Big Think

Science and TechHistory and SocietyArtificial IntelligenceClimate ChangeRenewable Energy Sign up for The Great Progression: 2025-2050 on Substack. The AI doomers have been particularly active these last several months, ramping up their descriptions of all the bad things that are going to happen any moment and all the disasters that will emerge for sure in the next decade.

This content is locked. Please login or become a member. Sean Carroll: The past, present, and future exist simultaneously Beneath our assumptions lies the most complex, unsolved question in physics: Why does time have any direction at all?

David Reich is a geneticist at Harvard whose lab helped pioneer the field of ancient DNA — extracting and sequencing genetic material from human remains thousands of years old. What they found overturned nearly everything scientists thought they knew about where we come from. Before 2010, the story of human migration was mostly guesswork.

An astrophysics column on big questions and our universe. Science and TechAstrophysicsAstronomySpace ExplorationPlanetary Science In science, no matter how confident we are in our theories, there’s no substitute for interrogating the natural world by asking it questions about itself directly: through observation and experiment. Sometimes, that requires setting up conditions in a laboratory to create certain events whose outcomes we can measure to whatever precision we desire.

A behavioral science column for the decisions that matter. BusinessEmotional IntelligenceCareer DevelopmentMeaningful Work In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains failed one year too often. The family abandoned the farm and moved to Perth.

A literature column to feed your curiosity. History and SocietyAncient HistoryArchaeologyNarrativeHistorical Narratives “The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the streets.

Science and TechSustainabilityClimate ChangeEnvironmental PolicyBiodiversity From space, the boreal forest appears as a near-continuous pine-green band stretching across the Northern Hemisphere, just beneath the Arctic — from Europe through Russia and Asia, and again across Alaska and Canada. Up close, the forest resolves into a patchwork of species. Conifers like spruce, pine, and fir dominate, while deciduous trees such as birch, aspen, and poplar appear in warmer regions.

An astrophysics column on big questions and our universe. Science and TechAstronomyUniverse ExpansionCosmologyScience In 1675, Newton famously wrote , “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Behind the dome of a series of European Southern Observatory telescopes, the Milky Way towers in the southern skies, flanked by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, at right.

An astrophysics column on big questions and our universe. Science and TechAstronomySpace ExplorationPlanetary ScienceSpace Missions We often think about the Solar System as being our own cosmic backyard, and in many ways, it is: these are the closest objects to us in all the Universe, and our only opportunity to study lunar and planetary systems in situ.

Mind and BehaviorTrust BuildingTeam BuildingHabit FormationRelationships “We are what we repeatedly do.” Aristotle said it first, and a century of scientific research has confirmed it: The patterns of our lives — good and bad — are carved by our habits. But there’s something we tend to miss. We instinctively think of habits as tools for individual improvement, as levers to make us more disciplined, more efficient, more in control.