I arrive early at Carlton House Terrace, home of the Royal Society, and am ushered into the President’s Room. It’s like Dave Bowman entering the surreal hotel suite at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The furniture and decor are earthly and familiar, with the faded elegance of an Oxbridge senior common room. But the scale is wrong. No one has an office this big back on Earth. Behind me, through the window, the virtual reality winter sky is dying over a simulacrum of St James’s Park. Martin Rees materialises to my left, teacup in hand, and settles his slight frame in the adjacent chair. He has come straight from a House of Lords debate on food production, by teleportation perhaps. I switch on my digital recorder. “I have to think before I speak now,” he says, mindful of an earthling custom I don’t always observe.

But he turns out to be human, and I relax. This year’s BBC Reith lecturer, Martin Rees—Lord Rees of Ludlow—astronomer royal and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is a cosmologist of world renown and one of our foremost public intellectuals. He is also president of the Royal Society, which is currently celebrating its 350th anniversary, and so stands as a figurehead for the whole of British science. When he estimates that our civilisation has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving the present century, we should take note. If, in the next breath, he says that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti) will be one of the most important challenges for science over the next 20 years, then suspend disbelief.

“So, as astronomer royal, are you often summoned to the palace for briefings on gamma-ray bursts in distant galaxies? Does the Queen show much interest in extraterrestrials?” No, these aren’t the questions I put. Not yet, anyway. Instead, I ask whether science has enough good stories. There’s a long pause. Perhaps he’s wary of a trick question. But no, he’s just thinking before he speaks. He turns the question this way and that, dismantles and reassembles it, threads it through with allusions to the grand narratives on cosmos and quantum, evolution and consciousness. He cites legendary quests and iconic heroes (Galileo, Newton, Einstein) and points to the fuzzy frontiers where strange tales grow in the telling. “Our aim is to provide the best possible stories we can,” he concludes. Except that he hasn’t concluded. He’s off again: “But another way to interpret your question…” It’s a fair example of Rees’s style of thinking.  He’s a “big picture” man, a synthesist, always looking for patterns and connections and, finding them, turning them inside out for another view.

The founders of the Royal Society, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and the other “ingenious and curious gentlemen” who gathered at Gresham College would recognise Rees as one of their own. Their guiding spirit was the Elizabethan philosopher-scientist, Francis Bacon, who understood that science had two driving imperatives: “the search for enlightenment” and “the relief of man’s estate.” The founding fellows might have devoted their evenings to fathoming the motions of swinging pendulums, but their days were spent on man’s estate, notably helping rebuild London after the great fire. Rees operates according to a similar division of brain labour. His academic reputation is built on science of the purest, curiosity-driven variety. He has helped elucidate the processes underlying star and galaxy formation in the aftermath of the big bang, which in turn has brought us to our present God’s-eye view of the structure of the universe: the great foam of galaxies, clustered and strung in filaments across the void. According to the Oxford physicist, David Deutsch, Rees is “arguably the finest all-round theoretical physicist working today.”

But his feet are squarely set on planet Earth. A politician as well as a scientist, he sits on the cross benches in the Lords but accepts “old Labour” as a fair description of his true orientation. “I deplore growing inequality, declining institutional loyalties, and the selling off of core utilities.” The three main parties, he feels, are unduly relaxed about such trends. But it’s the apolitical platform of the Royal Society that gives him his more defined role in the politics of science and, in this final year of his term as president, climate change sits high on the Society’s agenda. He speaks eloquently on the subject, but dispassionately. He’s been called an alarmist for giving such grim odds on our chances of surviving the century (an estimate he stands by) but there is no hint of alarm in his delivery. The shenanigans at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (see p22) and the ineptitude of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the not-so-rapidly-melting Himalayan glaciers are embarrassments, but do not alter the fact that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are the highest for 500,000 years. Belching yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will force temperatures higher. If we don’t watch out, the Greenland ice cap will go and a foul megaburp of methane will issue from the arctic tundra with apocalyptic results. The gastric imagery and the alarmism here are mine. Rees just tells it like it is.

***

We all know the story. It’s bleak. So why do most people seem not to give a toss? Rees casts an avian glance. “It’s true,” he says. “The ordinary person does need a bit more convincing.” Yet even those who accept the scientific evidence and the catastrophic projections generally don’t engage much on a practical level; me, for example. I spend more time thinking about cricket than about climate change. There’s Rees’s birdlike gaze again—a sparrowhawk sighting a woodpigeon. “Most people discount the future,” he says. “Understandably, they care about their immediate surroundings and their kin rather than people in remote parts of the world, decades in the future.” Yet we turn a blind eye to the future even when our own lives are in jeopardy. “As in politics,” he says, “the immediate trumps the important.” Our future-blindness may reflect a basic limitation of the brain. “In so far as brains evolved to cope with everyday life on the savannah, they evolved in a context where you didn’t plan 50 years ahead and you cared about your local community. Although…” A pause. A sip of tea. “Although, it’s odd—I gave a talk at Ely cathedral not long ago. The people who built the cathedral had a limited view of the world. Their world was the fens, and they thought it would end quite soon, but nevertheless built this wonderful structure which is part of our heritage 1,000 years later. And it’s shameful in a way that we, with our longer horizons and greater resources, are reluctant to think 50 years ahead.”

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