A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
Michael Crichton
abiogenesis, brain, conjecture, consciousness, darwinism, evolution, extraterrestrial-life, guessing, human-behavior, ignorance, knowledge, language, origin-of-life, religion, science, seti, speculation, theories, theory