The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.

As for doing more dramatic work over comedy, I do whatever turns me on at the moment.

I think American guys tend to be a bit more forward, a bit more chatty and open than the Brits. The Brits seem to have a darker sense of humor, though I have met some Americans who have adopted bits of the British dry sense of humor as well.

My day jobs... I knew I was bad at those, so I didn't really have the confidence to think that I could do comedy. But I knew I hated the day jobs.

People are amazed that I do comedy. I always did comedy.