Freeman Dyson

Today I've visited an interesting event - Freeman Dyson's lecture at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dyson is American physicist and mathematician, famous mostly for his work in quantum field theory, but also for some very interesting and provocative thoughts about science, religion, life and everything (today he said something like "I'm too old for science, but young enough for philosophy"). Many of his ideas are about our future: look at Dyson sphere or Dyson tree. But today his lecture was related to global warming, nuclear weapons and genetic engineering.
Here is a short list of what I've learned today:

• Dyson thinks that genetically modified plants can solve all the problems with global warming. Some people say that's crap but who knows? I'm not a specialist.
  
• There probably was a quite long pre-evolution period when simple life forms (consisting of a few self-replicating moleculas) shared their advantages to each other (like in open source) to improve life quality and become more sophisticated organisms.
• 6 thousand years ago there were a lot of lakes and trees in Sahara. And if global warming will strike, trees and lakes can come back.
• Genetic engineering can become for us something like computer games in the future. Imagine a genetic game when you should grow the most powerful lizard in a week. Sounds great, but a bit strange.
  
• Nuclear strikes were not the reason Japain surrendered in WWII.

There was a lot of other amazing stuff, but I'm just too lazy to post it there. It's much more better to listen him, than to read about it here. He worked with Albert Einstein and my favorite physicist (do you have a favorite physicist?) Richard Feynman, btw.