term secretary and it is about china. the man who loved china. this is a ymca director who went to china in the late 1800's. this is the most definitive chronicle of china's contribution to science in the world. you ought to read this if you want to understand where this is coming from. not like yesterday they discovered science or yesterday's they discovered -- they have been there for 6,000 years and put it all together. ..

what publishers can do to books. because in australia clouds and that sort of stuff suggests high thoughts and wonderful, you know, and entering in the mind. of course is different from the american subtitle. it looked a bit too much like the magaziner something. keresan religious connotations. but the book came out of my attempts answer a question that i was asked her for early when i was talking to a climate change,

particularly after i had written in 2005. that question was our chances really of surviving the shifting climate. the only way i could think of to answer that question was to really go back through the sides of the fundamentals, to go back to the process that created us and our planet. the connection bizarre species and planet earth. i couldn't figure of a better way to look to the issue then to go back and look at the work of that man there, charles darwin, the great kind of sacred house for all of the great men. the british women.

he was buried in the church. nothing is said of his achievement. you wouldn't get why he was there, obviously what he had done and written about was the theory of evolution, it was not kindly look done. the reason i want to start with sarin was because he was the man who really explain to us the process that made us in the process that made our earth. his idea, his great a deal was an extremely simple one. was simply that in every generation there is variation between individuals. some of those individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce than others and that

over the best this of time people were just becoming aware of the history of the earth in the mid-19th century. but that is not on his ability, on the shape of the species as a whole, as he put it. so a very simple idea. darwin, being a very wise man, very perceptive person decided to sit on that idea for 20 years. it was only when i went back to darwin's house that a really understood a little bit more about why he waited so long before he announced his fundamental idea that changed our view of the world's. just outside his house he built a little dignity called the sand walk. that is it there. it's actually a pebble walk. there you go.

every day he would walk. and people have wondered why he did. policy doing as he walked around? it is just a loop around. scientists speculated may be he was protecting his arguments are constructing the beautiful paragraphs and sentences that characterize his wooden work. but the testimony of these children suggests something very different. they are left in lives where they talked about what they knew of the father and they would play in the forest and often interrupt. and he always seemed glad of interruption. whenever there were doing. and not the actions, i would say, the man who is deeply engaged in very complex and critical thought. i think what darwin was doing

was metaphorically thinking about the implication of his theory for religious belief in his country, for the shape of civil society, and other deep matters. i guess that what he was worried about was he would destroy the faith by showing we were not the unique creation of a loving and caring god but instead were the result of an immoral and utterly cool process. by destroying faith he might destroy hope and charity as well and have a very adverse impact upon his society. he may never have publicist theory if it hadn't been for this man here. in 185820 years after darwin first fumble on the idea of how we and every other living thing

on the planet was made this man here, alfred russel wallace, those working in indonesia. a man 20 years. he was a working-class lad, self-made, went to the tropics to collect specimens. while he was there he had a malarial attack. as a result an idea came to him. perhaps species were created by the same mechanisms that darwin had chanced upon 20 years earlier. when he recovered enough from his malaria to write he wrote a note to die when outlining his theory and nest drolen if you wouldn't mind transmitting it to one of the journals to be published. he was horrified. he said, you know, willis would not have made a summary of my work if he had have my notes in

front of. he's not, perhaps, that his life's work was about to be stolen. as it was he appealed to his friends, particularly those who looked after german publications and so forth including a great geologist. as a result of their intervention both pieces of work were co published in july in 1858, both star winds and wallace's. it is extraordinary how similar they are. the theory is presented in boneless and completeness in both accounts. but for all of that it was like as squiggling often criticize the. no one took any notice. the man who was in charge of publishing the journal, professor bell, an expert wrote his summary that there be no

significant scientific discoveries bulbous in the journal that year, nothing that revolutionized the department of science, of course he could not have been more wrong and that was shown the following year and 1859 when darwin published his book on the origin of species. and then as to when, perhaps, peered, with the theory at least upon society everything began to change. within five years the coin the term survival of the fittest. social darwinism had been born. he did not really help his own cause in the subtitle he picked for the book which included the line on the preservation. i can imagine 1859. and englishmen. picked up this book. the preservation of favored races spirit would not have been thinking about the favored

