From Dave Smith, Alnwick, Northumberland, UK
Julius Wroblewski offers a vision of robots going down mineshafts to extract minerals until the day they are swallowed by our sun, then grown into a red giant (Letters, 22 June). I find this a little optimistic.
Personally, I am looking forward to the day when robots do our recycling for us and there will be no need for mineshafts at all.
But, if I may update the four horsemen of the apocalypse, I fear nuclear war, plagues spread by air travel and floods and famines brought about by climate change may prevent this.
We are also now presented with a fifth problem: the worldwide drop in species diversity, including that of our internal microbiomes. Keep an eye on the stars by all means, but first, let's be careful where we put our size nines.
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