As a scientist, Dyson does not have much faith in predictions because science is organized unpredictability—scientists arrange experiments to be as unpredictable as possible and then observe what happens, making true predictions impossible from within the scientific method itself.

Heresy 1: The United States has less than a century left of its turn as the top nation; since the modern nation-state was invented around 1500, successive countries have held the top position for about 150 years each (Spain, France, Britain, America), and America's term began in 1920 so it should end around 2070 due to military, economic, and political overextension.

To understand carbon movement through atmosphere and biosphere, one key metric is that if all carbon emitted from fossil fuels were absorbed by biomass, the average increase in biomass thickness over half the Earth's land area would be one hundredth of an inch per year, or one inch per century.

If biotechnology takes over the planet in the next 50 years as computer technology has in the last 50 years, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed.

Six thousand years ago was the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era which began 12,000 years ago; deciduous forests existed in northern Europe where conifers now grow, and glaciers were much smaller than today.

John von Neumann invented computer software (punch card coded instructions) not the hardware (electronic computer existed at University of Pennsylvania as ENIAC), and software gave computers agility and flexibility allowing a single machine to predict weather, simulate populations, and test hydrogen bomb feasibility.

Flower breeders (orchids, roses) and reptile breeders (lizards, snakes) represent thousands of amateur and professional breeders who devote their lives to producing new varieties; genetic engineering tools in the hands of these breeders will produce an explosion of diversity rather than monoculture.

There was a golden age of pre-Darwinian life when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist; life was a community of cells sharing genetic information, allowing clever chemical tricks invented by one cell to be inherited by all, enabling rapid communal evolution.

Green technology could replace most existing chemical industries and much of mining and manufacturing by doing things more cheaply and cleanly; it could achieve more complete waste recycling and potentially use sunlight instead of fossil fuels as primary energy source.

In response to a question about internet impact: The internet is not only a distant future tool but is right here now; it is extremely powerful and will have significant long-range impact; China particularly will develop its own version of Google.

Sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries where a large fraction of the world's population lives and where rural poverty is most acute, making green technology a great equalizer since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil.

The world always needs heretics to challenge prevailing orthodoxy; the role of heresy is essential even though old heretics are less influential than young ones, so young people in the audience should take on the role of heretic to challenge future dogmas.

Tommie Gold proposed a heretical idea that oil and natural gas in the ground originate from deep in the Earth's mantle and have nothing to do with biology, an idea experts dismissed but which recent experiments at the Carnegie Institution mixing calcium carbonate, iron oxide, and water at mantle pressure and temperature successfully produced methane, suggesting his hypothesis was correct.

As an Englishman, Dyson has personal experience with a nation gracefully yielding its position as number one to become number two, and he advises Americans that yielding gracefully is how to handle the inevitable decline of American dominance.

Heresy 2: The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated; climate models solve fluid dynamics equations well but do very poor jobs describing clouds, dust, chemistry, and biology, so their predictions about the real world are unreliable.

The problems caused by warming are grossly exaggerated because the money and attention given to climate change takes away from more urgent and important problems like poverty, infectious diseases, public education, public health, and preservation of living creatures on land and in oceans.

Genetic engineering could increase biomass growth in topsoil more rapidly than conventional no-till farming by engineering crops to put more biomass into roots.

The problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is fundamentally a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology, because computer models of atmosphere and ocean cannot predict how humans will manage land in the future.

Public debates about climate change reveal enormous gaps in knowledge, sparseness of observations, and superficiality of theories; many basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood and must be better understood before accurate diagnosis of the planet's condition is possible.

The carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere has two important consequences: changes in radiation physics and changes in plant biology; opinions differ on whether the physical or biological effects dominate and whether they are beneficial or harmful.