races. you're thinking about british empire builders. and so there was this social impact. and over time i think what we saw was a very, very deep impact on our society by these darwinian ideas. everything from national socialism, to neoclassical economics have some income of darwinian thinking, particularly as mediated through the likes of herbert spencer. so as i was beginning to look at the process that creates u.s. read and reread. reread darwin and began to despair that, perhaps, we were selfish, shortsighted, ruthless

and to cease ford's by an amoral and ugly and cruel process. it was this man here that really gave me hope that that may not be so the case. alfred russel wallace live along and full life dying at the age of 90. the aged 80 he was still writing. instead, i would argue, is most important work was published in 1900 for in his eighth decade. that is the title page of it there. man's place in the universe, the study of the results of research in relation to the unit's you a plurality of worlds. a very strange tale in the. what this book very -- really is is a summary of wallace's understanding of what the evolutionary had created. he wasn't interested in drilling down ever more finely in terms of understanding the

evolutionary mechanism. he had done that in 1858. what he wanted to know was what it created. being a holistic tinker, his field of endeavor was the entire planet. this book is the foundation stone of science and astor biology. comparing worlds quite literally imposes the theory that this planet is the only living planet. the others, wherever they be in the universe. it is also the foreign of another theory. he talks in the book about the atmosphere, the way the atmosphere works, the way that that which is often created is important in regulating goods and claman's systems. an extraordinary lucid precede and work that underpants' many aspects of science, particularly holistic science, theory, and so

forth. and what we learn from wallace and his work is that evolutions legacy is not nasty, brutish, and short, survival of the fittest. instead this grew and immoral mechanism has led to a world of extraordinary intricacy, interconnectedness', and corporation. and i just want to run through a few examples of the cooperation. this slight just shows mitochondria. small organelles that exist in all of our cells. they are the power packs. it has been realized in the last 30 years or so that these actually have nothing to do with us in terms of their origin. they originated as freezing bacteria a billion years ago in an ancient ocean. they came to filter their bodies much the way algie do with coral

polyps. but over a billion years they have become so closely tied in with themselves and thus some basis is so intricate that they can exist for a millisecond without the cells that they live within. our bodily cells cannot survive without them. that is just the beginning of the complexities of what we call a human being. if i like my skin, i have hundreds of species of bacteria, viruses, and finer living all over me. i do watch. we are all like that. we are all ecosystems of neil planetary complexity. if he took the cells away you would still have a shadow of my entire body here because of but 10 percent of my body mass is made up of other species.

everything covering my skin, the special mites that only survive in human eyebrows. a species that only survived human eyelashes. we are ecosystems of planetary complexity. and what are we at the end of the day? we are ultimately just and craft for all or complexity. that is with the evolutionary process tells us, biochemistry. our chemical origin is in the earth's crust dating back 4 billion years with the spark of life and our planet. and, of course, we draw a separation line between us and the rest of the planet, foolish in terms of thinking. so what is the basic editing that we are part of? that is it there. the way i think up the planet is

simply in that caption their commemoration system organized manner. what is the information system at work here? it is dna which is a digital information system which obviously is the blueprint of our bodies. even more than that it has created that entity that we see today. for a half billion years old, nothing but sunlight. nothing going out but he to. yet it has created this extraordinary entity. i would like to concentrate briefly on the three organs of the planet because they tell a tale of dramatic modification of life itself and dna. the first is the craft. we have the oceanic crust year, the continental crust here. in the very early stages it works like a cousin of the crust. made by the weathering of these

rocks. scientists have recently come up with these rather intriguing nation's that the continents would not exist without life. that is because we can calculate the energy budget of the early earth, the primitive earth. we can work out of prison that is required to create the early continents. there was an energy deficit. so where was the energy coming from to create a version of the oceanic rocks that led to the continent's being formed? it can only have come from one source. that is life itself. life capturing energy from the sun, creating a sense and so forth, a very primitive bacteria and a primitive form of life that helped heighten -- hasten the erosion of rocks and so create the ground beneath their feet. boeotian itself, we know from

