George Dyson talks with Martin Eiermann about the definition of life, human progress, and the importance of cognitive autarchy.
Deep beneath the ocean floor off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists have described the existence of a potentially vast realm of life, one almost completely disconnected from the world above. Persisting in microscopic cracks in the basalt rocks of Earth’s oceanic crust is a complex microbial ecosystem fueled entirely by chemical reactions with rocks and…
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…
There are many tribes at Davos: business leaders (who pay for the rest), journalists, politicians, representatives of NGOs, bankers (I thought they all looked a bit defensive), faith leaders, and my own tribe, the academics. I left the conference full of admiration. Was I seduced by the glitter? Every second person seemed to be the…
Global population data spanning the years from 1900 to 2010 have enabled a research team from the Autonomous University of Madrid to predict that the number of people on Earth will stabilise around the middle of the century. The results, obtained with a model used by physicists, coincide with the UN’s downward forecasts. Author Metanexus…
Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we’ve shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we’re right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the…
A review of “Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior” by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson.