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Good morning. Science fiction seems to be turning into science fact and promising to change our world for the better. Recently, one multinational promised Star Trek like food replicators, a microchip has been inserted into the brain to give movement to a paralysed man, and science minister David Willetts unveiled a four hundred million pound spend from the Technology Strategy Board on among other things research on robots. He comments that such developments are ‘very much of the here and now’. Even flying saucers are here and now, with NASA testing its first last weekend! Its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, attempts to use the iconic shape to land a large payload and perhaps humans safely onto the surface of Mars. This news ironically coincides with yesterday being ‘world UFO day’, highlighting the worldwide fascination of whether we are being visited by technologically advanced aliens. Interest in flying saucers, both in fiction and in reported sightings, grew after the end of the Second World War and its development of rocket technology. It was a time when the fears of communism and nuclear war were mixed up with the optimism of scientific advance. The psychiatrist Carl Jung saw flying saucers as ‘technological angels’ for a secular age, and the cosmologist Fred Hoyle pointed out that the motivation for believing in extraterrestrial intelligence was ‘the expectation that we are going to be saved from ourselves by some miraculous interstellar intervention’. The technology of the future, whether of this world or others, can be an easy dream that will deliver Utopia. As a Christian I see technology as a gift from God to be used creatively and wisely for the benefit of all – whether healing a damaged brain or robots doing dangerous tasks. But it’s not a saviour for all of our problems. Technology is impersonal and can be used by human beings for both good and evil. It is also limited, and when pushed to its limit, as is happening in the case of antibiotics, can lose its effectiveness. That’s why my faith locates ultimate hope not in the impersonal but the personal, that is the God of creation who I see in Jesus. It’s exciting to see the rapid progress of science, and I will go from here to graduation ceremonies in Durham to celebrate those students who are turning some of science fiction into science fact. But progress to a better world is not inevitable. George W Bush, in a characteristic slip once commented, ‘The future will be better tomorrow.’ But for me the transformative power of science needs wisdom as well as knowledge.