The Future of Humanity

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

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Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Today on the Monkey Cage, we are asking human progress.

Was it a bad idea right from the start?

Did it all go wrong when a bacterium managed to find its way into an archaeon and formed the first eukaryote, laying the necessary, if not sufficient, foundations for the evolution of all complex multicellular life on Earth?

You've been reading Richard Dawkins again.

Yes, I have R2.

As Jacob Bronofsky said, we are nature's unique experiment to make rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.

Now that experiment seems to have failed.

What next for the human race?

Now, as many people realise, there is greater evidence to suggest the Earth only exists to actually be a public information film for all other sentient beings in the universe.

They turn on watchers at midnight and go, we better not do that.

What's on this side?

Remember, do not kiss a dog with rabies.

Never eat a lit firework.

And of course, the classic: when reheating a bath, don't do that by throwing in a two-bar fire.

And avoid democracy as much as you can.

I have to admit, I've very much now moved into that kind of now.

Democracy, I'm not sure.

I think benevolent dictatorship may well be the way that I'm going to go.

And possibly, like, maybe led by an enigmatic scientist, perhaps, someone like Jim Al Khalili.

I was with him until the last bit.

Anyway, today we will be discussing the future of humanity with a distinguished cosmologist, astronomer Royal, and former president of the Royal Society, an expert on global politics, chief EU negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal and former leader of the House of Lords, and an actor and director who's worked on some of the greatest satirical political comedies in recent years, including The Thick of It and Veep.

So, if your board of experts turn off now.

And our experts are.

I'm Martin Rees, I'm Professor at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal.

And if you ask me what my hope is for the future of this world, it's that we avoid the downsides of new technology.

My name is Cathy Ashton.

I was the European Union Foreign Minister and I'm now, amongst other things, Chancellor of Warwick University.

And when I think about my optimism for the future of planet Earth, I think that people are capable of making the right decisions eventually.

I'm Chris Addison.

I'm doing a PhD in procrastination at the University of I haven't got round to applying there yet.

And my most optimistic thought about the end of humanity is that at least we won't have to hear about Brexit anymore.

And this is our panel.

Chris, I'll start with you.

Do you feel when we're talking about the possibilities of civilization, is it time for the human race just to throw its hands up and say, look, we gave it a good go, but it hasn't really worked out.

Let's hand it over to another species?

Well, not necessarily.

There are a number of good temping agencies we could call to see if people could come in and take over from us.

I don't know if that's.

But other species, are there other species?

Yeah,

could we get some dolphins in for a while?

They're sort of famously quite clever and rather benign, apart from

one or two little awkward things that they get up to.

But other than that, you know, they're sort of famously bright and perhaps might have some possible solutions for us.

Of course, we would have to flood the entire place so they can get around.

Maybe they could take their capital as Venice and then we could move from there.

But yeah, I don't know that it's necessarily time for us to throw the towel in yet.

I just think that maybe we've it's like it's like when you're driving a car, sometimes you realise you're just going in the wrong direction and there are two options.

You can either keep going out of pure cussedness and the desire not to be felt like not to feel that you are wrong, or you can go, do you know what?

We took a wrong turning back there.

Maybe

we need to go back.

I think we're probably at that stage.

And just as soon as we can get the glove box open and read the map, we'll be fine.

I'm a bit worried that he's still got the glove compartment on the map.

It's called GPS now, isn't it?

You should see some of the cassettes he's got in there as well.

I passed a junction.

You know, at the junction of slip roads, sometimes you just see an unspooled cassette.

In the old days, you'd just see somebody had obviously gone, oh, for God's sake, thrown it out of the car.

I saw one about two weeks ago.

Who was that?

What car could they possibly have been driving?

At that point, you might as well just throw the car on the side.

Martin, your book is about the great challenges that we face.

And you said, I think, in your book, that we are facing our greatest challenges now.

We are, and of course, we can't forecast very well.

You mentioned I was astronomer royal.

