Sublime

book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which speculates about just how the seemingly “permanent” infrastructure we’ve created is likely to decay in the absence of our maintenance of it. That book adds a beautiful piece to our puzzle, because once you realize how fucked we are, the next thing you often wonder is whether the biosphere will be ab

En plus de la guerre nucléaire, l’humanité va affronter dans les prochaines décennies une nouvelle menace existentielle, qui apparaissait à peine sur les radars politiques de 1964 : l’effondrement écologique. Les hommes déstabilisent la biosphère globale sur de multiples fronts. Nous prélevons toujours plus de ressources dans l’environnement, tout

Only a tiny proportion of the sun’s energy reaches us, yet it amounts to 3,766,800 exajoules of energy each year (a joule is a unit of energy in the metric system, about the amount you expend to lift a small apple one yard straight up; an exajoule is a billion billion joules – that’s a lot of apples).2 All the world’s plants capture only about 3,00

To prove this hypothesis, Cosmo searched the universe to find another star with an atmosphere that was ejected following a collision with a planet. In the third year of the Crisis Era, he succeeded. “Dr. Cosmo’s team discovered planetary system 275E1, about eighty-four light-years from the Solar System.

Take away our oxygen-rich atmosphere, take away our protective magnetic field, take away the slow drift of tectonic planets, take away our large Moon, take away our shielding ozone layer, and life as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Jovian

Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. •