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“IN THE face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” says Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, when he realises he is stranded on Mars and no one is rushing to his rescue.
Eric Lander, a key scientist on the Human Genome Project and director of the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomic research centre in Massachusetts, quotes the lines in the prologue to his podcast, Brave New Planet, that explores how technology may shape the future.
We may not be alone on our planet, but we do face an existential threat from climate change. The question is, how much should we rely on technology to get us out of trouble? Should we, for example, attempt to pump the stratosphere with chemicals to reflect some solar radiation back into space? Lander, who acknowledges that society’s relationship with science has frayed in recent times, says such important decisions cannot be left to scientists and