauts’ and I just assumed, naively maybe, we’d plotting a course from our solar system to the farthest reaches of the known Universe. But no. Hell, I’m not even sure we left the Earth’s atmosphere for this is clearly an individual whose wisdom isn’t only limited to Event Horizons, Red Dwarfs and Heliospheres. Topics ranged from the Black Lives Matter movement to feeding the third world, the breakdown of society, social media, cyber and bio attacks and, most importantly of all, the environment. Certainly his bleak visions for our immediate future were unsettling but his faith in science to…deliver us if you will, from the precipice we currently find ourselves balancing on was just as equally upbeat. An extraordinary mind with a wit to match, this was quite simply one of those events it was a privilege to attend.