We have about 12 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change and prevent a mass extinction event. We should certainly work on the long-term population trend, but that doesn’t let us off the hook for reducing consumption.
Is the collapse of a civilisation necessarily calamitous? The failure of the Egyptian Old Kingdom towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE was accompanied by riots, tomb-raids and even cannibalism. ‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had...
Nature itself will be shaped by processes redesigned and ‘improved’ by geneticists and engineers. We should call this transition the beginning of a ‘synthetic age’, a time in which background constants are increasingly replaced by artificial and ‘improved’ versions of...
When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That...
What is the relationship of democracy to time? This question may seem abstract but is actually foundational. … Every person, whether or not they have children, exists as both a successor and an ancestor. We are all born into a world we did not make, subject to...
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