Martin Rees Quotes

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Modern science says: 'The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

Past, present, and future is where I'm at.

Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

You are the result of billions of years of evolution. You will only live for a few years and will never exist again. Absolutely beautiful

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

Society's only real 'progressives' are the deviants and mutants. Look at evolution - fish who didn't deviate never became amphibians; frogs who didn't mutate never became reptiles; conformist snakes never became mammals , etc. Normal Humans will remain humans, and they'll be subjugated by the digital monsters of the next few millenia.

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years.

... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it.

I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

If we're so smart and so much better than all the animals, and man rules the world, why can't we just change all the time from, like, a caterpillar to a butterfly?

The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

How you all will change the work after I am gone. If I came back a hundred years from now, I just wonder if I would even recognize it.

There is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type.