I'm sometimes asked, Do you do the Queen's horoscopes for her?

And I say, Well, if she wanted one, I'm the person she'd ask.

But I haven't been asked.

And I have to say that I'm an astronomer, and therefore I don't have a crystal ball, and I can't foresee things very very far ahead.

All I would say is that scientists are better predictors than economists, but I wouldn't say more than that.

But

if we ask what we can predict, there are some things we can predict 50 years ahead.

One is that the world's getting more crowded,

and also it's getting warmer.

Those are the two big problems which we have to tackle and cope with.

But also, the other point is that the new technology is advancing fast, and smartphones would have seemed pretty wild twenty or twenty-five years ago, So we can't at all predict the dominant technology in the middle of a century.

And what worries me very much is that, first of all, we won't cope with the big issues like climate change.

But secondly, technology is getting so powerful that even a few people can misuse it.

And we know already we have cyber attacks and we're going to have other ways in which people

can, by error or by design, cause problems at Cascade globally because our world is very interconnected, and anything that goes bad in one continent is going to spread around the world in a way it wouldn't in the past.

If we take those

examples and discuss them for a while, Cathy, so climate change, for example, I mean,

we know what the problem is.

It's a well-defined problem.

And actually, the solutions

in a scientific sense are well-defined.

It is clear that we need to reduce emissions and find a way of producing cleaner energy and so on.

But the problem, I suppose, there is one of politics and one of people.

And I suppose

convincing people that there is a problem, which is a PR problem in a way, or a political problem, and then finding a political solution because it's a global challenge.

Yeah, you've got to take the scientific information and translate it so that people,

I think, feel

able to do something about it, whether it's plastic bags that you have to pay for, or getting plastics out of the ocean, turning down the temperature and a washing machine, all of those individual practical steps that people can do and feeling control of something which, on the face of it, is a massive challenge and beyond many people's anticipation of what they can do.

You've also got to link it in some way to all of the other factors that make people

and politicians and policy makers decide to move in one direction or another.

So, you have to link it to trade.

You have to link it to what we can do to ensure people's jobs continue or new ones are created.

You have to find a way to make the science and the policy fit together effectively.

It's not impossible.

It requires us to collaborate better than I think we do with science from the public policy and politics point of view.

And it requires us to keep getting the message across and to do so in a way that makes it clear that this is a genuine problem and there is no alternative but to tackle it.

And that means as well thinking about what I call the false equivalence of having people who deny somehow being seen to be equal with those who say this is a real problem when they're not equivalent.

And all of those things need to happen by that collaborative effort being made real.

Chris, you're a storyteller, as part of, you know, whether you were when you were a stand-up comedian with the work you do in film and TV now.

That thing of

the offences I give in court.

I remember Brian about two and a half years ago saying to me, he said, I think if you show people the evidence, eventually they come to the right decision.

And he's a little bit more sceptical on that now.

And I think that's, you know, that problem that we have, which is to show a graph, however much that may show, you know, imminent problems, will not stick in the same way as a story.

You know, you hear of people in Trump's administration say that when he's found out to have totally misled people in terms of information, then people who work for him say it doesn't matter.

We've won the narrative.

So,

how do we make these ideas sticky enough to kind of stay on people, to go, hang on a minute, this story

is a story now which propels us into action?

Well, the problem is not so much finding those stories because those stories are available in terms of you can find communities that are

under threat of flooding and indeed have been flooded.

So you can point now to, and we've all all seen documentaries where there's a polar bear on a tiny fox's glacier mint in the Arctic.

And

that image is heartbreaking and it stays with us until we go to bed that Sunday night an hour later.

Is climate change now, is it really a scientific challenge or is it now more of a political challenge, a public relations challenge?

I think it's a latter because it's a hard sell to tell people to make a sacrifice now for people in distant parts of the world 50 years from now.

And I think even if you will agree on the science, that's going to be a hard sell.

And I think there are two things that can help.

One is that we should enhance research and development to all kinds of clean energy.

