Joris Luyendijk: ‘The old model of journalism is broken’

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How can journalism meet the challenges of the internet age? Former reporter Joris Luyendijk is looking for new ways to tell stories

Many journalists have mid-life crises when they begin to doubt their capacity to capture the truth in words or escape the media echo chamber. Joris Luyendijk had his crisis early – when he was 31, to be precise. He was Middle East correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, was widely admired, had just covered the Gulf war . . . and he packed it all in to write a book. A book that sought to demonstrate that it was almost impossible for a journalist to say anything worthwhile about the Middle East, where societies are closed, sources are often in the pay of the secret service, and western media lack the patience to get to grips with “the Arab world”, a term he in any case rejects.

That book, published in the Netherlands in 2006 and in the UK last year with the title Hello Everybody!, is a punchy dissection of the way the media operates, and shows how easy it is for governments to manipulate information. He argues that journalists did a poor job after 9/11, failing to admit it was impossible to gauge support for al-Qaida among ordinary Muslims and failing, too, to explore the roots of anger with the west. He also says the Israelis’ media savvy makes it easy for them to win the propaganda war with the Palestinians, and that in the Gulf war “the authoritative Anglosphere media adopted the perspective of the American PR machine”.

Hello Everybody! is not a piece of agitprop. It’s an insider’s guide to the impossibility of seeing the whole picture, of getting inside the houses – and the minds – of those living on the “Arab street”. And Luyendijk, who did a PhD in anthropology in Cairo, speaks Arabic – or at least the urban slang that passes for Arabic in Egypt’s capital. Plenty of Middle East correspondents don’t. Their bosses’ knowledge of the region is even more limited: one of his editors told him to hasten to Iran, where his Arabic would come in useful (only 1% of the population speak Arabic). Middle East dictatorship and western media dumbness make a potent mix, hopelessly biased against understanding. But now back home in the Netherlands and calling himself a “meta-journalist” – a term, he says, that is guaranteed to empty rooms – he thinks he may be edging towards a solution. This should be worth hearing.

“What will you have? I spent a long time in the Middle East and have to offer you something,” Luyendijk says when I arrive at his office, slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam’s red light district. He disappears and comes back a few minutes later with a perfectly executed espresso. He shares a floor of a three-storey building with a group of freelance writers and designers – “it’s like a newsroom, but without the hierarchy,” he tells me. He retains an arm’s length relationship with NRC Handelsblad, but the success of Hello Everybody! has bought him freedom. He hosted a chatshow on Dutch TV in 2006/7 that burnished his celebrity status, has just completed a stint as professor of journalism at the University of Tilburg, and a few days before we met had launched his latest book, which he describes as “an anthropological survey of the political class in Holland”. Add his good looks, angular cheekbones and spiky, close-cropped hair to this burgeoning portfolio career, and I think I’m starting to dislike him as much as the politicians, lobbyists, PR people and journalists skewered in his new book.

His main focus over the last couple of years, however, has not been the book, but an attempt to develop a new way of doing journalism. One legacy of his time in the Middle East was a belief that oil added to the problems of the region, fostering autocracy, corruption and an arms race. He is also interested in sustainability, so started a weekly column on electric cars in NRC Handelsblad. “I talked to lots of people, but instead of doing the research and then sharing my conclusions with my readers, I tried to share the journey,” he says. “I started at zero. I knew nothing about electric cars, but they seemed great, so I began an experiment to see if you could seduce readers to go along with your curiosity, rather than saying from a pedestal: ‘This is the truth about the electric car.’”

At the outset, he wanted to test whether it would be a good idea for NRC Handelsblad to be distributed solely by electric cars. “There’s no neutral position for a paper when it comes to sustainability,” he says. “Either you pollute or you don’t.” He says a weekly column proved the perfect vehicle for the experiment. “I was not subject to the competition of the newsroom, where I would have to inflate my stories to get them into the paper. If I’d done an interview and it was hopelessly boring and the PR person tried to inflate it, I would write about the attempts of the PR person to inflate it, rather than go along with the inflation.” The column was called “Starts with himself” – perhaps it trips off the tongue better in Dutch. “If you improve the world, you have to start with yourself,” he says. “Our idea was sustainability is always boring, but what if it’s not about making the world sustainable, but making yourself sustainable? Then you become the protagonist in your own story, and you write about the obstacles in your way to becoming sustainable.” The main obstacle being yourself.

