Tales of Many Things -Tales of Many Things

Daylight Saving Time: A Century of Moving the Hands and Getting Nowhere

Posted on 2026-11-01 by The Narrator

Every year, twice a year, we participate in one of the strangest government sponsored rituals of modern civilization. We change the clocks.

Today, we fell back to Standard Time, dutifully moving the hands of our clocks backward one hour. Somewhere, millions of people are celebrating an extra hour of sleep. Others are wondering why it gets dark before they’ve finished their afternoon tea. Virtually everyone is asking the same question, why are we still doing this?

It’s 2026. We have artificial intelligence, semi-autonomous vehicles, reusable rockets, gene editing and computers that can process more information in a second than entire generations of humans could process in their lifetimes, but apparently, we still haven’t figured out what time it should be.

Let’s take a look at how we got here.

A Brief History of Moving the Clock Hands

The United States first established Daylight Saving Time (DST) through the Standard Time Act of 1918. The legislation officially established U.S. time zones and introduced DST as a wartime measure intended to conserve fuel and electricity during World War I.

The public wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. Agricultural interests and other groups objected and Congress repealed DST in 1919 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Time zones, however, remained.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reintroduced year-round DST in 1942. It was called “War Time” and remained in effect continuously until September 1945.

After the war individual communities and states adopted their own arrangements, creating a confusing patchwork of local time observances. Transportation companies and federal regulators eventually decided enough was enough.

In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act, establishing a consistent national framework for observing DST. States could opt out entirely, which Hawaii and most of Arizona eventually did.

Then came the energy crisis of the 1970s. In December 1973 President Richard Nixon signed legislation establishing a two year experiment with year-round DST. The idea was to conserve energy by giving people more daylight in the evening.

It sounded wonderful, until winter arrived. Children were waiting for school buses and walking to school in darkness. Safety concerns mounted, public support evaporated and Congress intervened. Standard Time was temporarily restored during the winter of 1974-1975. Apparently, the sun hadn’t received the memo.

In 2005 Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, extending DST. Beginning in 2007 clocks would spring forward on the second Sunday in March and fall back on the first Sunday in November.

So here we are, all on the same schedule and still confused.

In March 2022 the Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act which would have made DST permanent. The legislation went nowhere in the House. More recently, the 2025 version of the bill passed the House in July 2026, only to encounter resistance in the Senate. I understand not being able to agree on economic policy or foreign policy, but this is two bodies of the legislative branch playing volleyball with an old style alarm clock.

So, after more than a century of debate, we’re still trying to figure out how to set the clock on the microwave.

The Great Debate: Which Clock Is the Right Clock?

There are essentially two camps. One wants permanent Daylight Saving Time. The other wants permanent Standard Time. Both have arguments, both have supporters and both have managed to turn an incredibly simple question into a political, economic, medical and philosophical debate.

The Case for Permanent Daylight Saving Time

The argument is relatively straightforward. People generally prefer daylight in the evening. Later sunsets mean more opportunities to shop, dine out, play golf, exercise, take the kids to the park or enjoy outdoor activities after work.

Businesses like the additional evening activity. Retailers and restaurants potentially benefit from increased foot traffic. Some studies also suggest that daylight during evening commuting hours can reduce certain types of crime and traffic accidents.

Historically, another argument was energy conservation. If people have more daylight in the evening, they need less artificial lighting. It’s a convenient idea. More sunshine, more outdoor activity, more economic activity. What’s not to like?

Well, winter mornings, for starters.

The Case for Permanent Standard Time

Sleep scientists and organizations such as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine favor permanent Standard Time. Their argument is based on human biology.

Our circadian rhythms are influenced by exposure to natural light. Morning sunlight helps synchronize our internal biological clocks, promotes alertness and helps regulate our sleep-wake cycles. Excessive evening light can delay melatonin production and interfere with sleep.

Permanent DST would shift sunrise an additional hour later during the winter. In northern parts of the country, children could be heading to school in darkness well into the morning. That isn’t just an inconvenience. It raises legitimate concerns about pedestrian safety, traffic accidents and the health consequences of disrupting our natural sleep patterns.

There are also concerns for people who work outdoors, particularly those whose shifts begin early in the morning.

So, one side wants more daylight after work. The other wants more daylight before work. Congratulations. We’ve managed to turn sunlight into a partisan issue.

The Science Isn’t Particularly Ambiguous About One Thing

The twice yearly clock change itself has consequences. Research has associated the spring transition with increased heart attack risk, traffic accidents, sleep disruption and workplace injuries. The evidence isn’t equally strong for every claimed consequence and the broader research isn’t entirely consistent, but there is enough evidence to make the twice yearly disruption difficult to defend.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has explicitly recommended eliminating seasonal clock changes in favor of permanent Standard Time.