Because if the cost comes down and it's more advanced, then the Indians, for instance, who now need to build coal-fired power stations in order to not depend on stoves burning wood and dung in their homes, they will be able to leapfrog directly to clean energy if it's cheap.

So to bring down the cost of clean energy so that India and other countries choose it, that's the one-win-win situation.

It helps the countries that build these new techniques, helps those that use them.

So that's one thing.

But also, I think, to keep public interest, it's got got to ensure we've got to ensure that politicians, inboxes, and the press are always concerned with climate change and these issues.

And that's where opinion leaders are important.

And if you look over the last few years, the two most important people have been the Pope and David Attenborough.

Two very different people, but the Pope,

before the Paris conference in 2015, he got a standing evasion at the UN for his encyclical and had a big effect on his billion followers in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia.

And David Attenborough, more recently, at the Poland conference, had a similar effect.

So it's really these charismatic people who can affect a large public, and they can have more effect than experts have directly.

Can I ask you, Martin?

You wrote a book, I think, 13, 14 years ago, which I think, I may be wrong.

It says Our Final Century, which in America they said people won't be interested in that kind of long term, so they called it Our Final Hour.

That's right, yeah.

To make it more immediate.

But

did you find from writing that book?

I'm interested in now in your new book, finding the certain stories that you heard back from readers, the ones again that really stuck with them, those ones where you thought, ah, this is the place where I can take the narrative, which will mean this really does alert people and stays with them.

Yes.

Well, I'm not a great preacher, but I try to sort of present the arguments.

But I do think that in the climate issue, it is a matter of how far you look ahead.

If you're planning to put up an office building or something, you apply a 5% discount rate.

And if you don't get your money back by, say, 2050, you won't do it.

But that's not the right way to think about climate change.

We've got to think about the life chances of someone who's born today, maybe alive in the 22nd century, and apply a small discount rate.

And unless you're prepared to do that, then you won't prioritize it enough.

So that's a big change.

We've got to get people to think long term.

And it's ironic that now we are in a situation where we are familiar with the billions of years ahead, which the Earth has.

It's less than halfway through its life.

We think and plan shorter term than our

medieval forebears did when they built cathedrals, which took 100 years to be built.

They thought there'd be an apocalypse in a thousand years, but they nonetheless added bricks to a cathedral, thinking 100 years ahead.

Whereas now we don't really plan even 30 years ahead in general.

And that's partly because, of course, things are changing more rapidly.

The medieval people thought their kids and their grandchildren would live the same lives as them.

That's why they thought ahead.

But we don't plan ahead more than 30 years.

There's one exception, actually, which is to

dispose of radioactive waste, where people talk with a straight face about whether the waste depository is safe for 10,000 years, even a million years.

So that's a context where they apply a zero discount rate.

But when it comes to actually planning energy, we don't think 30 years ahead.

But this isn't that partly to do with the fact that we,

oddly enough, although we have a much wider view of the world, we know far more of the world,

our concerns are so much smaller than they were in the sense that if you're building a cathedral because you think it might get you into heaven, it's the thing you're supposed to do as a central act of faith in your religion.

It doesn't matter that it's not going to be finished because you're doing it for the greater glory.

And if you want to look at it from a kind of what's in it for me perspective,

this is going to play well with a big fella when I go upstairs.

So we don't have that anymore.

And we also are led by people...

I mean, I know it's always coming back to this at the moment, but we're led by people who are just trying to get to the end of the day.

Our government just want to get to the end of the day.

And the next thing they want to do do is to make sure that they are in that seat

the next morning and

that they will win the next election.

So they will do whatever that takes.

And that's a kind of

telling the truth to the people.

That's true, because

as Mr.

Jon Cord Juncker said in a different context,

the politicians know what to do.

They don't know how to get re-elected when they've done it.

That's a serious concern.

But I think the point is that

the excuse they have to some extent is that it is harder to predict 10 or 20 years ahead now than it was in medieval times.

And so they genuinely don't quite know what the priority will be then.

