When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even thousands of stars. Depending on how dark your sky was, you could spot up to 6000 stars at once, as well as deep-sky objects, the plane of the Milky Way, and only the rare, occasional satellite streak. As time went on, more and more satellites were launched, bringing us up to around 2000 active satellites as of 2019.
And then we entered the era of satellite megaconstellations, beginning with the launch of the first Starlink satellites. Now, nearly 7 full years later, there are over 17,000 active and defunct satellite payloads in orbit, with approximately 100 times as many satellites proposed in the coming years. From satellite communications to direct-to-phone links to the proposition of AI data centers in space, the number of proposed use cases has exploded. However, as the environment around Earth becomes more crowded, the risks, the harms, and the ... Continue Reading »
H. Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and founder of multinational IT company Electronic Data Systems (EDS), once said, “Talk is cheap. Words are plentiful. Deeds are precious.”
He’s right. Deeds are what make intelligence powerful. Intelligence without action is philosophy. Intelligence with action is civilization.
Much of what we’ve seen from the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies has revolved around words: You go to their chatbot, ask it a question, and it responds. Over the past couple of years, some have taken this a step further with AI agents — those can actually do things, but only things you’ve told them to do.
The next frontier in AI is not better chat. It is not even better agents. The next frontier is proactive AI, the kind that takes action, learns in real time, and, critically, comes to you before you go to it. This distinction is not a feature improvement. It is a civilizational pivot.
The asymmetry that defines our era
This is the current architecture of human-AI interaction. You wake up. You remember you need to do something, like plan a trip. You open ... Continue Reading »
Here on Earth, signal degradation is a real problem whenever we transmit information to one another. Signals like sound, light, and gravity spread out through space in three dimensions, becoming weaker and weaker as you travel farther from the source. The medium that the signal travels through alters the signal’s properties as well, as an oncoming train sounds different from the air, with your ear to the ground, or from submerged in a body of water. And if there are interfering signals to contend with — like sound or light from additional sources — that “noise” can also degrade the quality of the signal, at least from the perception of the signal’s recipient.
Surely these factors, as well as potential other factors, affect signals as they travel through the expanding Universe, particularly across billions of light-years. But how severe is it? How big of a problem is signal degradation, and is there anything we can do to improve the information we can glean about the original source that generated it? That’s the question of Viraji Ogodapola, who wants to know:
“When light ... Continue Reading »
Time feels obvious, but physics tells a stranger story about its existence: Theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explores why our sense of time may be incredibly misleading, including the idea that past, present, and future might all exist at once.
This video The block universe: a theory where every moment already exists is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
It is March 27, 1933. Here is a headline in the New York Times: “Hitler Is Supreme Under Enabling Act.” Under that headline: “Chancellor, Preeminent Over Cabinet, Is Now Practically the German Government.” A few lines later, under that: “All Legislative Powers Have Been Transferred to Regime, Free to Refashion National Life.”
How might that transfer of powers, making the chancellor “free to refashion national life,” be justified? Is there a theory? To say the least, that is a complicated question, but for a glimpse, turn to the justification by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt of what happened in Germany on June 30, 1934.
That was the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler ordered his elite guards to murder hundreds of people, including the leaders of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA). The separation of powers was Schmitt’s central target. He announced, “The real Führer is always a judge. Out of Führerdom flows judgeship.” Schmitt added, “One who wants to separate the two from each other or puts them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the ... Continue Reading »
Anytime you reach deeper into the unknown than ever before, you should not only wonder about what you’re going to find, but also worry about what sort of demons you might accidentally unearth. In nuclear physics, discovering the internal structure of the atom led to enormous advances, but also brought us the dangers of radioactivity and atomic weapons. In the realm of particle physics, that double-edged sword arises the farther we probe into the high-energy Universe. The better we can explore the previously inaccessible energy frontier, the better we can reveal the high-energy processes that shaped the Universe in its early stages.
Many of the mysteries of how our Universe began and evolved from the earliest times can be best investigated by this exact method: colliding particles at higher and higher energies. New particles and rare processes can be revealed through accelerator physics at or beyond the current energy frontiers, but this is not without risk. If we can reach energies that:
reveal/demonstrate the ability to create more matter than antimatter (or vice versa),
restore the inflationary state that preceded and set up ... Continue Reading »
In the opening chapter of his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that philosophers have always had a strange, pathological obsession with “truth.” Truth is seen as the greatest good in the universe, and, if we believe Socrates, all the bad and evil in the world stems from ignorance of this truth. And so, libraries of books have been devoted to “What is truth?”, “How to know the truth?”, and “What is and isn’t true.”
