On the Future: Prospects for Humanity Paperback – October 5, 2021

Buy it. This is a thoughtful, balanced, riveting, easy-to-read book. I saw Martin Rees on WTTW's Chicago Tonight (the best thing on television in Chicago each weeknight at 7pm) and thought I'd have a look at his book. I couldn't put it down - very interesting.

This is pretty short book. Despite being thin (slightly over 200 pages) it has small format pages and somewhat large font that make each pages smaller, I almost felt like it was kid's book based on amount of text on each page.However I enjoyed going though number of big picture issues that face our planet and humanity, it truly gave me food for thought.One thing that I wish this book provided is depth. It could certainly benefit from more researched data on the issues as opposed just giving bare author's opinion/vision.

On The Future contains more well-informed opinion, more wisdom and more stimulating ideas than any other book I have read about the future waiting for our children and grandchildren. I gave copies to each of my grandchildren because I want them to understand and ponder the opportunities and dangers ahead. To my knowledge, no other author presents the future in more compelling terms than Martin Rees.John Dickey

Torn between three stars and four, and well aware that Amazon rates three stars as 'critical'. First the praise. This is a readable, comprehensive and persuasive assessment of risks facing current society. It draws heavily on current and projected science and technology. My disappointments are (i) its prescriptions are platitudinous and (ii) the author ventures way outside his area of very considerable expertise. I have no reason to doubt that his writing is well informed, but it seems to waste his expertise. This could have been undertaken equally well by an allround scientific journalist. Rees wrote a true masterpiece of popular science "Just Six Numbers" in which his field of expertise is superbly explained to the lay reader. If he wanted to venture again into popular science, concentration on his own field would have been much more productive.

You too could be master of a Cambridge College, President of the Royal Society, and a peer of the realm, if you had the superb intelligence, extraordinarily wide knowledge and interests, and the profound humanity of Martin Rees. For the rest of us, we can attempt to make up for our deficiencies by readings his books - especially the latest - On the Future: Prospects for Humanity.

I gobbled this one up right away and will probably read it again. Rees is a good writer and he clearly knows the material. I'd have liked more details about potential catastrophes and more discussion of "what if" scenarios, but for a general audience, this was interesting.

This book brings the long-term and short-term perspective of world impacting issues, with the inherent conflict between science and politics. Every citizen of the world should have an opportunity to read this book as we are all involved.

Very well written, covers a lot of area and is very sober in its analysis.i only wish it was longer.