studies, they did not resemble their current form 2 billion years ago. it was full of medals, dissolved metals, heavy metals and so forth. it was very different, and hospitable for life. the atmosphere didn't resemble the modern atmosphere. that thin layer, about as thick as an onionskin is the creation of life. almost all of the atmosphere with the exception of the noble gases are made by life itself for lives on purpose. so there is a profound impact of life on the system. quite literally a living planet. but what exactly is it? this is the question that scientists are asking.

the name comes from ancient greek. the ancient greeks believed that the earth was one hole and perfect living being, like a human being. they believed it was a living creature. no scientists today believe that is a tenable hypothesis because the earth just is not as tightly integrated nor as well regulated as a living creature such as ourselves. and yet it clearly has some self regulating capacity. we see that in the presence of greenhouse gases in the hemisphere. we know how warm the earth would be if there were no greenhouse gases. -15 degrees. instead it's plus 15 degrees because being struck by the greenhouse gases making the plan inhospitable to life. there are many examples of entities that influence the climate system and keep it

hospitable for life and in a rather stable state. they range from the atmospheric dust to various essen's created by algae at the surface of the notion that help with the formation of clouds and many other factors. greenhouse gases themselves alive refer to those as geothermal ounce because in a sense that word to operate rather more like pheromone's than any control system you will see in an animal. so, i think the best way to describe it is really a commonwealth of virtue. it is a system where every species takes in every other species rubbish and waste. there is no way to the end of the day. a system where nothing comes in the light and nothing goes up heat. i want to talk a little bit about hierarchies of organization between an individual like ourselves and the planet or an ecosystem for that matter.

the most important of those charities is that thing called the super organism. if you're interested in this i strongly recommend that you read wilson's book called the super organism that explains the level of organization better than anything and no. here is a great example of the super organism. these are termites. you can see that they differ quite a lot went to the other. they're all the same species. he super organism is a level of organization that is between that of our bodies and something like an ecosystem. it is the "hearts touched by fire" did these things, these creatures to pheromones. perhaps the best way to start thinking about the origin is to think where they came from. 100 million years ago these things are cockroaches.

just very specialized and modified cockroaches, but it was when cockroaches discovered agriculture that they became super organisms living together like that. always have the upper hand, the carcass, don't they? hundred million years before us billing parmesan cities. look at that. it is like s skyscraper. its own air-conditioning system, its own water security system, its own gardens. it is a very complex entity. the similarities between the structure and our cities, striking. the fact that there are many differences as of. i just would like to look briefly now, compare the in six super organisms with our own super organisms. the path that we have taken over

the last and dozen years is most closely paralleled by the end. the end 546,070,000,000 years ago were wasps, perhaps with a very primitive social system. starting 60 of million years ago and started to move from being hunter-gatherer's which primitive ants all are three to more organized sorts of humanization sprees and discovered that they could enslave others and therefore developed societies. there get them to work. other answer yet other species. they found that they could be herder's. aphids, they could and domesticate. and some of these had herding societies, an extraordinarily sophisticated ways of managing.

they carry them about searching for the best pastern. they will defend them from predators, just as we do with our livestock. them up them, and they will even build small bounce for them, some species to defend them against adverse weather conditions. there are other and species which developed agricultural systems. like the termites, the growth on deck, they don't grow green plants because of their gardens a subterranean. those and species, the new world that we see the closest parallel to our society's, human societies. the largest can be a millionaire so strong. it can be up to 40 different kinds of workers in the colonies. the great division of labor with all the efficiency that brings.