But what if most people don’t actually want the truth, or if they just want to be right? In such cases, the truth might be a liability. When what philosophers, scientists, or experts present as “true” is something that makes someone wrong, their minds will do something odd — they will lock down. And according to the philosopher Chris Ranalli, when this happens, we should call it “indoctrination.”
So, what is indoctrination, and how can we fix it?
The cage you build yourself
In his work on social epistemology, Ranalli argues that indoctrination isn’t just about what you believe, but about how that belief is sealed off ... Continue Reading »
When I first started working in venture capital, I was given a seemingly straightforward assignment: Get to know the most successful founders we’d invested in and figure out what they had in common. Ideally, I’d emerge with a neat checklist of experiences and attributes my firm could use to spot future winners.
I took the project seriously — borderline obsessively. I spent hours in long, winding conversations with founders, talking about everything from their childhoods to their home lives and hobbies. I administered a quantitative personality test that measures 28 dimensions across 125 sub-dimensions. I assumed that if I gathered enough data, a clear pattern would eventually reveal itself.
It didn’t.
After two years, there was no definitive list of traits that every successful leader shared. Instead, I noticed something subtler and far more interesting. These founders differed widely in background, personality, and intelligence. What they shared wasn’t education, pedigree, or even raw ambition. It was a consistent willingness to grow, experiment, and reinvent themselves. They embraced change.
I call this quality AQ, or your agility quotient. AQ is your capacity to navigate change, ... Continue Reading »
What if humanity is the galaxy’s only advanced civilization?
Brian Cox examines why, despite billions of stars and trillions of planets, we have found no evidence of other intelligent life.
This video Why alien civilizations may bloom and die unseen is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
One of the great mysteries in the Universe is that, in all the vastness of space, we have yet to detect any sort of life out there beyond our own planet. Whether microbial and simple, multicellular and complex, highly differentiated and intelligent, or technologically advanced, the only form of life we know of here in 2026 is terrestrial life that originated right here on Earth. Despite all of the discoveries and advances that we’ve made in recent years, from the origins and scale of the Universe to thousands of confirmed exoplanets, we still have yet to detect even a single robust signature of a lifeform that originated from anywhere else.
All we can do, at the present time, is to make the best use of the knowledge that we have. Because of all that we’ve learned about our galaxy and Universe, the history of stars and heavy elements, the properties and commonness of exoplanets, we can make very high-quality estimates about the abundance of potentially habitable planets. However, how many of them actually come to be inhabited remains a great unknown, ... Continue Reading »
When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even thousands of stars. Depending on how dark your sky was, you could spot up to 6000 stars at once, as well as deep-sky objects, the plane of the Milky Way, and only the rare, occasional satellite streak. As time went on, more and more satellites were launched, bringing us up to around 2000 active satellites as of 2019.
And then we entered the era of satellite megaconstellations, beginning with the launch of the first Starlink satellites. Now, nearly 7 full years later, there are over 17,000 active and defunct satellite payloads in orbit, with approximately 100 times as many satellites proposed in the coming years. From satellite communications to direct-to-phone links to the proposition of AI data centers in space, the number of proposed use cases has exploded. However, as the environment around Earth becomes more crowded, the risks, the harms, and the ... 
H. Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and founder of multinational IT company Electronic Data Systems (EDS), once said, “Talk is cheap. Words are plentiful. Deeds are precious.”
He’s right. Deeds are what make intelligence powerful. Intelligence without action is philosophy. Intelligence with action is civilization.
Much of what we’ve seen from the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies has revolved around words: You go to their chatbot, ask it a question, and it responds. Over the past couple of years, some have taken this a step further with AI agents — those can actually do things, but only things you’ve told them to do.
The next frontier in AI is not better chat. It is not even better agents. The next frontier is proactive AI, the kind that takes action, learns in real time, and, critically, comes to you before you go to it. This distinction is not a feature improvement. It is a civilizational pivot.
The asymmetry that defines our era
This is the current architecture of human-AI interaction. You wake up. You remember you need to do something, like plan a trip. You open ... 
Here on Earth, signal degradation is a real problem whenever we transmit information to one another. Signals like sound, light, and gravity spread out through space in three dimensions, becoming weaker and weaker as you travel farther from the source. The medium that the signal travels through alters the signal’s properties as well, as an oncoming train sounds different from the air, with your ear to the ground, or from submerged in a body of water. And if there are interfering signals to contend with — like sound or light from additional sources — that “noise” can also degrade the quality of the signal, at least from the perception of the signal’s recipient.
