In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once been called the McKinley Colonies. A century ago, it was a thriving citrus-growing community, American in everything except the letter of the law. Then came a couple of devastating hurricanes — and the closure of a geopolitical loophole.
A forgotten footnote in American history
The story of the McKinley Colonies is more than a forgotten footnote in history. William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States (from 1897 until his assassination in 1901), was America’s last unabashed expansionist-in-chief. Under his watch, the U.S. snapped up Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from Spain (with full sovereignty over the former three and only temporary control over the latter).
McKinley matters today because the current occupant of the White House is a fan: Trump name-checked him in his second inaugural address, and his own musings about acquiring the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland suggest an ... Continue Reading »
Trillions of dollars are now at risk because global investors are making the same mistake that caused the dot-com bubble, Black Friday, and the 1929 Wall Street crash. The mistake is: To believe that numbers can predict the future.
The mistake originates in logic. Logic reduces life to statistics. And statistics convert real-world business into spreadsheets of digits: total income, net profit, employee productivity. . . Those mathematical values are then scoured by logic for patterns and trends. Which is to say: The spreadsheets are fed into AI machine learning systems or analyzed by traders who (by engaging Daniel Kahneman’s system 2) have rigorously purged their minds of bias. Until — with probabilistic precision — the cost of future commodities is computed, prompting a set of rational epiphanies: This stock will rise! That stock will fall! Go hard, with maximum leverage! Go wide, to capture the entire index!
Years ago, Warren Buffet realized that this logical method was bullshit. There’s no way for math to predict asset prices because markets aren’t platonic algorithms. They’re biological ecosystems. And biological ecosystems, as a guy ... Continue Reading »
In all the known Universe, at least as of 2026, the only world known to support life is planet Earth. Despite all we’ve learned about the Universe, including:
the vast abundance of exoplanets,
including rocky exoplanets with Earth-like temperatures,
the ubiquity of heavy elements,
the commonness of organic molecules that are known precursors to life,
and the long cosmic timescales over which stars with such planets form,
there are no known examples of worlds, other than our own, where life processes or definitive biosignatures have been detected.
Although we’ve just recently discovered our 6000th confirmed exoplanet, we’ve sent spacecraft — including orbiters, landers, and even rovers — to a wide variety of planets and moons in our own Solar System, and we’ve been listening for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence for over half a century, no other world has yet revealed signs of life: either past or present. While there are a great many reasons to believe that life is relatively common in the Universe, all three of our main methods for seeking it continue to yield only the most ambiguous and mundane hints for life’s existence elsewhere.
While ... Continue Reading »
Your brain isn’t broken, but it may seem like that because of how the screen age overwhelms your biology.
Neurologist Richard Cytowic argues that attention is a finite energy budget, not a virtue, and modern life is engineered to exhaust it.
This video The biological necessity of boredom in the age of screens is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist, astrophysicist, and leading researcher in the search for life beyond Earth, examines how discovering life elsewhere would represent a Copernican-level shift in human understanding.
Research into Mars, Venus, and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn has revealed complex molecules and liquid environments that could support life. Independent origins of life would imply that the galaxy is rich with living individuals, challenging long-held cultural, religious, and philosophical assumptions. The acceptance of major scientific discoveries — and the unexpected practical contributions to pure science — impact how the search for extraterrestrial life may benefit society over time.
This video We may find alien life, but will we be able to accept the consequences? is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In terms of making things happen, energy is an indispensable consideration.
When we see something like a ball balanced precariously atop a hill, this appears to be what we call a finely-tuned state, or a state of unstable equilibrium. A much more stable position is for the ball to be down somewhere at the bottom of the valley. What we currently conceive of as our Universe’s zero-point energy may not actually be the lowest-energy state possible, which means that a transition, and an accompanying energy extraction event, may be possible.
Credit: L. Albarez-Gaume & J. Ellis, Nature Physics, 2011
Systems spontaneously tend toward the lowest-energy state.
In many physical instances, you can find yourself trapped in a local, false minimum, unable to reach the lowest-energy state, which is known as the true minimum. Whether you receive a kick to hurdle the barrier, which can occur classically, or whether you take the purely quantum mechanical path of quantum tunneling, going from one state to another is always possible so long as no fundamental conservation laws are violated. This is an example of a first-order phase ... Continue Reading »
Americans are getting worse at math. Student scores have fallen to their lowest point in decades. Nearly half of high school students barely meet what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) considers a “basic” level of comprehension, and more than 900 freshmen at the University of California, San Diego — 12.5% of the institution’s first-year class in 2024 — had the mathematical proficiency of a 13-year-old.