The columns were a big success – even the boring ones – and built up a loyal following, but he pulled the plug after 18 months and before he had reached the end of the journey, when he had planned – if the conclusion was that electric cars were a good thing – to ask his readers for €100 each to buy a fleet of them for the paper. NRC Handelsblad was being sold and it all became too bureaucratic and complicated. But rather than abandon all the material and contacts he had gathered, he got in touch with a software company that specialised in staging internet dialogues between experts and building “mind maps” to establish areas of consensus between them.

Suddenly, he saw a new way of doing journalism: instead of a journalist talking to half a dozen “experts” holding a range of opinions and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion based on what they say, he would let them talk to each other and allow conclusions to emerge organically. He thought this would be a way to see the whole picture, and could be applied to many areas beyond the relatively restricted one of electric cars. “On climate change,” he explains, “you get all these assertions, but never a consensus. This is a way of establishing what people agree about and where there are areas of meaningful disagreement. If you bring in lots of people, you can filter out the biased stuff.” The wisdom of crowds – as opposed to the individual perspectives of the usual suspects who get invited to opine by the media; and the idea of information as an ocean rather than a series of rivulets.

His electric car project is now heading for a new life – on the internet, where it will be the first of what he hopes will be a series of “agoras” (the agora was the place of assembly and debate in the ancient Greek city-states). The metaphor of an agora in cyberspace, where experts and interested lay people meet to thrash out issues concerning the electric car (or oil, energy, sustainability, the Middle East), is captivating: an online world peopled by Greeks rather than geeks; an ocean that might, after all, be navigable.

Luyendijk says “the old model of journalism is broken” – but so what? It didn’t really work anyway. “The best time is ahead of us,” he insists. “It will be possible on our site to have different entry points. If you are an expert, you go in at one point; if you are a novice, you enter somewhere else. The whole idea of what an article is will change.” He reckons we are still at year zero in terms of journalism adapting to the internet. “The first cars were horse carriages where they had taken out the horse, stuck in an engine and said: ‘Ha, there we are.’ Everyone said: ‘Who’s going to sit in that?’, and somebody had to walk in front with a flag. This is what we’re doing now. We have the horse carriage, which is the story. We stick it on the internet, and we think: ‘Ha, that’s it.’ But once a story’s on the internet, where there is no deadline and no limitations in terms of space, the whole thing begins to change. What papers do at the moment is collect stories that were written for a paper knowing that tomorrow fish will be in the paper, and they just dump them on the web. But we need a completely different way of presenting them.”

Papers, he believes, will disappear, though he offers no timescale. Once they have gone, the rationale for the “story” goes, too. One of the central conclusions of Hello Everybody! is that there is never just one story in the Middle East. In every situation, there are many stories, depending on your perspective. Luyendijk quit conventional journalism because he was always being railroaded into telling a linear story, packaged for one-off consumption. In the new net world, he believes, it will be possible to tell many stories, work on their development with other people in the agora via crowdsourcing, be open about saying “I don’t know”, be provisional in drawing conclusions, and endlessly return to the same subject. The agora exists in perpetuity; the debate never ends.

Luyendijk shows no interest in the subject that obsesses media organisations: how to make this transition work financially. “Imagine people trying to invent the airplane, and from day one they have to present an airtight business case,” he says. “No airplane would have got off the ground ever. If you’re going to innovate and from day one you have to explain how that’s going to make money, it’s not going to fly. I don’t think I’d have had any of the ideas with the electric car if I’d been thinking commercially. You won’t have ideas if your first angle is, how is this going to make money?”

