by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 13 Apr 2026 · 225pp · 76,418 words
stress. It’s a blitz our nervous systems were never designed to withstand. The fallout is both predictable and global: depression, exhaustion, burnout—on a planetary scale. In fact, if you try to quantify the wrecking ball of overload in bits and bytes, the standard metrics of information, well, once again, there
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. Algorithms. Labs. Market forces. All of them converged on the same target: the human brain. It’s a full-force rewiring of pleasure on a planetary scale. Social media was the first wave. Billed as a connection tool, it became an attention predator. Platforms built to facilitate communication became tools to supercharge
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for anti-fragility, and in our survival-of-the-speediest world, it’s our compass. We built tools of mythic power: AI, robotics, synthetic biology, planetary-scale networks. Yet we’re steering them with software tuned to life on the savanna. Logic helps, but lateral thinking, those strange intuitive leaps between distant
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leap in capability—from vision recognition to multimodal reasoning—has been powered by more computation, driving innovations in GPUs, tensor processors, and distributed training at planetary scale. The feedback loop is self-accelerating: Greater compute enables smarter models, which in turn design better chips and algorithms. Intelligence is no longer capped by
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees · 18 Apr 2022 · 192pp · 63,813 words
to our current installation at the South Pole, though operating under much harsher circumstances. Some enthusiasts regard this as a preliminary stage in a grand, planetary-scale project to turn Mars into a planet more hospitable to human habitation, potentially capable of supporting a population equal to Earth’s. Although Mars has
by Ray Jayawardhana · 3 Feb 2011 · 257pp · 66,480 words
the Earth is special among its brethren in the solar system as the only planet with liquid water on its surface and life on a planetary scale. But there’s no reason to think that our solar system is unique in the Galaxy, given its hundreds of billions of stars. Unfolding Story
by Natalie Starkey · 29 Sep 2021 · 309pp · 97,320 words
understand the inner workings of planets, then looking at what happens on the surface is a great place to begin. It’s a case of planetary-scale bookkeeping, documenting past events in order to piece together their history. Active planetary bodies literally spew out their insides, which offers a glimpse of what
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had a lesser effect on planetary evolution. During the time that aluminium-26 was active and generating heat, it was an incredibly effective source of planetary-scale warming. The heat produced was enough, in fact, to melt the planetesimals within which it was contained, turning their rocky interiors into molten rock, or
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be capable of fuelling significant geological processes at its surface. A planet that is cold inside, with no volcanism, is a dead one. Nevertheless, without planetary-scale cooling in the first place, we would never have seen volcanic features on these bodies either. In terms of making a life-giving, geologically interesting
by Lee Billings · 2 Oct 2013 · 326pp · 97,089 words
“primordial soup” of organic compounds—sugars, lipids, and even amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Acting over millions of years on a planetary scale, such reactions could easily synthesize the organic ingredients for life from inorganic chemical precursors. On our own planet, the fossil record suggested that life must
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Moon, the Martian moon Phobos, and Mars. The prominent astronomer Fred Whipple suggested that Earth’s population would have stabilized at 100 billion, and that planetary-scale engineering of Mars would have altered the Red Planet’s climate to allow its 700,000 inhabitants to be self-sufficient. The director of NASA
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scales differences between living things and their inanimate environs became indistinct, and the world could rightly be viewed as a complex system analogous to a planetary-scale organism. He called this union of the biosphere and the rest of the Earth “Gaia” after the goddess of Mother Earth in Greek mythology. With
by Mark Lynas · 3 Oct 2011 · 369pp · 98,776 words
divine. God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major forces of nature, from the
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itself, and hence our own survival as a species. To avert this increasing danger, we must begin to take responsibility for our actions at a planetary scale. Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here. This book aims to demonstrate how our new task
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world, probably has a direct effect on the region’s monsoon.7 Due to the globe-girdling reach of modern human civilization, these regional and planetary-scale changes are perhaps unsurprising, for humanity has always had an umbilical connection with rivers and fresh water. Imperial capitals throughout history have lined major watercourses
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little trace behind as their once unconquerable cities were reclaimed by sand or forest. Today we face the danger of overusing water resources on a planetary scale, and the consequences for our advanced civilization may be just as significant in the long run. TURNING ON THE TAP It would be foolish to
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our planet will subtly change color—to a darker hue, perhaps with a greenish tint where photosynthesizing algae take over from their calcifying brethren, another planetary-scale visual change that might be detected from space. Scientific studies seem to confirm that coccolithophores are sensitive to ocean acidification: Those organisms exposed to high
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by the national pledges currently on the table at Copenhagen would warm by four degrees, perhaps more. We all knew what this meant. It meant planetary-scale destruction and perhaps a mortal threat to civilization. Much of the hothouse atmosphere at the negotiations arose because everyone knew how desperately important they were
by Oliver Morton · 15 Feb 2003 · 409pp · 129,423 words
biota, at once so enduring and so seemingly fragile, that lives in the imagination most fully, establishing a new bridge between the books’ personal and planetary scales. There’s a seeming contradiction here. The surface of Mars is extraordinarily ancient; the High Sierras are relatively young mountains, and the postglacial fell-fields
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on Mars, Parker saw half a dozen shorelines parallel to each other. Most of them, though, could not be traced for long distances. At the planetary scale there were just two: “Contact 1,” which kept close to the highland-lowland boundary, and “Contact 2,” which was farther out into the lowlands. Parker
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distinct slope, with the south pole about six miles higher than the northern plains. So if the water were to find its level on a planetary scale, that level could easily be deep beneath the southern highlands—and a few miles above the northern plains. The ocean’s shore would mark the
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system for Sojourner. Boston threw herself into studying the complex interactions within biospheres in order to make sense of what biology could do on a planetary scale; she was one of the people who got the American Geophysical Union to take its first serious look at Jim Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which
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delicate bridges leaping the narrower parts of Valles Marineris in a single span. A Martian railway network could be a work of art on a planetary scale. But it might not be the only one. The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, perhaps most famous today for his furniture design, worked in his
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the state of the technological art than used to be the case. But at the same time, our technology has become capable of operating at planetary scales. Humankind had never really seen a planet-wide weather phenomenon before Mariner 9 sent back images of the great dust storm of 1971; within a
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to suppose it is near its end. And if it persists to twice its present age, it will be through designing those environments on a planetary scale with both greater care and greater ambition, protecting them from bolts from the blue and changes in the climate and other calamities that would once
by Natalie Starkey · 8 Mar 2018 · 284pp · 89,477 words
changes in their long history since formation. They have been melted and re-formed many times over, experiencing violent impacts from space and then undergoing planetary-scale processing such as plate tectonics, of which we’ll learn more later. In fact, because of these processes, the planets have almost completely hidden away
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to, with some being energetically closer than the Moon, requiring less rocket thrust to reach them. The relatively small size of comets and asteroids on planetary scales also gives them a low surface gravity which makes them easier to leave than the Moon, requiring less energy to blast back off their surfaces
by Jim Bell · 24 Feb 2015 · 310pp · 89,653 words
even including exotic, low-temperature ices other than water ice. And its strange backward orbit suggested that it may have been through some sort of planetary-scale trauma, such as being captured by Neptune, or had its course changed by some sort of giant impact. It was a great way to end
by Carl Sagan · 8 Sep 1997 · 356pp · 102,224 words
. And so, due to the almost mythic powers of our technology (and the prevalence of short-term thinking), we are beginning—on Continental and on planetary scales—to pose a danger to ourselves. Plainly, if these problems are to be solved, it will require many nations acting in concert over many years
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