U.S. adults aren’t faring much better. Last checked, only 65% could pass a basic arithmetic test, making the country one of the more quantitatively challenged in the industrialized world.
But this isn’t the first time the math graph has trended downward. A similar development took place during the early stages of the Cold War, when enrollment in high school algebra fell to levels not seen since the start of the 20th century. It wasn’t until the launch of Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviet Union kicked off the space race, that alarm gave way to action. Math and science education were overhauled, and calculus was introduced into the curriculum.
As then, concerns about the national “math ... Continue Reading »
Outer space is having a moment. NASA’s Artemis 2 mission is about to take humans farther into space than we have ever gone; SpaceX is preparing to test the latest version of Starship, its interplanetary transport system; and just today, a crew of four astronauts flew to the International Space Station to replace the team that was evacuated last month due to a medical emergency. These efforts are part of a common vision: expanding humanity’s presence beyond Earth, including the eventual creation of human settlements on Mars.
But what would it be like to live on Mars? Aside from the challenges of lower gravity, intense radiation, and toxic soil, an important, but less often considered, factor would be your love life.
People have been traveling to space for more than six decades and have been living off-planet continuously since 2000, when the International Space Station (ISS) became operational. Yet, no one has had sex in space (as far as we know). This is surprising given the extensive research dedicated to understanding nearly every aspect of how space affects biological systems. Not to ... Continue Reading »
One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe is the idea that the very fabric of space itself is expanding. It was proven, way back in 1922, that this is an inevitable consequence of having a Universe that’s filled, in a near-uniform fashion, with any type (or types) of energy at all. Such a Universe cannot be static and stable, but must, in the context of general relativity, either expand or contract. When this theoretical framework was combined with observational data measuring the distance to, and redshift of, galaxies external to our own Milky Way, the fact of the expanding Universe was established observationally.
It’s now a full century later, and we’ve learned — to a great degree of accuracy — how quickly the Universe itself is expanding, as well as what forms of energy drive that expansion and how the cosmic expansion has changed over time. Yet, we can only draw these conclusions by examining many different objects at many different cosmic distances, and combining all of that data together. Could we ever hope to see evidence for the ... Continue Reading »
The story of the chip is a story about geopolitics and scarcity. From $20 billion fabrication plants to machines built by a single Dutch firm, the supply chain behind your devices is both miraculous and astonishingly fragile.
Chris Miller explains why the AI race, U.S.–China tensions, and the future of economic dominance, all rest on this tiny square of silicon.
This video The most important piece of technology in your lifetime is this tiny chip is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once been called the McKinley Colonies. A century ago, it was a thriving citrus-growing community, American in everything except the letter of the law. Then came a couple of devastating hurricanes — and the closure of a geopolitical loophole.
A forgotten footnote in American history
The story of the McKinley Colonies is more than a forgotten footnote in history. William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States (from 1897 until his assassination in 1901), was America’s last unabashed expansionist-in-chief. Under his watch, the U.S. snapped up Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from Spain (with full sovereignty over the former three and only temporary control over the latter).
McKinley matters today because the current occupant of the White House is a fan: Trump name-checked him in his second inaugural address, and his own musings about acquiring the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland suggest an ... 
Trillions of dollars are now at risk because global investors are making the same mistake that caused the dot-com bubble, Black Friday, and the 1929 Wall Street crash. The mistake is: To believe that numbers can predict the future.
The mistake originates in logic. Logic reduces life to statistics. And statistics convert real-world business into spreadsheets of digits: total income, net profit, employee productivity. . . Those mathematical values are then scoured by logic for patterns and trends. Which is to say: The spreadsheets are fed into AI machine learning systems or analyzed by traders who (by engaging Daniel Kahneman’s system 2) have rigorously purged their minds of bias. Until — with probabilistic precision — the cost of future commodities is computed, prompting a set of rational epiphanies: This stock will rise! That stock will fall! Go hard, with maximum leverage! Go wide, to capture the entire index!
Years ago, Warren Buffet realized that this logical method was bullshit. There’s no way for math to predict asset prices because markets aren’t platonic algorithms. They’re biological ecosystems. And biological ecosystems, as a guy ... 
