In 58 BC, Cicero’s house was ransacked. Returning from exile, the Roman statesman found his property vandalized; his scrolls jumbled, torn, and scattered. A library assumes an order, a schema, something that renders it sensible and accessible. Cicero’s was chaos.
Enter Tyrannio, a Greek specialist in literature and libraries, owner of some 30,000 scrolls and famed expert on Aristotle — in fact, the same man responsible for restoring the philosopher’s tattered library after it was hauled to Rome. Tyrannio stepped in to sort through Cicero’s mess. He identified volumes, repaired damage, organized the scrolls, and created title tags. Cicero marveled at the transformation.
“You will be surprised at Tyrannio’s excellent arrangement in my library,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus. When the work was complete, his appreciation verged on the mystical. “Since Tyrannio has arranged my books,” he wrote, “the house seems to have acquired a soul.”
It’s a poetic but poor translation. Cicero used the Latin word mens — not “soul,” but “mind.” Another translation says the house “recovered its intelligence.” And he’s not talking about Tyrannio’s intelligence, but rather the intelligence ... Continue Reading »
In leadership discourse, the spotlight often falls on strategy, execution, vision, and charismatic influence. Yet one of the most persistent failure modes for even the most outstanding leaders lies not in what they do, but in what they fail to sense: the emotional currents around them, the whispers hidden behind applause. It turned out to be Julius Caesar’s fatal trap, a figure who conquered nations, reshaped Rome, and rewrote what leadership looked like. Caesar’s sudden and tragic end to his career at the hands of his followers was not due to arrogance or a power grab. It resulted from a deficit in emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), the quiet skill that sustains trust once one attains a leadership position. Something that Caesar could well have prevented.
A legendary rise — and an under-appreciated blind spot
Julius Caesar’s rise more than two millennia ago was stellar: both in Roman government and as a general. Ever since, Caesar remains one of history’s most compelling case studies in leadership. His career offers timeless lessons about influence, reputation, and human behavior inside large, competitive systems. His ... Continue Reading »
Joy is often mistaken for a stronger version of happiness. But historian and writer Kate Bowler argues that they are fundamentally different emotions.
Happiness, she explains, depends on things going well. It’s cumulative, fragile, and easily undone. Joy, by contrast, can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty. It doesn’t erase what’s broken — it helps hold it together.
Drawing from psychology, faith traditions, and her own experience living with stage four cancer, Bowler explores why joy is less about ease and more about connection, openness, and love. It’s not a mood or an achievement, but a way of seeing reality clearly and still saying yes to life. Joy, she suggests, isn’t a bonus for the fortunate. It’s something that carries us when happiness no longer can.
This video The brain-deep emotion that matters more than happiness is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The grandest cosmic question remains unanswered: “Are we alone?“
This depiction of an Earth-like exoplanet showcases a rocky world with a thin atmosphere in its parent star’s habitable zone. It has oceans and continents and clouds, and could possess macroscopic life forms on its surface. At a distance of multiple light-years away, it would take a gargantuan telescope to image them, and it would only be able to see the world as it was in the distant past, not as it is right now.
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Earth stands alone as a definitively inhabited world.
This aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most iconic hydrothermal features on land in the world. The colors are due to the various organisms living under these extreme conditions, and depend on the amount of sunlight that reaches the various parts of the springs. Hydrothermal fields like this are some of the best candidate locations for life to have first arisen on a young Earth, and may be home to abundant life on a variety of exoplanets.
Credit: Jim Peaco/National Parks ... Continue Reading »
Consciousness feels like the most familiar thing in the world, and yet science still can’t say what it is, where it begins, or why it exists at all.
Annaka Harris examines the assumptions shaping consciousness research, from the belief that awareness requires complex brains to the intuition that thought drives behavior.
This video The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Out there in the Universe, we’re most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and detectors. Much more difficult to see, as well as understand and make sense of, is the wide array of “stuff” that’s present, but that isn’t readily apparent to the apparatuses we normally use to reveal the Universe. From the dark bands of the Milky Way to the light-blocking materials in nebulae and clouds, all the way to lining the arms of spiral galaxies and the heavy, long-chained molecules found in protoplanetary disks, cosmic dust is perhaps our most enduring mystery.