The start-up costs of the agora site are being underwritten by the Dutch lottery, and some income is coming from chairing panel discussions on sustainability issues, but he just trusts that in the longer term a financial model will emerge. “In an information society, if you have good information there must be a way of making money from it,” he says. “Also, your costs will be so much lower because you no longer have to pay for distribution.”

Luyendijk, who is now 38 and married with three young children, sees himself as an anthropologist who stumbled into journalism by accident when Dutch newspaper Volkskrant signed him up to report on the Middle East in 1998 on the strength of his book about Egypt, A Good Man Sometimes Hits His Wife (he has a winning way with titles). Volkskrant did not see the job as especially significant. Then 9/11 happened and Luyendijk was suddenly its star man. He says that according to the rule of cui bono, he should be a prime suspect for the 9/11 attacks, because he was one of the main beneficiaries.

That catastrophe made him as a journalist – but it broke him, too, because he came to disbelieve the pretensions of journalism. Now he is groping for a new way of telling stories, of embracing complexity. I ask him what he thinks he’ll be doing 10 years from now. “I have no idea,” he says. “I would get really worried if I had the answer to what I’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m making a lot of enemies now [with the new book], so maybe I’ll be living in a different country.” In chilled-out Amsterdam, this contingent life seems natural.

An old-style interview would have a neat conclusion or killer quote with which to finish. But I am tiring after an early flight, the interview rather dribbles away and, in any case, old-style journalism is dying. There is no neat conclusion; no killer quote; no dramatic denouement; just a rather spurious full stop.

Hello Everybody! One Journalist’s Search for Truth in the Middle East, by Joris Luyendijk, is published by Profile Books (£8.99).

Environment: Energy | guardian.co.uk

Generate Your Own Electrical Energy Using Homemade Solar Panels

TweetDue to the fact that, the earth’s natural resources are become more and even more rare, a source of electricity created from burning off gas, fossil fuel and petrol has started to become more and more pricey to develop. A large number of nations have therefore started off on trimming down their dependencies with these hard to find and even unsafe sources of energies through the process of opting for other more cleaner and greener solutions. Top of the list of these kind of renewable energy sources are solar energy created and converted via a homemade solar panels and wind generated electrical energy.

Solar power is electrical energy produced from the sun by way of a homemade solar panels, that can easily be utilized to deliver you source of electricity in your residence, heating the water or drive some other electrical related appliances. Additionally the probabilities are infinite with some bit of creative imagination. On the other hand, do you know you can solve your more costly electricity bills by way of transitioning to solar power by using homemade solar panels or wind energy generated electrical energy? Doing this will get rid of your addiction to standard fuels and can help to maintain our environment by lowering the level of co2 (green house gas) which is usually generated.

As expected there’s a lot of misconception amongst people that installing solar technology is expensive and requires to generally be skillfully conducted. In fact they are usually considerably less costly options out there where you could develop your own homemade solar panels to make operational electricity for a fraction from the expense of purchased solar panels. All you need to carry out is uncover inexpensive photo-voltaic (PV) solar cells and set up the actual solar panel personally. A single homemade solar panels will involve many solar cells linked together. The PV cells use a semiconductor elements such as silicon to allow for the sun’s rays to always be converted into electricity. Typically the mounting up of the Pv cells straight to homemade solar panels doesn’t need virtually any skilled technical or Diy expertise and can be tackled using only quite a few gear.

How could you yield electricity using only homemade solar panels? Certainly, photo-voltaic is a method related with changing the sun’s rays directly onto electrical power. The P v solar cells generate household power (DC) source of electricity coming from sunlight, which can consequently be used to power electric powered products as well as to charge a battery. An excellent inverter is needed to turn the DC to AC energy. There are various manuals accessible which will teach you best places to discover cheap solar panel parts and offer you with step-by-step instruction manuals to create along with putting in homemade solar panels system. These models may perhaps be set up on the roof or surfaces of your building or alternatively could even be ground set up contingent on your particular environments and also the level of energy you would want to make.