Even if you disagree about which permanent arrangement is best, deliberately disrupting people’s sleep schedules twice a year isn’t exactly a brilliant public health strategy.

Then there’s the original justification, energy conservation. The theory made sense in an era when lighting was a substantial part of household energy consumption. More daylight in the evening meant fewer hours using candles, gas lamps and eventually incandescent light bulbs.

Except we’ve changed.

Modern LED lighting uses a fraction of the electricity consumed by older lighting technologies. Heating and cooling, appliances, electronics and other household demands have become much more significant considerations.

In other words, the energy argument that helped justify DST in 1918 isn’t nearly as compelling in 2026. We’re still rearranging our lives around an energy saving theory developed when people were lighting their homes with technology that predates the television.

We’ve Changed, but Time Hasn’t

This is where I think the entire debate goes off the rails. We keep trying to find a solution that accommodates everybody. Why?

People don’t all work the same hours. They never have. If you work in an office, your hours might be 8 AM to 5 PM. If you’re a baker or a barista, you might start at 4 AM and finish around noon. If you’re a bartender, your workday might run from 6 PM until 2 AM.

News anchors cover morning and evening broadcasts. Hospital employees work 7-to-7 shifts. Firefighters pull 24 hour shifts every third day. Actors and theater employees often work when everyone else is going home. A lot of these people don’t particularly care when the sun comes up or goes down.

Years ago I supported a project in France. I worked the graveyard shift because that was their business day. When my coworkers were arriving at 8 AM, I was packing up to go home. When the sun was shining outside, I was sleeping with a blanket pulled over my head to keep the light out. The sun didn’t care. Neither did my employer. We simply adjusted our schedules to accommodate the work.

Today, my current employer operates on three continents. We literally “follow the sun”. I have teammates in five different time zones. Not just coworkers. Teammates. People working on the same projects, sharing responsibilities and collaborating throughout the day. The twice yearly transition between Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time is a pain in the ass. (Forgive my English.)

Why? Because not everyone in the world changes their clocks on the same schedule. Some locations don’t observe DST at all, others change on different dates and every time somebody moves a clock, our carefully coordinated schedules need to be reconsidered.

We’ve built a global economy that operates around the clock, but we’re still arguing about whether the sun should set at 5 PM or 6 PM according to a number printed on a clock. We’ve moved beyond the agrarian society that helped shape our original assumptions about time. The old convention of being up with the chickens and going to bed with the chickens doesn’t describe modern life anymore.

Besides, modern chickens have very different schedules, too.

What If We Stopped Thinking About Time That Way?

In 1998, the Swiss watchmaker Swatch introduced an interesting experiment called Swatch Internet Time. The idea was to eliminate time zones and conventional hours and minutes in favor of a universal system. Instead of dividing a day into 24 hours, Swatch Internet Time divides it into 1,000 units called “.beats”. One .beat equals exactly 86.4 seconds, a long minute, in effect.

The day begins at midnight in Biel, Switzerland, the home of Swatch. That’s designated @000. Noon is @500 and the day ends at @999, before starting over again. The interesting part? There are no time zones. If it’s @700 in New York, it’s @700 in Tokyo, Paris, London and in Biel, Switzerland. The local clock might say 8 AM in one location and 3 PM in another, but both locations would agree that it’s @700. The reference is universal. The local schedule is not.

Think about that for a moment. I could schedule a meeting with someone in Germany at @430. Someone in Japan could join at precisely the same moment. Nobody needs to calculate whether Berlin is four or five hours ahead of New York, whether Europe has changed its clocks or whether somebody forgot that Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time.

My workday could start at @583 and end at @958. I’d even be willing to go @580 to @960! I wouldn’t need AM or PM. I wouldn’t need to worry about the local time in another country. It’s a universal reference.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the sun rises at the same local time everywhere. It doesn’t mean everyone should work the same hours or eat dinner at the same time. I could have coworkers hop on at @900 and work until @280 in one “time zone” and go @250 to @630 in another! This method simply separates the measurement of time from the local conventions we use to organize our lives.

That makes a tremendous difference. Swatch Internet Time never became a mainstream standard, but the underlying concept is worth considering. We already use UTC as a common reference for aviation, computing, science and international coordination. We don’t need to reinvent timekeeping. We need to recognize that different applications have different requirements. UTC and non-locational reference systems already prove we can separate global coordination from local schedules.

Time is a measurement. Our schedules are a social convention. Daylight is a physical phenomenon. We’ve confused the three.

The Problem Isn’t the Clock, It’s Us

What I find particularly amusing is this entire debate. We have spent more than a century arguing about how to rearrange an hour. We’ve conducted experiments. We’ve passed legislation. We’ve repealed legislation. We’ve studied energy consumption, traffic accidents, crime rates, economic activity and human circadian rhythms.