Sure, it gives absorption signatures that we can leverage, and at long enough infrared wavelengths, dust that gets heated has its own emission signatures, but we can generally only observe it in detail up close: within our own galaxy or in the nearest galaxies of all. That poses a huge challenge, because the origin of dust, including from a cosmic perspective, remains only very poorly understood. We may have identified many dust-producing sources in the ... Continue Reading »
Beside their shared modern origins, of the many similarities between the internet and ufology, both concern communication: between humans, between humans and aliens, between humans and machines, between machines themselves. Communication concerns the known and the unknown, the impulsive and the intentional, and the sayable and the obscure, which cannot be put into words. On the surface, digital communication concerns signals, with humans, in the language of cybernetics, that function like nodes caught up in feedback loops across biotic and machinic networks. It happens at vast distances but also in immediate and visceral spaces, right in our minds, where other people, and increasingly also artificial agents, are experienced as stimuli.
Yet, in a more profound sense, digital communication also concerns our place in the vast cosmos. Could the internet’s existence be evidence that the universe is immoral or evil? Or is it a mere tool, reducible to historical and social conditions, which can produce both evil and goodness in the world? And what about us, the users? Are we moved by free will or mindlessly following the oscillation of the stars ... Continue Reading »
The difficulty in predicting what happens in chaotic systems comes from how minute differences in inputs can become dramatic changes to the output, in what’s known as sensitivity to initial conditions. This is not an issue in classical Newtonian physics, where the regular movement of objects — planetary orbits, swinging pendulums, rolling balls — are easily predicted, even allowing for small changes to inputs.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is also known more commonly as the “butterfly effect,” which suggests the extreme possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle might cause a storm to rage across Europe some weeks later. I’m reminded of the idea every time I play a game of pool. What ostensibly appears to be a classical system — balls whizzing around the table — is more akin to a chaotic one. On rare occasions, my break-off shot is near-perfect, yet it is utterly impossible to replicate. One could find equations to model the movement of balls around the table, factoring in things such as their mass or the exact strength with which I strike ... Continue Reading »
If there’s one thing we can be certain of when we look out at the glittering canopy of the night sky, it’s this: that someday, all of those luminous points of light, including every star and every galaxy, will someday fade away and cease to shine. The stars and stellar remnants, the primary sources of light and heat and energy that propagate throughout the Universe, are powered by finite sources of fuel: whether through nuclear fusion, gravitation, or any other mechanism. At some point, those fuel sources will be exhausted, no further energy will be naturally extracted from what remains within them, and those once-brilliant objects will fade away into darkness. Some stars live only briefly, others will continue to shine long into the future, with lifetimes far exceeding our Universe’s current 13.8 billion year age.
That brings us to the question of James D, who was curious about the longest-lived stars of all, and wrote in to ask:
“I was reading one of your articles about the lifespan of red dwarf stars, with the smallest living anywhere from 20 trillion to ... Continue Reading »
Jill Tarter has spent a lifetime working on a question that resists answers: not whether we believe there is life beyond Earth, but the quest for undeniable proof.
Tarter explains why SETI is really about technology, patience, and learning how to tell alien signals from our own.
This video Why the search for alien life is about patience, not belief is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In 58 BC, Cicero’s house was ransacked. Returning from exile, the Roman statesman found his property vandalized; his scrolls jumbled, torn, and scattered. A library assumes an order, a schema, something that renders it sensible and accessible. Cicero’s was chaos.
Enter Tyrannio, a Greek specialist in literature and libraries, owner of some 30,000 scrolls and famed expert on Aristotle — in fact, the same man responsible for restoring the philosopher’s tattered library after it was hauled to Rome. Tyrannio stepped in to sort through Cicero’s mess. He identified volumes, repaired damage, organized the scrolls, and created title tags. Cicero marveled at the transformation.
“You will be surprised at Tyrannio’s excellent arrangement in my library,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus. When the work was complete, his appreciation verged on the mystical. “Since Tyrannio has arranged my books,” he wrote, “the house seems to have acquired a soul.”
It’s a poetic but poor translation. Cicero used the Latin word mens — not “soul,” but “mind.” Another translation says the house “recovered its intelligence.” And he’s not talking about Tyrannio’s intelligence, but rather the intelligence ... 
In leadership discourse, the spotlight often falls on strategy, execution, vision, and charismatic influence. Yet one of the most persistent failure modes for even the most outstanding leaders lies not in what they do, but in what they fail to sense: the emotional currents around them, the whispers hidden behind applause. It turned out to be Julius Caesar’s fatal trap, a figure who conquered nations, reshaped Rome, and rewrote what leadership looked like. Caesar’s sudden and tragic end to his career at the hands of his followers was not due to arrogance or a power grab. It resulted from a deficit in emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), the quiet skill that sustains trust once one attains a leadership position. Something that Caesar could well have prevented.
