A really easy to read book which asks 10 big questions - would highly recommend to anyone.
1. Is There a God?
If you think of God as a humanlike sentient Being who’s omnipotent and omniscient – then, no, there’s certainly no God.
Or, better yet, even if there is, he has absolutely no explanatory value: the universe would have been exactly the same as it is even if he had never existed.
With heaven/afterlife - it flies in the face of everything we know in science. There is a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children.
2. How Did It All Begin?
The Big Bang, and it’s meaningless to ask what came before the Big Bang - It’s the same as asking what is south of the South Pole. The Big Bang is the beginning – since before, it time (which exists only within our universe) didn’t exist.
3. Is There Other Intelligent Life in the Universe?
There are 200bn stars in the Milky Way, with c. 20% (40bn) in the Goldilocks zone of being in the right range to have surface water. There’s a difference between life and intelligent life. Multi-celled organisms appeared on Earth 2.5 billion years after the first single-celled organisms were formed. Asteroids and comets constantly slam planets. Life has probably appeared on many, many planets in our cosmic neighborhood, but if they’d evolved to an intelligent state, they likely would have visited Earth by now.
4. Can We Predict the Future?
Scientifically, if at one time we knew the positions and speeds of all the particles in the universe, then we would be able to calculate their behavior at any other time in the past or future. Like the speed of a car. But there are just too many variables and too many factors to be taken into consideration - so these calcs, though theoretically conceivable, are impractical.
5. What Is Inside a Black Hole?
6. Is Time Travel Possible?
7. Will We Survive on Earth?
Two threats we are able to – and should – do something about: climate change and nuclear weapons. Almost inevitable to occur within the next 1000yrs. Before then we’d have come up with a way to extend to other planets.
8. Should We Colonize Space?
Yes - a with deadlines, like a moon base by 2050 and a manned Mars landing by 2070.
9. Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?
Yes
10. How Do We Shape the Future?
Picking only one idea - nuclear fusion usage, as a clean + unlimited supply of clean energy -