He has written numerous popular science works for a general audience and is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum.
[4] In 2000, along with his co-author Donald E. Brownlee, he co-originated the term Rare Earth[1] and developed the Medea hypothesis alleging that multicellular life is ultimately self-destructive.
[5] His parents, Joseph and Ruth Ward, moved to Seattle following World War II.
The author argues that events in the past can give valuable information about the future of our planet.
Scientists at the Universities of York and Leeds also warn that the fossil record supports evidence of impending mass extinction.
Recently, Ward has slowly started to shift his interest toward climate change because of his experiences with studying mass extinctions, as well as justifying why intelligent life, including humanity, is especially even rarer than complex life in general in terms of both space and time, as intelligent life only lasts for just a few thousand years before finally collapsing and going extinct, as seen in the book The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps, which documents the effects of ongoing and future man-made climate change.