I’m Adam Becker. I’m a journalist and astrophysicist.

My latest project is my podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine, where I have conversations with guests each week about what a realistic good future might look like. The trailer for the show is here. You can find new episodes every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to get the chance to ask questions of our upcoming guests, you can support the show on Patreon.

My newest book, More Everything Forever, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. These are wildly implausible and profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow; in reality, there is no good evidence to think that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. These futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

I never wanted this book to be as timely as it is, but here we are. If you’re interested, please buy it now, or put it on hold at your local library. I think it’s pretty good, but you don’t have to take my word for it — the New York Times called it “smart and wonderfully readable.”

My first book, What is Real?, is about the unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics. The New York Times liked that one too; they called it “a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science.” If you want a taste of what that book is like, check out this interactive essay based on the book, about the strangest result in all of quantum physics. Errata for the book are here.

In addition to my books, I’ve written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Fortune, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, Quanta, Undark, New Scientist, NOVA, and other media outlets. My portfolio is here. I’ve also written about the foundations of mathematics for the YouTube channel Veritasium, I’ve recorded several animated videos with the BBC, and I occasionally show up on podcasts like Ologies, Better Offline, Trashfuture, On with Kara Swisher, and Mindscape. In recent years, I’ve been a Science Journalism Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a Science Communicator in Residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, a visiting researcher in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine, and a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Office for History of Science and Technology. And well before any of that, I was an intern at New Scientist magazine, where I designed and coded several interactive features for their website.

I earned a PhD in computational cosmology from the University of Michigan, where I worked with Dragan Huterer in the Physics Department. My thesis was on primordial non-Gaussianity, which is a fancy way of saying that I was trying to find out how much we can learn about the way stuff was arranged in the early universe by looking at the way stuff is arranged in the universe right now. While I was in graduate school, I had some adventures you might enjoy hearing about.

If you want to contact me, you can drop me a line here, or send me an email. You can also find me on Bluesky. If you’d like to have me give a talk at your company, institution, or conference, please do reach out — I’m happy to do it, as my schedule allows. My upcoming speaking engagements are listed here.