science
The rehabilitation of truth
You cannot build a secular civilization into the future without a kind of faith.
Solarpunk humanism: How we dream bigger than despair
Solarpunk offers a potent narrative space for imagining secular worlds to come, and how to get there.
Biophysicist: Society will 'eventually accept' designer babies
"Why wait 100,000 years for natural selection to do its job?"
How much should we worry about asteroids?
Astronomers have found an estimated 40% of the near-Earth asteroids that are 140 m and larger. You do the math.
Eco-friendly transportation? The good, the bad, and the pipe dreams
The saying about putting a fox in charge of the hen house grossly underestimates human ingenuity. We are not foxes, and so we have the ability to be much cleverer custodians of institutions we’re still destroying.
Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous
Some philosophers stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any obligations to the present.
Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI
Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first
Do we have the technology to ease our melting ice sheets?
Reading Time: 11 minutes This past year, news outlets have been reporting that initial predictions for polar ice melt were overly optimistic: ice sheets are melting much faster than models for the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report suggested. Irrespective o
Broken heat records—and the promise of more
Reading Time: 4 minutes Another set of broken heat records has devastating implications—not only for human thriving in the coming years, but also the inability of consequences from past failings to stir global action to some better end.
Fact check: The Inquisition convicted Galileo of heresy, not science fraud
Reading Time: 6 minutes Catholics even today can’t seem to give up the conceit that legendary Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) wasn’t persecuted by the Church in the 17th century for heretical religion but, instead, for bad science. As if. No matter that the Inquisition, the Church’s f
The evolution of cuteness: Why kittens and puppies beat babies, paws down
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve long suspected I have a character flaw: I am far more charmed by kittens and puppies—in fact by any non-human baby animals—than baby humans. It’s a kind of intra-species treason, I suppose. For one thing, kits and pups are far more entertainingly interactive far earlier