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Jan 24, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Intelligence on Earth did not appear until almost 4.5 billion years after the planet formed. On the other hand, the Sun is slowly heating up and that means there’s just a billion or so years left before life becomes impossible on Earth. Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from these two seemly unrelated facts?
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
flipboard.com | Adam Frank
7 hours agoIt happened in 1859. Today, it would be catastrophic. On a hot and humid Florida night in late August 1859, the sky suddenly lit up. But it was not from fireflies or a fireswamp. Instead, it was the Northern Lights–or aurora borealis. The aurora is usually seen in far more northern latitudes, but it …
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people “It’s hilarious what these astrophysicists have to say about the Universe.” That was a sentence (not verbatim) that popped up in the comments below a video of my recent 3.5-hour interview with Lex Fridman.
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Dec 27, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Human beings have imagined many ways to organize themselves. From hunter-gatherers to global-spanning empires, we have invented political and economic forms and later abandoned those in favor of something new. Now, a quarter into the 21st century, our global project of “civilization” faces novel pressures that may demand another reimagining of our social arrangements.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people It’s impossible to know our place in history. Trapped in the furious back and forth of current events, from elections to dangerous conflicts, we can lose sight of how long it can take for processes emerging now to play out over time. I was reminded of this last week when, during a science-based visit to Florence, Italy, I visited the Galileo Museum.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Welcome to part two of my conversation with theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker, a professor at Arizona State University and the author of the 2024 book Life as No One Knows It. Walker’s book is an example of radical new thinking at the forefront of the “physics of life,” a burgeoning field investigating what makes life different from non-life at a fundamental level. It’s a trickier question than you might think.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people I don’t want to believe; I want to know. That is my mantra. I am a scientist, and I want something real, something I can do something real with, not more swirling stories of incredible possibilities that are never backed up. As a professional astronomer whose professional task is to professionally think about finding life beyond Earth, that’s my reaction to yesterday’s congressional hearings. Let me explain.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people How did life on Earth begin? Is there life on other worlds? These two questions have an excellent pedigree as human beings have been asking them for a very long time. What is remarkable about this historical moment, however, is how close we may be to answering either one. Even more remarkable, given their importance, is how an answer to either of these momentous questions will reflect heavily on the other.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Sara Imari Walker is a professor of physics at Arizona State University and the author of a new bookLife as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. As I wrote in my review of the book, I’m a big fan of Walker’s work (full disclosure, we have collaborated before on a paper and a proposal).
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Adam Frank
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Sara Imari Walker is a professor of physics at Arizona State University and the author of a new bookLife as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. As I wrote in my review of the book, I’m a big fan of Walker’s work (full disclosure, we have collaborated before on a paper and a proposal).