Definitely the main factor to putting in a good reliable homemade solar panels system is to locate the highly endorsed user guide which gives precise instructions on where to purchase the equipment from and ways to build the exact homemade solar panels (if possible backed-up through video tutorial guidelines). You additionally have a need to purchase these from dealers with good customer support, who are confident to answer an individual’s technical queries and have experienced business for a long period, and consequently understand the market inside out. A standard homemade solar panels can be accomplished for about $200 by using components bought through the community home improvement center.

Homemade solar panels energy system is one of the most clean and the most possible types of alternative energies and can be applied in a number of different methods to power the energy needs in your house or backyard. The technology is undoubtedly further enhancing regularly and homemade solar panels have gotten smaller sized and a lot more proficient. Making your own your electricity through the sun will help to decrease your utility bills and just about any an overabundance of power generated can typically be offered to your electrical energy supplier for a income.

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Ugandans turn Kampala’s uncollected garbage into versatile fuel

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Cement kilns are used to transform waste, which would otherwise pollute the city, into a fuel that suits petrol engines

Fred Kyagulanyi and James Sendikwanawa used to get up in the dark to dump bags of rubbish in Kampala‘s suburbs. Trying not to be spotted, they would sneak past the houses of sleeping neighbours and throw the bags on to the roadside or toss them in drains.

“We would wait several days until we had many bags and then make a trip,” Kyagulanyi says. “We were embarrassed, even if nobody was watching us at the time.”

Without a proper waste collection and management system, such nocturnal enterprises are not unusual in Uganda. These days, however, the two men turn rubbish into fuel. The friends have honed a technique to produce what Kyagulanyi calls “non-fossil fuel”, made from refuse such as plastic bottles, polythene bags and organic waste.

Kyagulanyi and Sendikwanawa, who are from Ndegye, a township about 17km outside the Ugandan capital, were inspired to find a use for rubbish after waking each morning to find piles of garbage thrown by other people.

“We decided that we would try to find a solution to deal with garbage,” says Kyagulanyi. “So we began researching how we could put it to good use.”

The pair had dropped out of school before their final exams, but Sendikwanawa had always had an interest in chemistry. It occurred to him that each year hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste were piling up in Kampala and around other towns across Uganda and that perhaps he could do something with it all.

The result of their research can be found in a factory, little more than a corrugated iron roof held up with wooden poles. Here they use cement kilns to turn rubbish into fuel.

The men are heroes among the boda boda (motorbike taxi) riders who buy fuel from them at around $ 1 a litre – half the price of the petrol stations. Other customers include local car drivers and the neighbourhood video hall manager.

“We have three types of petrol here,” Kyagulanyi explains. “We have ‘super’, we have ‘premium’ and also we have ‘pure’. This is our factory language but in the language of fossil fuels, it can be called unleaded premium or benzene. But ours is very different so we have different names.”

“We use all types of waste from plants, plastic bottles, shoe soles and all different types of organic waste,” Kyagulanyi says. “We use all that waste to make fuel that runs petrol engines,” adds Sendikwanawa, who is known as “engineer” in Ndegye Township due to his day job: fixing biogas digesters on pit latrines.

He says they had originally tried turning waste into manure and fertilisers, hoping to sell it to farmers, but found there was little demand. However, with fuel prices soaring they knew they would have an eager market if they could power engines. Kyagulanyi found out about biodiesel during a four-year stint working in Germany. When he returned to Uganda he brought back literature on biodiesel, which inspired Sendikwanawa, who, he says, is the brains behind the project.

The men dry and sort the rubbish then heat it in kilns to produce a crude oil. A catalyst is added to produce different types of fuel. It is a process known as catalytic pyrolysis, in which material is heated at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. Pyrolysis is the basis of several methods being developed around the world as a means of producing fuel from crops or waste products.

The pair admit there were a few hiccups, but they kept experimenting until they had a breakthrough in early 2009. Now they can process up to two tonnes of garbage a day.