as you mentioned for human society. the level of sophistication of those societies and the scale does have parallels. this sort of level of economic endeavor and the complexity of processing materials is quite sophisticated in these large and colonies. the difference between us and the end super organisms, i think, in part, at least, is that our super organisms began with the development of agriculture. in what is really extraordinary about our species is that we didn't just do it once. we did it five times independently. you see here the five independent examples of the discovery of agriculture by our species, the oldest being

deferred of crescent were domestication of talks took place beginning to end the 14,000 years ago. then in east asia eight or nine dozen years ago, domesticated, entirely independently. some time earlier than 10,000 years ago we had the domestication in beginning. that is a very surprising domestication i haven't looked, but if you're interested, an experiment in super organism development. just see how very different the outcomes are across these different regions. you might think that that p&g super organism is insignificant, but no super organism is insignificant in terms of human endeavor. this particular one here give us the most valuable crop on earth

today which happens to be sugarcane. domesticated in the mountains of new guinea. 10,000 years ago on an island to . the americans had to separate independent developments of agriculture, both much later than the others. 5,000 years ago in these cases. but with the very large number of economic species being developed today. and when i looked at these organisms, it is almost as if we have links within us, the capacity to do this. almost a blueprint. it is like the ens. almost like a blueprint for super orgasms, organizations. you look at mexico city and he lifted the lay out the good find

your way around that city. precincts, sons, royce, kind of like engine droned or any other city. it is as if there is something in our mind, a blueprint. and what happens, what is the glue that holds them together? for the ends the clue is genetic religion. that is absolutely clear. and perhaps the best expression of the way that commonly works was given to us by plato to adapt thousand years ago when he wrote his republic. he said, you know, and the idea society there is no difference between mine and mine. that is exactly the case. there is no difference between the individual as opposed to the interests of the collective.

now for all of the great works, we have never been able to create the system in human societies. we are willful, selfish upright apes. we have a sense of ourselves and what is important to us. severe glue that holds our super organisms together. there are two fundamental glue's holding our civilization's together. one of them was identified by adam smith when he talked about the division of labor. the benefits of specialization and labor are so enormous that they have driven human society ever since the first crop was planted in my view. you only have to look at the great cities of the world did the last thousand years. you see that what that means for someone going in, they're likely to die of an epidemic disease. and yet for hundreds and hundreds of these people, a

relatively healthy countryside. why? to sit at the table at the division of labor and benefit from the specialization that comes from people living in the city. and our own civilization as we are having to put up with the pollution which comes with the traffic jams. all for what? just so we can exist with sources made available by the division of labor. the other thing that you see if you look at things super organisms is that they tend to share a particular point of view, a philosophy of ideals. that is another very important piece of blue that holds our civilization's together. what happens when these super organisms leave? very interesting. sure, there is a lot of disaster. there is also an exchange.

the bigger the group is the greater the division of labor, the greater the benefits, the greater to the trade, the more amenities that are created. and know i have wandered along with from my initial question, hope of surviving climate change. want to return to that a background of our species as a planet. there were two ways of thinking about this. when comes from an understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms as darwin and organs which infused with the sense of our current impact of the environment can lead one to despair. that particular theory has been really articulated most fully by paleontologist.

he puts it up in opposition. the name comes from ancient greek as well. the woman who is slated by her husband and slaughter's her own children. and he uses that name because he believes that life is inherently destructive to life. in a matthews in world where populations continue to increase and the capacity to feed them increases species are destined to crash. he also postulates that the great extinction event has been caused by life itself. he sees that because life tends to lead to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the hemisphere was the get about a thousand parts per million. you get changes in the oceanic system that can lead to the great extension.

the end of the permian. it is a very different view of the world. there really is survival of the fittest view of the world. humans are nothing special. we are simply the continuation of the great destructive capacity of the planet. within a few generations we will have a great extinction and life will go on without us. as this suggests, i have quite a different view of that. i think that if we look at not just evolution mechanisms, but its legacy we've seen reason for hope and the interrelated this of life as a whole. we see that a species in pecs the power of coevolution, the power of the division of labor