And that is an excuse.

Although, as I say, in some cases, we can predict 50 years ahead.

We can predict the population will be higher.

We can predict the world will be warmer.

But you can get the scientific predictions if you take the one about population.

And we know there will be a larger population.

What we also know is it'll be on the move.

And that's where politicians and politics has to come in.

Because how you deal with that?

How do you deal with the challenge of people who, for one reason or another, we may have had seventy years of peace, but actually, most of the planet has not.

And there are wars raging on our borders, as it were, that are creating the circumstances where people flee for their lives.

Yes, and that's one of the things that I believe, back to my original point about what I'm optimistic, is that the interconnectivity and the way that generations that will follow are linked together and are talking, tackling, and looking at issues is something that we should be extremely optimistic about.

We know that in 20 years' time, the technology that we think of today as groundbreaking will seem passe,

and we don't know what that will mean.

And we also know that we've got to find clever and intellectually

very cutting-edge ways to tackle problems that exist not just in our own societies but beyond.

And so, if you look at that, I think what we don't do is give enough credence to the capacity of people to make change.

I was thinking about this on the way in.

Last year, this time last year, there were five vegans in the UK.

Now,

McDonald's, I think, has a vegan menu.

There's like 600,000 of them out of nowhere, like they were in a cupboard going boom.

And suddenly, something, something in that idea, something in the idea of health and in the idea that there's climate is attached to that notion.

It's slightly more problematic than people make make out, but nonetheless, that is an impetus to take up that diet.

It's gone crazy.

So, it's clearly possible.

What is it about that specific thing that has caught people's imagination?

I'm a vegetarian.

They've taken the heat off us in the old days.

If you were a vegetarian and you turned up, it's all right.

What can you eat then?

Anything except meat?

We don't have anything except meat.

Now they're just, oh, you're not a vegan.

Thank heavens for that.

We've run out of seeds.

You know, it's just the.

In the next hour of the programme.

Martin, I wanted to move to your second point,

which actually relates to what Cathy said about the march of technology, essentially, which in some sense

leads us to imagine a brighter future.

But as you alluded to, there are significant problems that come with those technologies.

Right.

I talked in my book about bio, cyber, AI and space technologies.

And actually, space is the most benign one.

So we should leave us at the end and talk about the gloomy ones first.

Of course,

cyber, we know already allows a few individuals to cause

massive damage through cyber attacks and it's very very hard to check these up and I think bio although it offers huge opportunities for better health is going to have the same problem because bio-error and bio-terror is something which can be generated by just a small group.

It's not like making a nuclear weapon, but you can't do in a clandestine way in your back garden, but you can generate a cyber attack or a bioweapon quite easily.

And I think there'll be a growing tension between privacy, security, and liberty if we're going to guard against these kinds of problems happening in our country and elsewhere.

So that's the real downside, I think.

So we've got to try and make sure that we can harness the benefits of these, which of course are potentially huge, but avoid the misuse, because our society is very vulnerable.

We know that a few people can cause massive disruption on the scale of a city or even a country.

Yeah, I suppose, Cathy, that's a challenge, isn't it?

Because you look back to the big threats that we faced in the past, perhaps Cuban missile crisis, or as you negotiated, the Iran nuclear deal, you're dealing with state actors, big programmes, and you can verify.

And you hope, rational actors.

But if you have individuals that can cause mass destruction, that's almost seems like an unsolvable problem.

I think it's a really difficult problem, and you can see that by everything from how police forces and nations are trying to grapple with it individually and collaboratively, to try and work out

how you make sure that you can check whether somebody's got hold of fissile material if they're trying to build some kind of dirty bomb, or simply the household products that can create a bomb that you can set off.

This is really, really difficult and challenging stuff, and I don't think we've really got beyond the foothills when it comes to cyber wolf of actually looking at what we can do to really take it on.

We know it's a problem, we actually have seen it as a problem every day.

There are challenges in this country and elsewhere.

