| 情報・電子系応用分野 |
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| 生命系応用分野 |
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| 環境系応用分野 |
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理事長武田郁夫から武田賞を受け取るブレーク氏。 |
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Dr. Takeda, all the wonderful staff
of the Takeda Foundation, ladies and gentlemen: This,
needless to say, is a very proud moment.
I would like to remind you of something that Socrates said 2400 years ago, and that is that it is not the ownership of things that brings satisfaction; it's the use of these things, and I think this is part of what we have been trying to think about and to develop when designing what the future may give us, not just for us obviously but for many generations to come.
One can quite easily show that it is totally impossible to globalize the material consumption, the energy consumption that we have achieved over the last altogether 150 years with absolutely fantastic technology. This earth is just not big enough for that. That can be calculated quite easily and that is to say the economy as it runs now, the ownership, the use of things, the infrastructures and the way we create leisure time and happiness is not going to last.
We not only have to invent a totally new technology in terms of lowering the input of natural resources and increasing the output of services, happiness, of things we want and we need, and we have reasons to expect, all of us. We also have to think of the rest of the world, the other 80 percent who do not have these things at this time, and they will take those things, and if we are not clever enough to replace material and energy with brains in the future, this humanity is not going to survive much longer.
This is not just a question of climate change or of other important issues that you all are familiar with. This is a question of where we are and where we wish to be. We have shown over the last 10 years or so that this is not just a pipe dream that we can live with much less natural resources and still create quite easily, technologically speaking, the kind of services we have, but it doesn't work at this time. It doesn't work not because of technology. It doesn't work because we have created the long economic framework, and so what you are giving us here, my friend Ernst and myself and many of our co-workers whom I wish to thank from this platform, it is not just a question of technology. It is a question of societal choices, it's a question of creating the economic framework that will allow to make resources as much worth as they should be on the market because there is no use in saving resources as long a they are worth almost nothing, and that, I guess, is the future that we are trying hard all together to change the system sufficiently, not going away from the market but changing the system, making the market stronger than it is today, and create a society in which we can live with a lot less natural resources and maintain the system we have on this earth for hopefully a long time to come.
Dr. Takeda, I thank you in the name of my co-workers, in the name of my institute, and all that you given to us for what we have done because I think it will make a big difference that we have this prize.
Thank you very much. |
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