I’m having the best day, Manu said. Over dinner, he posed to me his most hypothetical questions: What sort of farmers would we be? Which historical period? Astronaut or deep-sea diver? The questions made me feel that I couldn’t survive a day in the world. I wouldn’t be able to grow anything to eat, couldn’t live through a war or plague, would get

worry that those same gut-check crisis moments might just as easily kick folks into an even darker me-mine, go-it-alone, might-makes-right attitude.