leading to help for collaboration and a very different relationship with life on earth, and i just want to explore that a liability. been people often cite that we are not making any progress on environmental issues. it is all going to hell in a handbasket and that we should just despair. i hate the way people just go from ignorance to despair so quickly. it is the lazy man's option. it really is. i don't have to do anything because it is all ruined anyway. the fact is we do need to make efforts commanded is tied to make changed. we are making progress, and i just want to give you a few examples of the challenges that lie five faces and some of the examples of progress that have occurred recently. it is very important. it really summarizes our war against the most dangerous chemicals that the human ingenuity has invented, the

persistent organic pollutants, things that will accumulate in active issues in the past on to our children in do enormous damage, not just our species, but of the five. uc under the convention that progress is made. we establish the negotiating committee right through to last year when amendments were introduced. and it is a really aggressive treaty that bans the production of these chemicals are right and mandates that wealthy countries, developed countries must give funding developing countries to help the transition to of all the chemicals there as well. to say paris we truly are endangered. so is just one example of the major advance in terms of our seamen sustainability on this planet.

doesn't depletion is another one. 1987. i think it will be celebrated one day as the first global festival, first national, a truly global there celebration on our planet. you can see here where we were in terms of as and depletion. you have goes on here. the depletion of ozone. continuing. 2009, 2020, still slightly. of course these are projections of what would have happened without the montreal protocol. three said 2016. down to very low levels. life can't exist on earth as we know it without ozone is ultraviolet radiation care's our dna apart.

for every percentage decrease for every percentage increase in ultraviolet radiation is a percentage increase in our crops, the percentage increase in blindness for any creature with ties. and, of course, the problem, these chemicals were banned under the protocol and have a lot less time in our hemisphere. well in advance of the worst manifestations of the problem. thank believe we did that. you see over time dozen concentrations decreasing. that just over the last couple of years scientists have announced their confidence the ozone protection is rig during. by 2015 they will be back at levels that it was before we ever started releasing.

there is the latest data, arguing that the ozone layer is recovering. another great achievement for a humanity, every nation had to agree to phase out dangerous chemicals some. some toxins, environmental toxins don't affect all species. one of the most extraordinary impacts recently on a particular group of organisms has been the impact of this little molecule here on this species year or this group with species. this is an anti-inflammatory drug. some it is market. it is used for got. sufferers of that horrible disease will know about it.

in east asia and it was the practice to use that for cows that were sick and suffering from inflation. and beginning in the 1990's these creatures started dying. in fact, for the best part of the decade the decline in species in east asia, not just one, but all was faster than that of the decline of the data. so these things were heading to extinction. no one knew initially what caused the problem. it turned out that it was this thing here, this chemical. it causes kidney failure. you will lose all of them. it's as simple as that.

that had a big impact, a particular group in india. this hours of silence. as seen this. it is a very environmentally friendly way of exposing the body. the vultures contaminated. the dead person is recycled into a live in being within a few days. with the demise of the vultures the bodies were being recycled. very influential in the -- people in india. the government banned the use, but it had almost no impact. that would feed it to the cal. it took a much deeper engagement

to get this out of cattle. what happened is a number of indian ngos now offering alternative subsidies for alternative drugs to indian farmers in an attempt to win the off wall this as a veterinary medicine. slowly the vultures are returning, but it will take many, many decades for that to happen. again, just in the subcontinent been you have a systemic shift in the waning people deal with a particular dangerous chemical even though there are very poor him. obviously in that country what it. a way that is leading to the recovery of a species that is vital to survival. i should say, it wasn't just some the passing the word suffering. the amount of dogs. and there were very serious concerns about the outbreak of rabies epidemic as a result.

everything is connected to everything else resource exploitation, another great threat to humanity. two examples that they just want to briefly talk about. you can see here. this is the under exploited. and now there is a time line. you can see it. very, very quickly. it is one of the more intractable problems. their attorneys in place. there are organizations working on this problem. as you can see, pointing downwards. this problem here on land is actually been more effectively dealt with. you're seeing the development of satellite surveillance around the planet. we can look at our tropical forests of the individual tree leveled. there is no excuse anymore for illegal dumping anywhere on the

