Lord Martin Rees on Catastrophe, Cosmology, and the Future

Sometimes in this game you get to do an interview where you
genuinely can say: "the person I'm about to interview needs no
introduction." This is one of those occasions. But if I were to
do that, it would wreck the fun of getting to introduce the
interview, and why would I deprive myself of that?


So, this episode, we are interviewing Lord Martin Rees. Martin
Rees is one of the foremost cosmologists and astrophysicists of
our time. He was made the Astronomer Royal in 1995, has been
Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and President of the Royal
Society. He has written more than 500 research papers across
various areas of astrophysics and cosmology, including
contributions to the origin of the cosmic microwave background
radiation, the final proofs of the Big Bang theory, quasars, and
gamma ray bursts.


In the latter part of his career, he has been an immensely
influential populariser of science, writing books on Cosmology
such as Just Six Numbers and Our Cosmic Habitat. And he has also
devoted himself to considering grand problems of the future of
humanity and the existential risks that we face: his book, Our
Final Century, helped to kick off the field of existential risk
studies, and he co-founded the Centre for the Study of
Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge in 2012.


It is no exaggeration to say that a great many of the ideas that
we've discussed on this show - and my own personal inspiration to
study physics in the first place - owes to the work of Lord Rees,
both in discovering much of the science in the first place and
then again in popularising and explaining the ideas so
wonderfully.


I was extremely grateful that he was willing to be so generous
with his time and respond to such a large range of my questions.
Our interview touches on existential risks, the current pandemic,
extraterrestrial life, cosmology in general, and the nature of
fundamental physics.