Kyagulanyi and Sendikwanawa have formed Lat Photo Energy Uganda Limited and hope to ramp up production, pointing out there is no shortage of raw material for their fuel.

Kampala’s suburbs are choked with tonnes of uncollected waste, with city officials estimating that each person generates 0.2 tonnes of waste annually. Michael Mudanye, a waste engineer for Kampala council, says the city generates an estimated 1,500 tonnes of garbage a day, three-quarters of which rots uncollected on the streets, or gets thrown into in sewerage outlets and water channels, some of which run into Lake Victoria.

“So far we can only produce 100 litres of fuel a day,” says Kyagulanyi. We hope to increase the production if we get partners to expand our kilns. The challenge is that some people are still doubtful that our fuel works. We are now out to show the nation that we can produce enough fuel for everyone to run their vehicles while cleaning up all the rubbish left lying around the country.”

Uganda’s state minister for energy, Simon Du’janga, said he was aware that some gas and fuel could be obtained from garbage but his message to Kyagulanyi and Sendikwanawa was: “Tell those fellows they should not waste their time. It is a very costly process with very little output.”

However, Lat Photo Energy Uganda appears to be proving him wrong. The company may be small but it’s doing steady business.

Raj Kaakeeto is a boda boda rider and one of Kyagulanyi and Sendikwanawa’s regular customers. He says at first he doubted whether the fuel would work. “One day I had no money yet I needed fuel. So I bought some of their fuel and mixed it with the little that I had in the tank. I was surprised – it worked,” he says. He likes it because it’s a lot cheaper than the regular petrol.

Jimmy Lutakome, another resident in the area, testifies that the fuel works well in petrol engine generators. He says: “The fuel lasts longer if you mix it with that from the petrol stations. I have been saving about 2,000 shillings per day [about 90 cents] compared to the past.”

Kyagulanyi and Sendikwanawa have a grander vision than just providing cheaper fuel for their neighbours. “We thought we should be part of the solution to the global demand for environmentally beneficial practice. And I think we are succeeding,” Sendikwanawa says. “We only need to expand the capacity of our kiln and distilleries and we shall clean up the city of waste.”

Environment: Biofuels | guardian.co.uk

Ten questions science must answer

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For 350 years, the Royal Society has called on the world’s biggest brains to unravel the mysteries of science. Its president, Martin Rees, considers today’s big issues, while leading thinkers describe the puzzles they would love to see solved

Today we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. It signalled the emergence of a new breed of people – described by Francis Bacon as “merchants of light”. They sought to understand the world by experiment and observation, rather than by reading ancient texts. They were motivated by curiosity, but also engaged with the practical problems of their time – improving navigation, cultivating forests, rebuilding London after the Great Fire, and so forth.

Over the last 350 years our lives have been changed beyond recognition by the application of science. In 1660, vast areas were terra incognita; today, rapid communication and travel makes the world seem connected, even constricted. Some of the changes have been less benign: this is the first century when one species – ours – risks irreversibly degrading the entire planet’s environment.

We are now in a time of challenges and adversity but it is also a time for scientific opportunity.

Issues relating to global health and sustainability must stay high on the agenda if we are to cope with an ageing and ever-increasing population, with growing pressure on resources, and with rising global temperatures. The risks and dangers need to be assessed and then confronted. The need to develop “clean” energy, new vaccines and better resources means science has a critical role to play over the coming years.

Helping to meet the challenges of the 21st century demands technological advancement – and an optimal use of existing knowledge. From the growth of the internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

We have learned so much over the last 350 years, but with every answer comes more questions. From a personal perspective I am disappointed that we have yet to really achieve a full understanding of the origins of life on Earth. What was the spark that, billions of years ago, kickstarted the process of evolution that has brought us life as we know it today? I hope that we will get some answers to that in my lifetime.

Looking further ahead is notoriously difficult, but whatever breakthroughs are in store in the coming decades and beyond, we can be sure of one thing: there will be an ever-widening gulf between what science allows us to do, and what it is prudent or ethical actually to do. In respect of (for instance) human reproductive cloning, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology, robotics and geoengineering, regulation will be called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds.

