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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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Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Ross: Well I do think the larger questions are questions of climate change, which will affect many other things. I mean climate change will affect poverty because unfortunately, the places that are already the hardest hit are gonna suffer more drought. The places least capable of coping with dramatic climatic change are the places that are gonna be the hardest hit. It’ll create refugee flows, which has consequences for security. It’ll create more failed states, which has consequences also for security. So I start with climate change as being something that affects the globe. And you would think . . . You know what is the old imagery that if the world was ever attacked, you know, by invaders from out of space, we’d all draw together. And plenty of movies have tried to be built around that kind of theme. But climate change is not an external threat; it’s an internal one. And it requires a . . . It’s going to affect everything. So number one I would say climate change, which also . . . As I said, it affects poverty. It affects health. And when I look at the big issues, I think they start with that.

 

 

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