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The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity's place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.