In terms of what we should be looking to achieve, a huge priority must be to decarbonise our energy needs. Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources.

Science has a huge part to play in the development, and the very survival, of humankind in both the near and distant future. Some of the challenges are obvious and some of the solutions are already being worked on by scientists. New challenges will emerge and in science we have seen again and again that some of the greatest breakthroughs are the unpredictable outcomes of pure curiosity. As we look to the next 350 years of the Royal Society we have no crystal ball that allows us to predict the detailed course of scientific discovery. However, we can be sure that today’s young people will live their lives in a world where science – and the way it is applied – will play a greater role than ever before.

Martin Rees is the Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society.

Kathy Sykes
What is consciousness?

Most of us have a feel for what we mean by it. But science hasn’t managed to define or understand it. There are various theories; Roger Penrose suggests that quantum mechanics plays a key role, while Susan Greenfield postulates that it is similar to the “wetness of water”, a property that emerges from the actions of individual molecules. But, even with advances in brain-scanning techniques, such as fMRI, we are really only beginning to fathom how our brains work, let alone understand what consciousness is.

In the future, as we get better at synthesising organisms, or making empathetic robots, we may be challenged harder about what actually counts as “conscious”. Even now, can we say with confidence which animals are “conscious”? Is your dog conscious? And what happens to our consciousness if we get progressive Alzheimer’s, or if we become psychotic?

And what about those “coincidences” or “unscientific” claims you hear about two conscious minds communicating at a distance? When someone “knows” that something awful is happening to someone they love? One day, could we have a tested understanding of consciousness that provides a viable mechanism? Maybe not, but it’s a delightful thought that we might be connected to people we love – in a way we can’t yet explain.

Will we ever understand consciousness fully? Perhaps not. We are having to use the human brain to understand its own workings. But I hope in my lifetime that we will get closer to having some inkling about what and who we really are.

Kathy Sykes is professor of sciences and society at the University of Bristol and co-director of the Cheltenham science festival.

Joan Bakewell
What happened before the big bang?

To simply declare – as some scientists do – there was no space or time before the big bang and that the question is therefore meaningless is hard to accept, as it suggests matter was created out of nothing. But then if there was some kind of pre-existing primordial chaos that was fashioned into the universe by the hand of God, then where did the chaos come from?

At the other end of the timescale, I’d like to know whether robots will ever supercede humans. We are told scientists have already created artificial intelligence that can respond to emotion, but will they be able to go beyond getting robots to affect responses and generate feelings spontaneously – such as falling in love? And will robots overcome their inability to physically reproduce by finding a way of replicating their components into newer models? Or will the same robots keep on regenerating themselves?

Joan Bakewell is a broadcaster and writer.

Mark Miodownik
Will science and engineering give us back our individuality?

If you do a quick inventory of what you own, you will find that most of it is mass produced. This is a result of the industrial revolution, during which we gave up the individually crafted object in return for factories, and in the process got extremely rich. The price was the acceptance of uniformity in every aspect of our lives: our pens, our clothes, our cars, even our homes are all mass produced. It is a dominant influence in our lives, and it shapes global capitalism. But now there is a technology coming out of university science labs that could change all this and set in motion a second industrial revolution that may reverse the whole process.

The technology is called a 3D printer. What it does is this: it takes a design from your computer and makes it into a physical object. In other words, you press “print” and out comes a thing; this can be a functioning pen, a pair of glasses, or a hip replacement. This is not science fiction: I have a 3D printer in my lab and it works. At the moment the technology is in its early stages, but already hospitals are using it to make tailor-made implants for patients. Think what might happen if we perfect this technology. Why buy a phone, when you can design and print your own? Why buy a ring when you can express exactly how you feel by making one for your lover, or new cutlery for your mother? The possibilities are literally endless.