Surely these factors, as well as potential other factors, affect signals as they travel through the expanding Universe, particularly across billions of light-years. But how severe is it? How big of a problem is signal degradation, and is there anything we can do to improve the information we can glean about the original source that generated it? That’s the question of Viraji Ogodapola, who wants to know:
“When light ... 
It is March 27, 1933. Here is a headline in the New York Times: “Hitler Is Supreme Under Enabling Act.” Under that headline: “Chancellor, Preeminent Over Cabinet, Is Now Practically the German Government.” A few lines later, under that: “All Legislative Powers Have Been Transferred to Regime, Free to Refashion National Life.”
How might that transfer of powers, making the chancellor “free to refashion national life,” be justified? Is there a theory? To say the least, that is a complicated question, but for a glimpse, turn to the justification by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt of what happened in Germany on June 30, 1934.
That was the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler ordered his elite guards to murder hundreds of people, including the leaders of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA). The separation of powers was Schmitt’s central target. He announced, “The real Führer is always a judge. Out of Führerdom flows judgeship.” Schmitt added, “One who wants to separate the two from each other or puts them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the ... 
Anytime you reach deeper into the unknown than ever before, you should not only wonder about what you’re going to find, but also worry about what sort of demons you might accidentally unearth. In nuclear physics, discovering the internal structure of the atom led to enormous advances, but also brought us the dangers of radioactivity and atomic weapons. In the realm of particle physics, that double-edged sword arises the farther we probe into the high-energy Universe. The better we can explore the previously inaccessible energy frontier, the better we can reveal the high-energy processes that shaped the Universe in its early stages.
Many of the mysteries of how our Universe began and evolved from the earliest times can be best investigated by this exact method: colliding particles at higher and higher energies. New particles and rare processes can be revealed through accelerator physics at or beyond the current energy frontiers, but this is not without risk. If we can reach energies that:
reveal/demonstrate the ability to create more matter than antimatter (or vice versa),
restore the inflationary state that preceded and set up ... 
In the opening chapter of his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that philosophers have always had a strange, pathological obsession with “truth.” Truth is seen as the greatest good in the universe, and, if we believe Socrates, all the bad and evil in the world stems from ignorance of this truth. And so, libraries of books have been devoted to “What is truth?”, “How to know the truth?”, and “What is and isn’t true.”
But what if most people don’t actually want the truth, or if they just want to be right? In such cases, the truth might be a liability. When what philosophers, scientists, or experts present as “true” is something that makes someone wrong, their minds will do something odd — they will lock down. And according to the philosopher Chris Ranalli, when this happens, we should call it “indoctrination.”
So, what is indoctrination, and how can we fix it?
The cage you build yourself
In his work on social epistemology, Ranalli argues that indoctrination isn’t just about what you believe, but about how that belief is sealed off ... 
When I first started working in venture capital, I was given a seemingly straightforward assignment: Get to know the most successful founders we’d invested in and figure out what they had in common. Ideally, I’d emerge with a neat checklist of experiences and attributes my firm could use to spot future winners.
I took the project seriously — borderline obsessively. I spent hours in long, winding conversations with founders, talking about everything from their childhoods to their home lives and hobbies. I administered a quantitative personality test that measures 28 dimensions across 125 sub-dimensions. I assumed that if I gathered enough data, a clear pattern would eventually reveal itself.
It didn’t.
After two years, there was no definitive list of traits that every successful leader shared. Instead, I noticed something subtler and far more interesting. These founders differed widely in background, personality, and intelligence. What they shared wasn’t education, pedigree, or even raw ambition. It was a consistent willingness to grow, experiment, and reinvent themselves. They embraced change.
I call this quality AQ, or your agility quotient. AQ is your capacity to navigate change, ... 
One of the great mysteries in the Universe is that, in all the vastness of space, we have yet to detect any sort of life out there beyond our own planet. Whether microbial and simple, multicellular and complex, highly differentiated and intelligent, or technologically advanced, the only form of life we know of here in 2026 is terrestrial life that originated right here on Earth. Despite all of the discoveries and advances that we’ve made in recent years, from the origins and scale of the Universe to thousands of confirmed exoplanets, we still have yet to detect even a single robust signature of a lifeform that originated from anywhere else.
All we can do, at the present time, is to make the best use of the knowledge that we have. Because of all that we’ve learned about our galaxy and Universe, the history of stars and heavy elements, the properties and commonness of exoplanets, we can make very high-quality estimates about the abundance of potentially habitable planets. However, how many of them actually come to be inhabited remains a great unknown, ...