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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
A doorway within a metallic-like surface surrounded by hazard tape leads to a low-lit tunnel
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The future

Prehistory in the atomic age

To understand the terrifying futures unleashed by nuclear weapons, we urgently need to return to the deep past

Maria Stavrinaki

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Computing and artificial intelligence

Frontier AI ethics

Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?

Seth Lazar

A couple lying on grass on a hill nearby an American listening station in Berlin
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Metaphysics

What awaits us?

Humanity’s future remains as unthinkable as the still-uncolonised galaxy or the enduring mystery of our own births and deaths

Jennifer Banks

A measure for depth of water stands upright in a dried up landscape that was formerly a lake
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Information and communication

Beware climate populism

The most ardent deniers of anthropogenic climate change today will become the climate conspiracy theorists of tomorrow

Ákos Szegőfi

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Space exploration

Capturing the cosmos

When self-replicating craft bring life to the far Universe, a religious cult, not science, is likely to be the driving force

Jay Olson

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Space exploration

Would children born beyond Earth ever be able to return to humanity’s home planet?

5 minutes

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Earth science and climate

Deep warming

Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future

Mark Buchanan

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Space exploration

Burning ice, metal clouds, gemstone rain – tour the strangest known exoplanets

31 minutes

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The future

What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?

15 minutes

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Stories and literature

Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi

7 minutes

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Animals and humans

Against human exceptionalism

In a tight spot, you’d probably intuit that a human life outweighs an animal’s. There are good arguments why that’s wrong

Jeff Sebo

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Thinkers and theories

Against longtermism

It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous

Émile P Torres

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Neuroscience

Am I my connectome?

Each human brain possesses a unique, intricate pattern of 86 billion neurons. If science can map it, immortality beckons

Phil Jaekl

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Complexity

Uncertain times

The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all

Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell

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The future

Where did the grandeur go?

Superlative things were done in the past century by marshalling thousands of people in the service of a vision of the future

Martin Parker

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Philosophy of science

The good scientist

Science is the one culture that all humans share. What would it mean to create a scientifically literate future together?

Martin Rees

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History

Are there laws of history?

Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right?

Amanda Rees

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The future

At the limits of thought

Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?

David C Krakauer

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Stories and literature

Supermensch

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

Iwan Rhys Morus

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Film and visual culture

Our biological past and our technological future play out on a single human face

1 minute

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Progress and modernity

Smart homes, bountiful oceans and casual sexism: the future as envisaged from 1967

26 minutes

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The future

The end of us

Only since the Enlightenment have we been able to imagine humans going extinct. Is it a sign of our maturity as a species?

Thomas Moynihan

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Film and visual culture

Why the power of cute is colonising our world

Simon May

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Computing and artificial intelligence

Civilisation peaked in 1940 and will collapse by 2040: the data-based predictions of 1973

11 minutes