But it has political and economic implications too. As soon as our desire for material wealth is no longer linked to mass production, factories may become redundant, and shops too. This technology is currently at the state that computers were in the 1980s. Will science and engineering deliver another industrial revolution by perfecting the 3D printer as it did the computer?

Mark Miodownik is a physicist at King’s College London and will give this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures.

Tracy Chevalier
How are we going to cope with the world’s burgeoning population?

We can talk all we like about renewable energies, recycling and sustainable agriculture, but population is the issue that really matters. Yet it is the one on which so many people are silent. We have made the human right to reproduce unchallengeable: to do so is either to be eugenicist or – as with China’s one-child policy – repressively authoritarian. But sooner or later we have to do something. No matter how much recycling we do, how much renewable energy we create and how much better we become at producing food, there has to come a time when the world’s population makes the planet unsustainable. What’s more, the pressure on resources is being maintained at both ends of the population spectrum; not only are more babies being born, people are living longer and longer. There are even suggestions some people may soon live to 200-300. This may be a triumph for medicine but it may be a disaster for the world. So I’d like to see scientists create a working model of population growth that can predict the planet’s breaking point and for global policy to be framed around it.

Tracy Chevalier is a novelist.

Marcus du Sautoy
Is there a pattern to the prime numbers?

For 2,000 years mathematicians have been struggling to unlock the secret of the primes, numbers such as seven and 17 that can’t be divided. Is there a pattern to these numbers that can help us predict where to find the next one, as we count higher and higher through the universe of numbers? Each generation has contributed another chapter in our odyssey to understand these fundamental numbers. There is a feeling that the answer to the enigma of the primes might finally be close. But the fun thing about mathematics is that you can never be sure when and from where the great breakthrough will come.

I think many people believe that we must have solved all the big problems of mathematics, that Fermat’s Last Theorem was precisely that: the last theorem. But that is far from true. Mathematics is a living, breathing subject because of the many problems we still can’t solve. Numbers still retain many of their mysteries, none more so than the primes.

Given all the problems that face the world – cancer, climate change, sustainability, energy alternatives – the problem of the primes sounds something of an esoteric, arcane place to be channelling one’s scientific efforts over the coming decades. History tells us otherwise. The great technological breakthroughs, the science that has changed society, all have their roots in fundamental science pursued for its own sake. The primes are the atoms of arithmetic; from numbers you get mathematics; and from mathematics flow all the other sciences. It’s answering the fundamental questions of science that has the greatest potential to transform society.

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford and author of The Number Mysteries.

Brian Cox
Can we make a scientific way of thinking all pervasive?

This would be the greatest achievement for science over the coming centuries. I say this because I do not believe that we currently run our world according to evidence-based principles. If we did, we would be investing in an energy Manhattan project to quickly develop and deploy clean energy technologies. We would be investing far larger amounts of our GDP in the eradication of diseases such as malaria, and we would be learning to live and work in space – not as an interesting and extravagant sideline, but as an essential part of our long-term survival strategy.

One only has to look at the so-called controversies in areas such as climate science or the vaccination of our children to see that the rationalist project is far from triumphant at the turn of the 21st century – indeed, it is possible to argue that it is under threat. I believe that we will only be able to build a safer, fairer, more prosperous and more peaceful world when a majority of the population understand the methods of science and accept the guidance offered by an evidence-based investigation of the challenges ahead. Scientific education must therefore be the foundation upon which our future rests.

Brian Cox is a physicist at the University of Manchester and Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva.

John Sulston
How do we ensure humanity survives and flourishes?

This is the context in which all the exciting discoveries and explorations are going to happen. We certainly can survive but we can only do it by thinking in a rather larger and more collective way than we’re accustomed to at the moment. The natural sciences will need to work in conjunction with the social sciences and governance if we are to ensure we will address challenges in an effective way. The challenges lie not so much in the natural sciences but in the social sciences and governance.