We’ve even managed to make it a political issue and yet, the fundamental problem hasn’t changed. People have different schedules. Different jobs. Different lifestyles. Different relationships with daylight. There is no magical clock arrangement that makes everybody happy.

Permanent Daylight Saving Time has advantages and disadvantages. Permanent Standard Time has advantages and disadvantages. The current arrangement manages to combine some of the disadvantages of both while adding the inconvenience of changing clocks twice a year. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I don’t particularly care whether we settle on permanent Standard Time or permanent Daylight Saving Time. I have preferences and I understand the scientific arguments favoring Standard Time. What I do care about is ending an unnecessary ritual that disrupts millions of lives twice a year.

We should be able to agree on a consistent system of timekeeping without pretending that changing the clock changes the amount of daylight available.

The Earth will continue rotating. The seasons will continue changing. Sunrise and sunset will happen whether Congress approves or not. Perhaps it’s time we stopped trying to legislate the sun. After all, it’s been doing its job quite successfully for about 4.5 billion years and it hasn’t changed its clock once.

Posted in Culture, Science, Society | Tagged accident, agriculture, Biel Mean Time, Congress, daylight, Daylight Saving Time, debate, DST, energy, heart attack, history, school, science, Standard Time, Sun, Swatch Internet Time, technology, time, time zone, UTC, War Time | Leave a comment

Take the Extra Minute to Rest: The World, Upside-Down

Posted on 2026-10-28 by The Narrator

Last year, I wrote about the moment when a rescuer’s faith is tested, the Paladin’s Dilemma. It’s the crossroads where conviction meets exhaustion, where the light of purpose flickers against the weight of disillusionment. For many in the first responder community, this isn’t a distant or abstract struggle. It’s personal. It creeps in quietly, like a slow rot, until one day the ache becomes systemic, until they find themselves cornered by the very mission that once gave them meaning. I’ve seen it happen far too often. I’ve known rescuers who fell to that unseen blade.

There comes a time in every responder’s life when the compass spins, the light fades and even the most familiar trails disappear into fog. For those of us in search and rescue, that moment doesn’t always happen in the middle of a blizzard or on a cliffside. Sometimes it’s after the mission, in the quiet, when the adrenaline is gone and the doubts begin to speak.

Sometimes the hardest part of search and rescue isn’t finding someone lost in the wilderness. It’s recognizing when we’ve started losing ourselves.

We enter this work with clear purpose, because we believe in something bigger than ourselves. We serve because no one should be left alone when the world turns against them. We believe that courage, skill and compassion can fix what’s broken, that if we push harder, climb higher, stay longer, the story will end the way it’s supposed to.

But sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes the system fails.
Sometimes leadership falters.
Sometimes the politics drown the purpose.
Sometimes the world you vowed to protect feels unrecognizable and the uniform that once felt like armor starts to feel like a weight.
Sometimes we do everything right and still lose.

When the Armor Grows Heavy

Search and rescue demands everything. Your time, your peace, your belief that effort always equals outcome. You give those things willingly because service feels sacred, but what happens when that faith is shaken? When betrayal or indifference creep into the spaces where duty once lived? When your hands are still calloused from the last mission and yet you can’t bring yourself to answer the next call?

That’s the moment every rescuer dreads. Not the edge of the cliff, not the storm’s fury, but the quiet erosion of why we do this.

For those of us who serve, the hardest act of courage isn’t charging into the storm. It’s knowing when to stop, when to set down the pack, when to take off the armor, when to admit that even light bearers can get lost in the dark.

The truth is that you can’t pour from an empty vessel or heal the world with shaking hands. You’ve seen too much, carried too much and held faith for others long after your own began to fade and still, you show up. That alone is proof of grace, but showing up must sometimes mean showing up for yourself. Sometimes, showing up means letting go.

A friend of mine, a SAR veteran of over two decades, recently admitted how much the commitment has cost him. In the last year his marriage fell apart under the strain. His work, once a source of purpose, has become another source of stress. His life is like a tattered and frayed flag, trying to fight gale force winds.

I’ve known him for almost a decade. He’s been a steadfast advisor, a voice of wisdom and a living example of what search and rescue can represent at its best, but even the strongest armor wears down. He told me he had nearly walked away.

The Extra Minute

We tell others to #TakeTheExtraMinute to plan ahead, to make mindful choices, to stay safe, but how often do we offer ourselves that same grace?

Rest, for a rescuer, isn’t idleness. It’s reclamation. Taking the extra minute to rest isn’t laziness. It’s maintenance.

