Freeman Dyson's Rosy Future

In an article posted on Salon.com titled "Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson" by Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Dyson, an eminent physicist, says that climate change is nothing to worry about, and let's celebrate genetic engineering and our ability to design a new world of plants and creatures.

In the article, Dyson describes how we may end up creating a world much like that described by Erick Wujcik in the Second Edition of After the Bomb™.

Freeman Dyson said,

That's now the new era of what I call open-source genetics, an analogy to open-source software in the computer business. It means that genes are shared between species. Species in the end will fade out. They will become merged. I think that's a hopeful future, but it's also going to be dangerous, of course. And all sorts of unintended consequences will no doubt come to plague us.

[snip]

With that will probably go biotech games for children, where you give the child some eggs and seeds and a kit for writing the genomes and seeing what comes out. That will certainly be a very messy and sometimes dangerous business, but I think it's on the whole likely to be very good for education.

[snip]

My idea is that in 50 years, this whole problem of fossil fuels will evaporate because we'll learn how to grow trees that produce liquid fuels much more efficiently than existing trees. So we'll have an ample supply of fuel without having to dig it out of the ground.

However, Dyson talks about more that how out grand or great-grandchildren may be playing with genetics like we play with computers. He also discusses religion/theology and science, and how global warming is 'nothing to worry about'.

[NOTE] Here's an article & video clip over at New Scientist which helped me understand better what it was Dyson was saying about not panicing over global warming: Are we overreacting to climate change?