Who is afraid of the dark?

Who wants to live forever? 15% of us. As people age, they increasingly believe quality of life is more important than longevity. People tend to grow more reconciled to the inevitable. People are more frightened of dying in pain than of being informed that they are being dying in the first place. A £400 blood test that can show how fast someone is ageing – and offers the tantalising possibility of estimating how long they have left to live – is to go on sale to the general public in Britain later this year. Professor Jerry Shay of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, "The worrying thing is that if this information ever got to a point where it is believable, insurance companies would start requiring it in terms of insuring people...if you have short telomeres your insurance rates might be higher too."

Stephen Hawking, Britain's most eminent scientist , who was diagnosed with the incurable motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. "

In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

Q: What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"

Hawkings: The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.

Q: Is our existence all down to luck?

Hawkings: Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe.