Nick Bostrom

“Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.”

“For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.”

“Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.”

“Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.”

“Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.”

“Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.”

“Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower.”

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”

“I personally don't think of myself as either an optimist or a pessimist.”

“There are some problems that technology can't solve.”