planet. in places like brazil major steps to being made. regulators have not just in the last year or two's uridine on illegal selling -- telling of rain forest. they have identified the buying of cattle. and the big meat buying companies from north america. they are making enormous fines of them. if you clearing of rain forests, almost overnight. i think check with the treaty that is now being talked about to the climate discussions we have got a good home of turning this problem around. this one, oceanic comments, very hard to regulate. why do people do this anyway? why is it that people will

destroy their resource base? even though it is bad for them and their children in the future. it is partly because the evolution designed as a thoroughly species. life is is not nasty and brutish, likely to be short in the past. the discounting rate in their own minds. often stupid things. to steve glenn very briefly how this works. social scientists the best students. give your hundred dollars right now. renominated some. coming up with outrageous figures command dollars or $500. no, eight is outrageous because if you took a hundred dollars and put it in the banking would get $110 on average at the end of the year. we have a high discount rate. if we wait for something into the future big discount that.

parlay that is because in evolutionary times we may have been likely to die before we reap the benefit of waiting for your. people with very little to lose the had the steepest discount rates. socially mediated by our affluence and how secure we are. some of the poorest people on the planet. they become the richest people on the planet almost overnight. but very, very, young men are the ones most prone. if you are young man, nothing to lose, you will too outrageous things in the hope that you will attract a girl ended your genes into the next generation for you in a locked up for life for dead. wherever you end up dying. so it is important that we understand that about ourselves

because in an interconnected world, and emerging global super organism every part affects every other part. issues of social justice and relative equality, opportunity, and affluent and so forth are very important to. i want to just talk briefly about what is happening as defined independent super organisms emerged toward a single coherent entity. we can see that happening right now on our planet. think we are in a critical phase of the moment where the new session media such as the internet, mobile phones, and so forth, is causing our species to come here as a single, global intelligence or ideas are shared instantly in the interconnectedness is at an unparalleled level. one thing social media are also doing is empower individuals.

racine for the first time outside. rock, an accelerated rate, africa and the middle east. people throwing off dictatorships. empowered by this new session media. and i think it is an amazing phenomenon. i was watching the news looking at what was happening in syria a few nights ago. there were people who lives terribly alien at first, men dressed in arabic customs. the robe and headdress. women dressed. they were talking in arabic. welcome listen to the rhythm. the people united will never be defeated. made me think their is a common humanity, a common series of aspirations we all have that as we become empowered and come to the surface and become interconnected we become ever more transparent. where is all of that having? it is anybody's guess.

what i think we are seeing now is the emergence of a truly global super organism which is capable in principle, at least, of acting as intelligence for our planet. and if you look at legacy inside you can see that that is the way the information has always worked. command-and-control systems have been thrown up again and again in nature. our brains are great example. starting up a command and control system for itself in the form of this emerging global super organism. people say that that can never be the biggest since a greedy and selfish. well, brains are also greedy and selfish. they take in 20 percent of the

energy. they used to percent of the energies. there greedy. they're also incredibly selfish. brains will cut off the supply to almost every other part of the body before they pride themselves. just like us. so we are greedy and selfish. it is interesting that wanted percent of the energy of the planet, humans are currently using something in excess of 20 percent of the total by capacity of the planet. perhaps we should come back into that. but just because we're greedy and selfish doesn't mean we can't form earth's control and command system. the other important thing to realize is any command-and-control system has to be self regulated. what is stopping the brain from taking in more resources? it has to be within the constraints of its body. and we have species becoming

self regulating because we see the population projections. stork, 7 million people this month, but the projections are that within just four years we will be at the population of 9 billion. within 150 years the entire human species will have gone to the demographic transition. that is incredible. there has never been a species that has escaped the trap that was described so eloquently. exponentially. we are the first ever to escape the trap. in doing so we have become self regulating, at least in terms of our numbers, and that gives me great hope for the future of our species and planet. just to summarize, an analogy should replace it?

the originator has a particular view on this. he says that the earth system is like an old lady who has to share a house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers. grows angry. and if they don't mend their ways she will begin. i think that he is wrong about that. i think that if you look at the earth more objectively ec is much more like a newborn baby. newborns have new formed brains, just like our earth now which is going through this process of forming a global super organism. nervous systems just as our satellite systems. for many natural systems that exist as well centigrade s and the rest of nature and bodies.

