It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be.

We're just as frustrated as you are with the stock price.

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.

It's a great pity that the Royal Society cannot itself afford to purchase them so that they could be restored to our collection of documents from which they were removed at some point during our early history.

I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.