The Extinction Loop

At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurp

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Take Elon Musk. When he had just come out with the Tesla and showed me his own car for the first time, he had as much to say about the key fob that opened the doors as he did about his overarching vision for how Tesla fits into the broader future of transportation and how important that is to our planet. Later on, when I asked him how he came to st

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In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening t... See more

We could be facing the existential collapse of everything we know, and yet no single person or organization is the culprit. Can we blame the fossil fuel companies? The super-rich? All of the consumers in ‘the West’? Or would it be better to blame the Chinese for building coal power plants on such a massive scale in the early 2000s? The Republicans

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The stakes are high. New legal frameworks should make it possible to harness technology and achieve a radical upheaval of the way of life for both adventurous hunters and settling families at every level of the income ladder. If they fail to accommodate both populations, the danger is for every large city to be inhabited only by very rich hunters a

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