We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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A risk in which “an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential”
What's the Latest Development? A new report out from the International Energy Agency (IEA) offers an aggressive plan for nations to follow over the next seven years in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The suggestions include imposing tighter energy-efficiency standards on a wide range of ...
What's the Latest Development? Although recent satellite images show visual proof of the Earth's getting greener, the exact cause of that increase hasn't been pinned down. Randall Donohue of Australia's CSIRO research institute studied vegetation growth at the edges of deserts in several ...
What's the Latest Development? A century-old government war on wildfires in the western US has resulted in the growth of several billion excess trees that are negatively impacting ecosystems in several ways, according to Jamie Workman of the Environmental Defense Fund. For example, he says that ...
How can physicists tackle the problem of achieving faster-than-light travel? Marc Millis, the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, explores this question in the video below from Space.com, and also provides an elegant answer to the question of why. Not only would ...
What's the Latest Development? At this week's Meeting of the Americas, held in Mexico by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), University of Milan researchers reported that Mount Everest is warmer than it used to be: The snow cloak covering the world's tallest mountain has shrunk by 13 percent ...
By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) It is beginning to look like the 21st century may indeed turn out to be the “endgame of the human race,” as Arundhati Roy predicted in 2009. There is now near-universal consensus among scientists that the threat posed by global warming is severe and that if ...
The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has had his moments of doubt, about both himself and about the future of the human race. Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, 50 years ago. As a result, he told an audience of doctors at a stem cell laboratory yesterday, Hawking became ...
How confident are scientists that world won't end on December 21? Here's a Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet from several weeks ago: Tyson is not alone. NASA scientists are also so confident, in fact, that they released a video explaining why the world "didn't end yesterday" 10 days in advance. In ...
Let’s say you’re just now tuning in to reports that the world will end on December 21 when the Mayan calendar resets to zero. Maybe you’re one of the 35 million Americans who fear it will really happen. Maybe the prospect of solar storms, rogue planets and devastating floods is a welcome ...
The near earth asteroid 2012 DA14 discovered last year is not going to hit Earth next year, scientists say. Phew. And yet, it will still be coming in way too close for comfort (17,000 miles away--closer than many orbiting satellites), and may hit us the next time around, in 2020, or on another ...
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses the question of what will be the ...
Like any good gimmick, the so-called Doomsday Clock, an invention of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is meant to grab your attention. No, scientists have not discovered a way to accurately measure our distance in time from the end of the world. What they have done is convened a distinguished ...
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. – T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men The Metaphysical Hangover Far more fearsome than the physical hangover, writes Kingsley Amis in his practical and entertaining guide to Everyday Drinking (Bloomsbury, 2008, Introduction by ...