the system as a whole. fully integrated. we have the newly emerging consciousness. but we have yet to be fully integrated. rudimentary as the human species yesterday. it is also the most dangerous. we are going through a dangerous transition. i would just like to revisit that idea that affirmation matters. in the context of life on our planet formed for a half billion years ago live originating around about 4 billion years ago, many scientists think very early in the history of our planet. just after 3 billion years ago life is taking control. so the chemical that

characterizes dead plants has vanished, and dramatic chemicals are enforced by the live system itself, by the enormous energy budget, 100 to our wants, 3 billion years your the budget was sufficient to take control of the system. 100 million years ago the cockroach's discover agriculture and become the first super organism. 10,000 years ago the first intelligence super organs and forms, and perhaps today the very end of the line, we can see that those are the new integrated taking place. we at least have the potential tax as a command-and-control system on the planet, it's as our brain does for our bodies. when might it be said to reproduce? i would argue that the moment we

colonized and other heavenly body and planet we can think of it as having reduced. russel wallace, my great scientific hero said at the very end of his book, and the universe, that perhaps it was human destiny to fill the human spirit in the fastest of the universe. it is a thought that stuck with me for two reasons. one is that if you look at the time scales involved in planetary travel, even at the rate we can travel through space today it would take us 5 billion years to colonize the whole galaxy. that is quick. it's amazing, i think. but secondly as well because it highlights just how very much is a stake for this generation, this decade. this is the moment of decision. it is an enormous privilege to be born and to be a live here

and now. we are the generation that will make the decisions about this. we will decide whether we are not going to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel and thereby precipitate a global crisis that might to stabilize the food systems and lead to the demise of these global super organisms that have only now taking shape. so the way i think about the options before us is really framed by one of my other scientific euros, a man called in rego. he was an italian physicist. one day, one evening he looked up into the heavens and knew that there were billions of stars and ask a very simple question. why the great silence? why aren't we hearing from other intelligence is? and there really are only too satisfactory explanations for this paradox.

one is that intelligence super organisms that exist at the global scale carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction so that soon after birth they inevitably dying and therefore the great silence that exists in the universe. the second possibility is that we genuinely are the first. incredibly unlikely. but if you look at the time scale of the universe to the extent, that's another 10 billion years, you realize that it takes three generations of stars to create the heavy elements that make life even possible. so that is taking up to here before you can even think about having life in the universe. the other heavy elements that have to be in the heart of stars over three generations. and then, of course, it takes all of evolutionary time to

create an intelligence, global, super organism. so, maybe, just maybe, we are the first. maybe wallace's right that we will go on to perfect the human spirit in the fastest of the universe. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] [applause] i'm happy to take questions. yes, please. >> i think i heard you say that sugar is the most valuable crop in the world. the financials and whether or not there is a trend for that. >> well, sugar is a raw form of energy used in many things. the most valuable crop on the planet. with the advent of biofuels, the

ultimate example of that, used for transport fuels as well as food. so i think that woman in new guinea to a dozen years ago did as a great favor. >> it is not just the financials? >> it is financial. just in terms of value. but in terms of a supposed non monetary value it is also very important because it gives us both food and transport. there is someone right there. >> yes. i had heard you mention about the world population capping out at 9 billion. i had seen that before. i don't know if i just didn't have the step. why is that? why stop at 9 billion? >> well, it is really an intriguing question and worthy of kind of a slightly more

elaborate answer if you don't mind. every two years the united nations does the protection of global population growth. they have been doing it for a number of years. the last one in treat me because it suggested that the total global population would be lower than at the previous projection. so when i looked there were predicting a higher population. after that point every one of the projections had just been showing an increase in population. i went and had a look at the assumptions that are underlying the modeling for that. it was fascinating. the u.n. demographers had assured that the aids epidemic would be debated. at the moment that is having a big impact on human population growth. they also assumed that in developed countries like the as states and australia we have an average increase in the family ze