Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me: You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famine when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.... In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market acts as if it does not know you exist and does not care whether you live or die. DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die - not out of malice , but out of indifference.

Humanity's story must be one of constant change because that is one way to transmute hope.

The more we cull diversity, the more we are vulnerable to extinction,

Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.