Letters archive

Venki Ramakrishnan's take on the most promising ways to stop ageing gave a realistic appraisal of the state of the science. But I was particularly struck by his discussion about the need to accept mortality and how hard it is to do this gracefully ( 23 March, p 36 ). Any intervention that increases longevity …

I read "Megaprojects that could save the world" with a sense of despair. Intentionally or not, any such efforts will just distract from decarbonising using the technologies that we already have ( 16 March, p 36 ). The last thing we need is a huge outlay in emissions to make space-based solar power, concrete islands …

David Robson writes about how to make big decisions that we won't regret. Coming to the belief that I don't have free will has brought the unexpected benefit of making me much less likely to regret past decisions, on the grounds that I didn't really have a choice at the time. Nevertheless, in the present, …

I have made several big life choices, including drastic changes in occupation, and regretted none of them. More recently, I uprooted myself from my home of 30 years and moved an 8-hour drive away to a part of the country I had only fleetingly passed through six years earlier, a place I wasn't familiar with …

There is no reason for negativity over the latest launch of SpaceX's Starship. At lift-off , all 33 of the first-stage engines lit and stayed that way, as planned. The second stage then completed a successful "hot staging", firing up its six engines before it separated and entered orbit. Both stages were lost – as …

You highlight the benefits of time alone. I have found that if you have a problem that requires thought and analysis, solitude is often your best friend. In my career, the best ideas and solutions occasionally arose in conversations with colleagues, but more frequently during a period of solitude, whether in an office, at home …

I propose that, on some bizarre-but-possible meta-level, all the weird theories of quantum mechanics, panpsychism and simulated realities that Eric Schwitzgebel lists exist and are simultaneously useful. All are true, all are bizarre and all are dubious. We probably won't ever be able to "choose" between them anyway since they are, on a level we …

If we accept that our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains, then the "self" must be part of the simulation. To ask whether we live "in" a simulation is a category error. We live as a simulation, not in one.

Quantum and wave mechanics, together with relativity, were developed to explain physical phenomena that had otherwise defied explanation. They have been spectacularly successful at describing particle/wave properties and behaviour, which is what they were intended to do. It really comes as no surprise that trying to extract sense from these mathematical constructs about more complex …

Sam Edge's correspondence and Alison Flood's insightful interview with Tali Sharot ( 2 March, p 40 ) both focus on habituation to negative signalling. But becoming inured to misleadingly optimistic scenarios can be just as dangerous ( Letters, 30 March ). To give just one example, the notion of interstellar travel is chimerical, and discussion …