And so it's going to take science, especially, and technology to be able to grapple with it, as well as all the human stuff that goes alongside it.

Because people's desire to create mayhem needs to be addressed.

Yes, there's an arms race between the attackers and the defenders in the cyber context.

And this natural assumption and instinct we have for our own individual liberty,

which is, as you'd mentioned, seems to be a tension here.

Yes.

But because privacy is not a concern, because everyone puts all their stuff on Facebook, et cetera.

So it's a generational difference.

I mean, old people do care about this, whereas younger generation don't.

And that's at least something which is

reassurance because they're spying on each other.

And that makes it harder for someone to get away with something clandestine without it being noticed.

Martin, can I...

Sorry, just

Is part of the problem that we have, which is what we are now, some human minds are able to generate in terms of technology, in terms of the inventiveness and innovation, the number of possible permutations of its use.

If you have a flint or fire or a wheel, et cetera, there are so.

But now, what we're able to create, there are, to actually be able to predict where this information can go and how it can be used is such a kind of unruly and difficult to pick path.

No, I think that's a big problem, and that's a problem with everything to do with computers and AI.

But I think the other concern we need to have is about

health and bio, which

we know already there are ethical and prudential concerns about what's done with gene editing and all that sort of thing.

And that's going to become more acute.

We're going to have to ask to what extent do we allow gene editing to be used, not just to get rid of some really bad gene that gives you a particular disease.

Are we going to use it to enhance people if we can?

We just don't know.

But that's going to be a new set of concerns concerns we're going to have to deal with.

So, I suppose the question is whether our knowledge about nature and the workings of nature

is, well,

it certainly has the potential to make our lives better or worse.

But is not knowing any better than knowing?

Well, I think on the whole, not knowing is better.

Clearly, knowledge is, on the whole, a good thing, but we've got to accept that we can't predict how it'll be applied.

To take a simple example, when the laser was invented, those who invented it had no idea it could be used both as a weapon and also to destroy Princess Leia's home planet.

Right, yes.

Yeah, right.

But also for eye surgery and for DVD recordings and all that.

Was that a laser?

Benign.

That was a form of a laser, yeah.

It was a sort of, yeah.

Look, don't get into the science feet and be right.

This is...

What I'm worried about now is that the show has reached a point where we are going, no more knowledge, and maybe we should destroy nature because it's trying to destroy us.

And we've never got that bleep before.

I thought we'd come to some of the more fun ways that we might be annihilated

rather than the more positive.

Because I don't know.

In your book, you deal with some of the more

fanciful scenarios.

The universe can just take us out without us having a hand in it.

Well, I'd like to cheer you up and not talk about that.

I think space has a cheerful aspect.

So we can get optimistic.

Yes.

And also life extension has

driven us.

Does that sound like a good idea?

Well, some people think so, and of course, there's this guy, Ray Kurzweil,

who

works for Google.

He wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, and he thinks that he could be downloaded to a machine, but he's in his 60s, so it won't happen in his lifetime.

And that's why he wants to be frozen in liquid nitrogen

when he dies and then resurrected into this new world.

He sounds like somebody you'd avoid at a party, certainly.

Well, let me tell you something else.

I discovered that there are three academics in this country who've paid to be frozen in the same way.

Well, two have paid the full whack, one paid the cut price just to have his head frozen.

And I'm glad to say they're at Oxford, not from my university.

All three of them are from Oxford.

Yes, yes.

And I told them I wanted to end my days in an English churchyard, not an American refrigerator.

What about in a refrigerator in an English churchyard?

Well, maybe that's the best of both worlds.

Thomas Gray's Elegy in an Electrolytic.

Right.

So in terms of our future beyond Earth, into space.

Yes.

What are our possibilities?

There are opportunities.

Well, I mean,

I think it's a post-human enterprise rather than a human one in the following sense.

Clearly, we could have people going to Mars.

I'm old enough to remember the Apollo program 50 years ago, and I thought then that it would only be 10 years before there were footprints on Mars, as there would have been had the Americans continued to spend 4% of their federal budget on space.

