Big Ideas Forum

We have long known that plastic debris on land and in the ocean is a huge problem. But it is generally not known that the slow degradation of plastic leaves particles small enough to penetrate the cells of marine animals and never disappear. As part of the food chain, humans are exposed to a threat far larger than anticipated. [Read More]

By 2040, we need to find room on Earth for 9-10 billion people. Space exploration is one option. Another is colonizing the oceans. After all, 3/4 of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. There are many ideas for both surface and sub-surface colonies, and such colonization may well be a faster and cheaper way than space colonization. [Read More]

In this program, we will “go inside” the MIT Center for cutting edge technologies (the “Center for Bits and Atoms”) and see how researchers are putting devices together–literally atom by atom–to make things that no one yet knows what to use for… truly a mind-blowing endeavor that will challenge us to even grasp what it actually takes to bring forth products and processes we don’t see until they are completed and put on the market. [Read More]

In the format of the popular Poetry Slams, Big Ideas Forum turns into Tech Slam for an evening: Each volunteering participant gets 5 minutes to introduce a book, an article, a film, a TV feature, a web posting or any other source of information that has caught your attention in the past month. We will discuss this “breaking tech news” for an additional 5 minutes, and maybe select one of the subject for a future BIF event. [Read More]

3D printing has attracted media attention with products from small plastic devices to big items like cars and houses. Now, science has achieved remarkable success in printing human organs from our own cells which work not only in the lab but in humans. We will soon be able to create banks of human spare parts. [Read More]

The ultimate application of AI is to connect the human brain to a hard disk. The goal is to be able to upload and download information between the two media. It would expand the capacity of human “knowledge” to the near infinite. But what else does it do? How about emotions? Or ethics? As we are getting closer to mastering this technologically? Are we ready socially? [Read More]