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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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The race among leading contenders to build commercial spaceships to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station and beyond
With state and local governments still suffering from a persistent deficit of tax revenues due to the moribund economic recovery, smart politicians are looking ahead and lobbying for spaceport development in their constituencies. Spaceport America in Southern New Mexico has been the most ...
Get this: there is a startup called I Dream of Space that is selling posters for $10 that also come with the chance to win a trip to space. In other words, your $10 ticket could be worth a $200,000 seat on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 trip on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx. Apparently the ...
Elon Musk is going to Mars. With or without NASA. Of course, the ambitious former PayPal entrepreneur who founded SpaceX in 2002 has to take one step at a time. A very important first step, indeed a milestone, will happen this Saturday, May 19 at 4:55 a.m, when the SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to ...
Recently, a group of Google and Microsoft billionaires, film maker James Cameron, directors of the X-Prize Foundation (Peter Diamandis), founder of the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures (Eric Anderson), former astronauts, etc. have banded together to propose a new, game-changing ...
While it has been the cause of significant buzz, relatively little has been known about the company Planetary Resources other than the names of its A-list founders and backers that include James Cameron, Google's Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize ...
James Cameron, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Peter Diamandis aren't afraid to fail. If these men were afraid, they wouldn't be attempting the most ambitious private space exploration venture the world has ever seen. A company they have formed called Planetary Resources aims to mine ...
In a post last May, entitled The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space, we speculated about how the future explorers of space will be chasing unimaginable riches: As Peter Diamandis told the International Space Development Conference, “There are twenty-trillion-dollar checks ...
On the night of April 13, 1970, astronaut Jack Swigert famously beemed into NASA headquarters to declare “Houston, we have a problem.” A nation of inspired onlookers watched in suspense as the Apollo 13 crew worked frantically against the clock, and their failing ship, to return to earth alive to ...
What's the Big Idea? Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson says there is a lot of delusion when it comes to the future ambitions of space exploration. Tyson, an astrophysicist and the author of the new book The Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier , signals out recent claims by ...
What's the Big Idea? China has just made its intentions clear. According to a recently released white paper, it is now official Chinese policy to launch the country's own space station and put an astronaut on the moon by 2020. According to former astronaut and second generation Chinese ...
A massive earth-based laser has just locked on to the scrapped hulk of an ancient cosmonaut satellite. The laser blasts from a massive cannon and collides with the hulk, politely easing it aside. What's the Big Idea? Space Debris Research has just successfully tested the world’s first space ...
What's the Big Idea? With the end of the space shuttle era, and the United States no longer able to put people in orbit without the help of Russian or Chinese rockets, Texas Governor Rick Perry accused the Obama administration of leaving U.S. astronauts to "hitchhike into space." For ...