In all the known Universe, at least as of 2026, the only world known to support life is planet Earth. Despite all we’ve learned about the Universe, including:
the vast abundance of exoplanets,
including rocky exoplanets with Earth-like temperatures,
the ubiquity of heavy elements,
the commonness of organic molecules that are known precursors to life,
and the long cosmic timescales over which stars with such planets form,
there are no known examples of worlds, other than our own, where life processes or definitive biosignatures have been detected.
Although we’ve just recently discovered our 6000th confirmed exoplanet, we’ve sent spacecraft — including orbiters, landers, and even rovers — to a wide variety of planets and moons in our own Solar System, and we’ve been listening for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence for over half a century, no other world has yet revealed signs of life: either past or present. While there are a great many reasons to believe that life is relatively common in the Universe, all three of our main methods for seeking it continue to yield only the most ambiguous and mundane hints for life’s existence elsewhere.
While ... 
In terms of making things happen, energy is an indispensable consideration.
When we see something like a ball balanced precariously atop a hill, this appears to be what we call a finely-tuned state, or a state of unstable equilibrium. A much more stable position is for the ball to be down somewhere at the bottom of the valley. What we currently conceive of as our Universe’s zero-point energy may not actually be the lowest-energy state possible, which means that a transition, and an accompanying energy extraction event, may be possible.
Credit: L. Albarez-Gaume & J. Ellis, Nature Physics, 2011
Systems spontaneously tend toward the lowest-energy state.
In many physical instances, you can find yourself trapped in a local, false minimum, unable to reach the lowest-energy state, which is known as the true minimum. Whether you receive a kick to hurdle the barrier, which can occur classically, or whether you take the purely quantum mechanical path of quantum tunneling, going from one state to another is always possible so long as no fundamental conservation laws are violated. This is an example of a first-order phase ... 
Americans are getting worse at math. Student scores have fallen to their lowest point in decades. Nearly half of high school students barely meet what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) considers a “basic” level of comprehension, and more than 900 freshmen at the University of California, San Diego — 12.5% of the institution’s first-year class in 2024 — had the mathematical proficiency of a 13-year-old.
U.S. adults aren’t faring much better. Last checked, only 65% could pass a basic arithmetic test, making the country one of the more quantitatively challenged in the industrialized world.
But this isn’t the first time the math graph has trended downward. A similar development took place during the early stages of the Cold War, when enrollment in high school algebra fell to levels not seen since the start of the 20th century. It wasn’t until the launch of Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviet Union kicked off the space race, that alarm gave way to action. Math and science education were overhauled, and calculus was introduced into the curriculum.
As then, concerns about the national “math ... 
Outer space is having a moment. NASA’s Artemis 2 mission is about to take humans farther into space than we have ever gone; SpaceX is preparing to test the latest version of Starship, its interplanetary transport system; and just today, a crew of four astronauts flew to the International Space Station to replace the team that was evacuated last month due to a medical emergency. These efforts are part of a common vision: expanding humanity’s presence beyond Earth, including the eventual creation of human settlements on Mars.
But what would it be like to live on Mars? Aside from the challenges of lower gravity, intense radiation, and toxic soil, an important, but less often considered, factor would be your love life.
People have been traveling to space for more than six decades and have been living off-planet continuously since 2000, when the International Space Station (ISS) became operational. Yet, no one has had sex in space (as far as we know). This is surprising given the extensive research dedicated to understanding nearly every aspect of how space affects biological systems. Not to ... 
One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe is the idea that the very fabric of space itself is expanding. It was proven, way back in 1922, that this is an inevitable consequence of having a Universe that’s filled, in a near-uniform fashion, with any type (or types) of energy at all. Such a Universe cannot be static and stable, but must, in the context of general relativity, either expand or contract. When this theoretical framework was combined with observational data measuring the distance to, and redshift of, galaxies external to our own Milky Way, the fact of the expanding Universe was established observationally.
It’s now a full century later, and we’ve learned — to a great degree of accuracy — how quickly the Universe itself is expanding, as well as what forms of energy drive that expansion and how the cosmic expansion has changed over time. Yet, we can only draw these conclusions by examining many different objects at many different cosmic distances, and combining all of that data together. Could we ever hope to see evidence for the ...