But they didn't, there was no motive.

And of course, now

robots are so much better that there's no practical case for sending people into space.

And if I was an American, I wouldn't support the NASA manned programme.

I'd leave it to the private sector.

Elon Musk and

Jeff Bezos were their companies, because they can accept higher risks than NASA can impose on civilians who are funded by a taxpayer.

And there'd be crazy people prepared to go, even with one-way tickets.

And Musk himself says he wants to die on Mars, but not on impact.

And

he's only 47 now, so he might.

So I think

the few people will go, but I think it's a dangerous delusion.

to believe in mass emigration, as Musk does and as the late Stephen Hawking did,

because nowhere on Mars is as clement as the top of Everest or the South Pole.

And dealing with climate change, though, a problem is a real doddle compared to terraforming Mars.

So we've got to deal with the Earth's problems here.

There's no planet B for ordinary risk-averse people.

But, and this is getting back to answering your question.

Yeah, I thought you were going to be optimistic.

Yeah.

So that we're just here, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

These guys on Mars, by the end of a century, they will be ill-adapted to where they are.

They'll be away from all the regulators.

So they will use all the techniques of cyborg and genetic modification to adapt to that alien environment.

And that may mean they are flesh and blood, but looking rather different.

It could be that they become electronic.

And in the latter case, if they become electronic entities, then they won't want gravity, they won't want an atmosphere, so they'll just go off into the blue yonder.

You're describing the Daleks.

Yeah, that's right.

Yes.

Yeah.

And if they're not out there, then we'll be sending them because they'll be near immortal, and so they can make these interstellar voyages.

So I think it'll be these

people on Mars.

And they will be the precursors of this post-human evolution beyond the Earth.

The idea of people on Mars by the end of the century is not crazy, but it'll be for adventurers, not for mass immigration.

But I agree with Martin.

I mean, in your book, you talk about the fact that the people who did the adventures of the past, who went off in leaky boats heading for somewhere they'd no idea quite where it was with very little equipment to help them, were taking much greater risks than actually most of

and going into the unknown to a far greater extent.

Exactly, they've no idea what they're saying.

Exactly, they know what it's made of, they know what it's going to be like, and so on.

Whereas they've no idea what they were going to reach out to.

And so there will always be, thank goodness, adventurers prepared to do things that really will expand our knowledge and do things in ways that I think are quite crazy, but actually get the results that you want.

And we should cheer them on.

We should cheer them on.

But we also have to recognise that most people are not going to do that.

And we have to solve the problems that we have here, too.

And don't send something equivalent of the Mayflower shortly afterwards, and then go, who's on Mars now?

Religious zealot, terrible mistake.

Right.

Do you think that will

help us?

You've essentially suggested it will, but it will help us develop technologies which will be relevant to solve our problems here on Earth.

Because you often hear this, and science in general, actually.

I mean,

you see the criticism of the Large Hadron Collider or the space missions, and say, well, shouldn't we solve the problems here first before we acquire new knowledge about the universe?

Yes.

Well I think that argument's oversold, you know, the non-stick frying pan coming out of the moon landings, as it were.

There are easier ways to make a non-stick frying pan.

But clearly

you can't predict the uses of these new technologies.

And clearly

having people work at the frontier technology is is going to help us, but we have to control the downsides.

But I do think that we should leave these things to the private sector.

People talk about us going to explore the solar system.

It needn't be us, because whereas climate change does require a concerted effort by all people and all nations,

space travel can be just left to a few individuals.

It may be the sort of Wild West scenario, but that I think is more realistic than us spending a lot of public money on something which doesn't provide any practical help.

And you end up with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mars.

Everybody.

It's fantastic.

You just, essentially, the people who can afford to go are the people who go, bye then.

Bye.

But the only thing you have to be, I think just we have to be conscious of is that the motivation for them, not them as individuals, but the adventurers we think of in the future, is also interesting in itself.