A legendary rise — and an under-appreciated blind spot
Julius Caesar’s rise more than two millennia ago was stellar: both in Roman government and as a general. Ever since, Caesar remains one of history’s most compelling case studies in leadership. His career offers timeless lessons about influence, reputation, and human behavior inside large, competitive systems. His ... 
The grandest cosmic question remains unanswered: “Are we alone?“
This depiction of an Earth-like exoplanet showcases a rocky world with a thin atmosphere in its parent star’s habitable zone. It has oceans and continents and clouds, and could possess macroscopic life forms on its surface. At a distance of multiple light-years away, it would take a gargantuan telescope to image them, and it would only be able to see the world as it was in the distant past, not as it is right now.
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Earth stands alone as a definitively inhabited world.
This aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most iconic hydrothermal features on land in the world. The colors are due to the various organisms living under these extreme conditions, and depend on the amount of sunlight that reaches the various parts of the springs. Hydrothermal fields like this are some of the best candidate locations for life to have first arisen on a young Earth, and may be home to abundant life on a variety of exoplanets.
Credit: Jim Peaco/National Parks ... 
Out there in the Universe, we’re most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and detectors. Much more difficult to see, as well as understand and make sense of, is the wide array of “stuff” that’s present, but that isn’t readily apparent to the apparatuses we normally use to reveal the Universe. From the dark bands of the Milky Way to the light-blocking materials in nebulae and clouds, all the way to lining the arms of spiral galaxies and the heavy, long-chained molecules found in protoplanetary disks, cosmic dust is perhaps our most enduring mystery.
Sure, it gives absorption signatures that we can leverage, and at long enough infrared wavelengths, dust that gets heated has its own emission signatures, but we can generally only observe it in detail up close: within our own galaxy or in the nearest galaxies of all. That poses a huge challenge, because the origin of dust, including from a cosmic perspective, remains only very poorly understood. We may have identified many dust-producing sources in the ... 
Beside their shared modern origins, of the many similarities between the internet and ufology, both concern communication: between humans, between humans and aliens, between humans and machines, between machines themselves. Communication concerns the known and the unknown, the impulsive and the intentional, and the sayable and the obscure, which cannot be put into words. On the surface, digital communication concerns signals, with humans, in the language of cybernetics, that function like nodes caught up in feedback loops across biotic and machinic networks. It happens at vast distances but also in immediate and visceral spaces, right in our minds, where other people, and increasingly also artificial agents, are experienced as stimuli.
Yet, in a more profound sense, digital communication also concerns our place in the vast cosmos. Could the internet’s existence be evidence that the universe is immoral or evil? Or is it a mere tool, reducible to historical and social conditions, which can produce both evil and goodness in the world? And what about us, the users? Are we moved by free will or mindlessly following the oscillation of the stars ... 
The difficulty in predicting what happens in chaotic systems comes from how minute differences in inputs can become dramatic changes to the output, in what’s known as sensitivity to initial conditions. This is not an issue in classical Newtonian physics, where the regular movement of objects — planetary orbits, swinging pendulums, rolling balls — are easily predicted, even allowing for small changes to inputs.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is also known more commonly as the “butterfly effect,” which suggests the extreme possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle might cause a storm to rage across Europe some weeks later. I’m reminded of the idea every time I play a game of pool. What ostensibly appears to be a classical system — balls whizzing around the table — is more akin to a chaotic one. On rare occasions, my break-off shot is near-perfect, yet it is utterly impossible to replicate. One could find equations to model the movement of balls around the table, factoring in things such as their mass or the exact strength with which I strike ... 
If there’s one thing we can be certain of when we look out at the glittering canopy of the night sky, it’s this: that someday, all of those luminous points of light, including every star and every galaxy, will someday fade away and cease to shine. The stars and stellar remnants, the primary sources of light and heat and energy that propagate throughout the Universe, are powered by finite sources of fuel: whether through nuclear fusion, gravitation, or any other mechanism. At some point, those fuel sources will be exhausted, no further energy will be naturally extracted from what remains within them, and those once-brilliant objects will fade away into darkness. Some stars live only briefly, others will continue to shine long into the future, with lifetimes far exceeding our Universe’s current 13.8 billion year age.
That brings us to the question of James D, who was curious about the longest-lived stars of all, and wrote in to ask:
“I was reading one of your articles about the lifespan of red dwarf stars, with the smallest living anywhere from 20 trillion to ...