Why might we not survive? We are hitting a number of very obvious resource limitations in terms of consumption and emissions. Some prefer to deny the importance or existence of anthropogenic climate change but I think there’s no doubt at all. It’s very clear that the framework is solid; we are heading for a warmer Earth and it is going to have a lot of consequences, among which will be increasing conflict and dangers of us not collectively surviving in the end. We need to head off the thing happening at all, if we can, and we need to head off the consequences in terms of conflict and ultimate conflagration.

Underlying all our problems is that we are over-running the Earth. That’s not to say that we should panic about it, but it is something we should discuss openly and manage. This is a challenge we can meet if we think more collectively. We’re not good at doing that, especially in our current ethos. In the last 50 years, we have moved away from collective thinking: people are set up and educated more and more in the western style to compete. This is not a good way of solving these problems. On the small scale, and on a level playing field, the free-market structures are great; they’re exactly what we need to flourish. But they don’t work at all on the global scale, and it is there where we have to address the best way of going about it.

We need a democracy that recognises that these large things matter. That’s the conundrum, really, to see how we can use the security and individual freedom that comes out of the ballot box with sensible collective behaviour. That’s something that is not been solved and it is a problem for social science and natural science working together.

John Sulston is chairing the Royal Society’s study on people and the planet.

Andrew Motion
Can someone explain adequately the meaning of infinite space?

The idea of there being no end to space seems logically impossible. How can there be no limits to space? We know the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into? Is it squeezing into something else and making that contract, or is the universe just venturing into nothingness? In which case, nothingness and somethingness appear to be much the same. We are also told the universe may contract in time; this raises similar questions. What replaces the space that was the something of the universe?

On a more frivolous level, I’d also like to know whether my cat is fully evolved as a species. She certainly gives every impression of having pretty much everything she needs. Following on from this, I’d also like to know whether humans are the final step in the primate evolutionary ladder, or whether there will be another species running the world one day while we get locked up in zoos and forced to smoke cigarettes in laboratories. I’d die a happy man with answers to these questions.

Andrew Motion is a former poet laureate.

Lionel Shriver
Will I be able to record my brain like I can record a programme on television?

I would like to be able to re-experience something significant in my life, such as falling in love. (Think how much safer it would be to take a hallucinogen once and then just replay it when you were in the mood.) I would especially like to be able to record my dreams – and I do not mean the sad little journal jottings of what I barely remember. I want to see those images again, rewind, and contemplate where I got those amazing stories from. I would never run dry on fiction ideas again.

Assuming that other people could also play your tapes in their brains, the technology would be rife with problems, providing the ultimate in invasion of privacy. Secrets of any sort could become impossible. Worst of all, other people could get their hands on how tawdry and dreary most of your thought processes really are. On the other hand, it would also make it possible to truly experience what it is like to be someone else – though that might put fiction writers out of business.

Lionel Shriver is a novelist.

Piers Sellers
Can humanity get to the stars?

In the next 100 years, we will have explored right to the limits of our solar system with people and thoroughly explored every nook and cranny with robots. I don’t know when humans will start spreading out towards the stars after that; when someone can put a starship drive together – robots first and then people. We know there are planets out there and we know some of them live in the habitable zone.

Robots will go out first to other stars and you will be able to see them in your living room. Humans will follow, though I don’t know yet how they will keep people alive or frozen or whatever for the times and distances required.

Even if humans creep around at 1% of the speed of light (and I’m sure we could do better than that over time), we will have spread out over the galaxy in 10m years. It’s not hard to do. With 10% of the speed of light, we will have gone around the whole galaxy in 1m years. There will be people everywhere.

Every advance in science has changed the human perspective, the way we see ourselves. The idea that the Earth isn’t the centre of the universe and the theory of evolution both changed things. I’m pretty sure there is life out there somewhere and bumping into other lifeforms, intelligent or not, will be interesting.

The descendants of the human race, whatever they are, will have to move away from this rock and this solar system to survive – stars have finite lifetimes. But that’s a long way off: I wouldn’t worry about selling your stocks and shares just yet.

Piers Sellers is a British-born astronaut at Nasa.

Environment: Energy | guardian.co.uk

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