Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has joined a cadre of public intellectuals who have dropped big concept books about humanity in 2018. If they disagree on the details, they converge on the diagnosis that our species’ priorities are badly out of whack.

Several of the biggest names in science have stoically set about coaxing public attention away from daily news cycles and onto long-term issues. While political drama dominated February’s headlines and bestseller lists, the psychologist Steven Pinker calmly made the case for progress and reason in Enlightenment Now. As we fussed over state funerals and sport sponsorship deals in September, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari laid down 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions will compete with midterm elections (and thus inevitable furore) when it’s released later this month. The voices of reason are up against it. It’s with this in mind that Rees releases On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, a relatively short book on the existential threats facing our species and “some hopes, fears, and conjectures about what lies ahead.” The injunction is clear: drop your petty terrestrial angst and turn up the cosmic dread.

Unsurprisingly, it’s science, not politics, that the astronomer pitches as the best problem solving tool we have—the book’s introduction is a brief statement on how we should never allow our ills to “put the brakes on technology.” Rees has reined in the pessimism of his 2003 book Our Final Century, but naïve idealism remains off the table. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s trendy to view technological innovation as synonymous with moral betterment. Martin Rees is not a trendy man. He warns his younger colleagues, with the finger wag befitting an old hand, that technology is morally neutral; it giveth, it taketh away. And it is currently doing both. “The gulf between the way the world is and the way it could be is wider than it ever was,” writes Rees, and notes that the plight of the planet’s “bottom billion” could be transformed by redistributing the wealth of the thousand richest. Inequality isn’t a quirk of globalism, but a “humanitarian imperative,” the failure to respond to which “surely casts doubt on any claims of institutional moral progress.” It’s unfortunate the ears that most need to hear Rees’s sobering takes are occupied by VR headsets and sprucely-produced podcasts about how to buy immortality. If the next generation of billionaires turns out to be any different from the current one, it will be thanks to new trends, not old wisdom.

Books that aim to be about everything can end up being about nothing. This proverb hangs heavily over the opening half of On the Future, as Rees attempts to bring readers up to speed on the nuclear threat, climate change, biotech, cybertech, A.I.—and much more—in less than one hundred pages. It’s an impressive exercise in concise writing, but anyone up on their science news will finish the section feeling no better off. Climate change gets a mere seven pages of exposition, the nuclear threat: five. If it’s familiar ground, Rees at least covers it quickly.

Midway through the book, half a page is allocated to the philosopher Derek Parfit’s thoughts on the rights of the yet-to-be-born. Parfit thought seriously about how much we should discount our current contentment in order to help future generations. Put simply, do we want to make A) more people happy, or B) more happy people? This is an interesting and consequential area of philosophy, and though Rees deigns to give it a brief mention halfway through his book, it belongs at the beginning: On the Future reads as a case for option B. Opening with a germane moral dilemma would also raise the stakes for those headlong first hundred pages, and amount to a much more gripping introduction to the presented issues. But Rees is no philosopher. As he admits at the outset, “I offer a personal perspective—writing partly as a scientist (an astronomer) but also as an anxious member of the human race.” Fortunately for Rees, the symptoms of his anxiety appear to be an exceptionally clear head and a capable grasp of the big picture. His sense of cosmic wonder shines through brilliantly in the book’s later chapters. Explanations of complex subjects like the Large Hadron Collider and the ongoing search for exoplanets benefit from his crisp, precise prose, and his musings on the nature of alien intelligence seem almost racy after one hundred and fifty pages of speculative restraint.

Overall, On the Future is uncontroversial in its predictions and prescriptions, written in a way that’s accessible to the general reader, and sprinkled with moments of infectious awe for the topics at hand. Read as a broad summary of what the most sensible voices in science are saying about the state of humanity and its future, the book achieves its purpose. Avid readers of popular science might come away from the book thirsting for a bit more depth and speculation. But Rees is a seasoned science communicator, and in so far as his job is to get more and more people interested in the field, the book’s short length and approachable style is a shrewd move that will open a wormhole to the big questions for the curious.