A new idea – whether it’s a way to collect solar energy more efficiently or a cheaper way to desalinate sea water or a new seed to boost the amount of food we can grow – can stretch the physical resources we have, or even multiply them. And the ideas themselves don’t ever wear out. Ramez Naam Read Quote
Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we’re going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty. Ramez Naam Read Quote
I absolutely hated ‘Gattaca.’ I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you’ll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be. Ramez Naam Read Quote
We must learn to set our emotions aside and embrace what science tells us. GMOs and nuclear power are two of the most effective and most important green technologies we have. If – after looking at the data – you aren’t in favour of using them responsibly, you aren’t an environmentalist. Ramez Naam Read Quote
Everything in nature is not just a straight up. It’s an S-curve. It arises for a while until it hits some physical limitation, and then it plateaus again. Ramez Naam Read Quote
What we want to do is put a price on greenhouse gases. Because if they’re more expensive, businesses will find a way to be more efficient or switch to solar or hydro or wind power. So that will reduce emissions. Ramez Naam Read Quote
I’m a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms. Ramez Naam Read Quote
The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we’ve learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago. Ramez Naam Read Quote
If you had no new technology, and you powered society as we do today – mostly by fossil fuels – you’d have only two choices: Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. Ramez Naam Read Quote