People went to foreign lands to explore and to bring back products that they could sell and to be involved dynamically, if you like, in trade and other things.

Well, so too, the explorers of the future will be looking for things that they can sell back on earth or they can use back on earth.

And that has implications again if you have monopolies who are bringing back products that they can charge whatever they wish for that become increasingly important.

So you still end up with having to balance all of these different things against, I'm afraid, these people that we call politicians and governments.

I love the idea that they're going there to bring new stuff back.

And the Chinese have just announced that they're going to do an experiment on the moon to try and grow a potato.

Walter Raleigh got that.

We've brought that one back already.

Find something else.

We don't need moon potatoes.

Well, so it is Jeff Bezos, isn't it?

It is Bezos doing that as well.

I just want something that might mention,

which is sometimes when people talk about the optimism and that we are moving forward, and as you mentioned earlier, Chris, you know, perhaps sometimes we're so tapped in to connect it to the bleakness.

But the real thing that we should be thinking about is the fact that it's not the gap between the way things are, but the way things could be, was something that might and and that is is the real battle now, which is to say, Yes, we are moving on, but we need to more and more work out, hang on, we have this, we have this information, we have these possibilities we have in terms of managing to minimise the divide between people.

Do you think that that's what we it's there, it does exist, these possibilities, but they're still not being acted on?

Yeah, and it's back to the the narrative, the story.

That we we know what kind of country, what kind of world we could live in.

We know the solutions to a lot of problems, scientific or otherwise.

The question is are we prepared to put the effort, the energy and the priority into trying to resolve them?

And

sometimes we make decisions that take us in a different direction.

You can think back on

ways in which perhaps we would have moved faster and further on climate change.

Perhaps if we'd had President Al Gore,

the White House would have done more quickly because for him, that was a massive priority at a time when it wasn't a priority for many people, particularly politicians involved across the world.

Or you can look back and think, if things had been different,

we could have made a dramatic change.

And it comes back again to the role of people: that people actually determine much more than I think sometimes we all realize how far and how fast we move on an issue.

And so it really is important to make sure that people feel empowered to make change.

Right, but it's very hard to get people to think about the long term when there are immediate

humane issues.

I mean,

it's hard to believe that people are really going to do something about climate change 50 years from now when there's now a situation when the thousand richest people on the planet could improve the lives of the bottom billion on the planet, and they're not doing so.

So that's really the big gap between the way things are and the way they could be.

And although people are getting, on average, better off, the gap between the way they are and the way they could be is getting wider.

And that's why there's no ethical progress.

And that's what depresses me.

Chris, at the end of this, do you have a greater optimism,

more strenuous pessimism?

Where are we?

I don't know.

I think I am broadly optimistic about the future of humanity, but that is because I just don't understand enough.

Well, that's the end of the moral maze.

And

I feel that this might be a show that needs a sequel.

It turns out, talking about the destiny of humanity and the ethics of all of them can't be covered in 29 minutes.

Why don't you do one in 2047 called Told You So?

And he'll still look the same age.

Me too, right?

They reboot him every year.

We also asked the audience a question, and the question was: when you were a child, what did you think humanity would be up to by 2019?

And here are the answers.

We will be able to use teleportation to get anywhere, but I would still have been late for school.

Extinct.

I thought we'd have discovered the secret of everlasting youth by now, but it seems Brian Cox has kept it all to himself.

I was told that we should not worry because things can only get better.

Happy to have misled a generation, Brian, and just simply not this.

That's the universal human condition, right there, in two words.

I didn't think it was going to be that.

Thank you very much to our panel, Chris Addison, Kathy Ashton, and Martin Rees.

Next week's episode, we are asking, can fish count?

I'm not asking that.

All right, then, next week's episode, I'll be asking, can fish count?

And you'll be sitting there going, why aren't we doing physics?

Anyway, good night.

Good night.

Without your trousers.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Before you go, let me just squeeze in here and tell you about the flip podcasts from BBC Radio 4.

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

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