Psychology Today

Nonbelievers can show that the universe does have meaning, and that it exists whether humans do or not. And they can show that that meaning emerges inevitably, inexorably, out of the basic physical processes of the universe – that it is not optional or accidental. We can get a religion out of that, but of a very different kind than we've had in the past six thousand years.

When you kill someone in a video game, there should be a popup telling you his name, age, significant other, and hobbies. Here's how I learned how to play video games peacefully.

It's not enough to point out the difficulty of shooting only the assailant in a room full of panicking people. We also have to remember that in a civilized nation, citizens grant a monopoly on violence to a legitimately elected government.

Many rocky planets have been discovered in their star's habitable zone. All of them are larger than Earth, but that doesn't mean their gravity will be crushing.

When implantable technologies come of age, new uses will be found for them, and they won’t be about merely enhancing our bodies. It’ll about letting our bodies do things we have never dreamed of doing before.

In the long run, stupidity never wins. Humanity will get its act together, as it always has. The only question is when. That’s why I’m not only a scientific progressive, I’m an optimistic scientific progressive.

In the popular imagination, aliens are usually either thinly disguised humans (e. g. Klingons) or utterly incomprehensible (e.g. the inscrutable monolith in 2001.) But will real extraterrestrials be so different from us as to be truly incomprehensible? I think the answer is no. And yes.

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the Olympics told a rich and fascinating story of why Great Britain had such a massive impact on world history. It was a brilliant achievement, and it makes the 2012 Olympics one to remember.

I think of our planet swimming in the starry blackness, studded with radio telescopes peering anxiously into the void—and hearing nothing. To me, that feels a lot like being deaf.

Can we create a message that any intelligent extraterrestrial mind can understand?

If America needs a moral turning point, this is it.

Aliens could have profoundly different metaphorical systems for structuring their languages, but patient explanation may get the message across all the same. Here's how the work of several linguists can be applied to the problem of interspecies communication.

Can we find biological, thermodynamic, and philosophical criteria for defining how advanced a society is? And should we even try?

According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years. Now, welcome Stevenson & Kording's Law: the number of neurons that can be tracked in the brain doubles every 7.4 years. What are the implications of that?