The Public Knows That Human

The Fundamental Reason Why Carbon Dioxide In The Atmosphere Is Critically Important To Biology Is That There Is So Little Of It. A Field Of Corn Growing In Full Sunlight In The Middle Of The Day Uses Up All The Carbon Dioxide Within A Meter Of The Ground In About Five Minutes. If The Air Were Not Constantly Stirred By Convection Currents And Winds, The Corn Would Stop Growing.

If It Should Turn Out That The Whole Of Physical Reality Can Be Described By A Finite Set Of Equations, I Would Be Disappointed, I Would Feel That The Creator Had Been Uncharacteristically Lacking In Imagination.

It's Not Going To Be Just Humans Colonizing Space, It's Going To Be Life Moving Out From The Earth, Moving It Into Its Kingdom. And The Kingdom Of Life, Of Course, Is Going To Be The Universe.

The Brain, Being Analog, Is Able To Grasp Images So Much Better. The Brain Is Just Designed For Comparing Images And Some Patterns - Patterns In Space And Patterns In Time - Which We Do Amazingly Well. Computers Can Do It, Too, But Not In Anything Like The Same Kind Of Flexibility.

The Bottom Line For Mathematicians Is That The Architecture Has To Be Right. In All The Mathematics That I Did, The Essential Point Was To Find The Right Architecture. It's Like Building A Bridge. Once The Main Lines Of The Structure Are Right, Then The Details Miraculously Fit. The Problem Is The Overall Design.