It’s standing at the edge of the storm you’ve weathered for years and saying, “not today”. It’s facing the cliff of burnout and knowing that you’re not ready to go. It’s walking a trail without a radio on your hip, remembering that you exist outside the mission. It’s lighting a candle not for a subject lost, but for a piece of yourself that’s still missing. It’s remembering that the calling was never about perfection. It was about compassion, which was never meant to be a one-way street. It’s recognizing that the person who needs rescuing might, occasionally, be you.

Rest doesn’t mean giving up. It means reclaiming the strength to keep going, with purpose, with heart, with boundaries intact. Your commitment to the mission does not obligate you to sacrifice everything else that makes your life worth living.

I told my friend that if the search and rescue community lost him, it would be a tragedy, but the greater tragedy is what will happen if he sacrifices himself to stay. We, search and rescue, as a community, are the absolute worst when it comes to taking the extra minute for ourselves. There is always another call, another mission, another person in distress and like a moth to a flame, we return, risking burnout. The hardest thing that any first responder does is embrace their own needs.

Maybe taking the extra minute means declining the next call. Maybe it means telling a teammate you’re not okay, talking to someone outside the team or stepping out of a leadership role before resentment replaces the purpose that brought you there. Maybe it means admitting that you need help before the people around you have to ask why you’ve changed.

When the World Is Upside-Down

The world doesn’t make this easy. Life is unfair. The good doesn’t always win. Sometimes, leadership fails you. Sometimes, those you trust most walk away first, but that doesn’t make your calling false. It just makes your calling real.

Even the strongest hearts can fracture under the weight of too many names, too many losses, too many “what ifs”, but in those fractures light finds new ways to shine through. Showing up must sometimes mean showing up for yourself.

Maybe that’s the lesson of the Paladin’s path, not that duty means breaking yourself to serve others, but that self-healing is part of the service. Another friend of mine, also in search and rescue, a retired marine, told me once that being a Paladin does not require you to destroy evil. It doesn’t even require that you defeat it. He told me that all we have to do is oppose evil, stalemate it, until the rest of the team catches up.

The Quiet Faith

Search and rescue, at its core, isn’t about heroics. It’s about faith, the quiet, persistent kind that endures when nothing else makes sense.

Faith that compassion still matters, faith that effort is still worth something, even when it’s unseen, faith that one act of courage in the dark can ripple further than you’ll ever know.

Sometimes that faith has to be rebuilt from scratch. That’s okay. Maybe you walk away for a while. Maybe you stay, but change how you serve. Maybe you start to heal before you go back out again. Whatever it looks like, it’s still service.

Showing up for humanity doesn’t always mean hiking into the cold. Sometimes it means sitting in stillness and forgiving yourself for being human.

The Return

When a Paladin heals, they don’t come back the same. The armor doesn’t shine like it once did, but it fits better. The faith is quieter, steadier, more honest. The mission is no longer about saving everyone. It’s about showing up when you can, with love that’s real and endurance that’s earned.

That’s how light survives in a broken world. Not in perfection, but in persistence. Not in triumph, but in the quiet stubborn choice to keep caring anyway.

That’s what taking the extra minute really means.

It’s not a pause in the mission. It’s part of the mission, because the world still needs you, but it needs you whole.

So if you find yourself standing on the edge of burnout, betrayal or exhaustion, stop. Breathe. Lay down the armor for a while. The world will still need you when you’re ready and when you rise again, it will be with the kind of strength that no storm can take from you.

#TakeTheExtraMinute to Rest

To breathe.
To rebuild.
To remember why you serve, because even when the world is upside-down, the true north of a rescuer’s heart never disappears. It just waits. Patiently. Quietly. It waits for you to find it again.

Posted in Holidays, Search and Rescue | Tagged community service, compassion, emergency response, first responders, National First Responds Day, Paladin, psychological first aid, search and rescue, TakeTheExtraMinute | Leave a comment

Bologna: The Meat That Sounds Like a Lie

Posted on 2026-10-24 by The Narrator

There are foods we celebrate because they represent the pinnacle of human culinary achievement. There is chocolate. There is pizza. There is a perfectly cooked steak.

Then there is bologna, the meat that looks like a giant pink hockey puck. The lunch meat that has inspired generations of school children to question its origins, composition and basic right to exist. The food whose very name sounds like something a politician says when they don’t want to answer a question.

Baloney.

Actually, that’s not a bad place to start.

October 24 is National Bologna Day and I can’t let it sneak out the door without being called out, so let’s take a closer look at this humble deli counter staple, its surprisingly sophisticated ancestry, its international relatives and the uncomfortable question of what, exactly, we’re putting between two slices of bread.

First, Let’s Get Our Baloney Straight

Bologna is pronounced baloney, not bo-LOAN-ya, despite what the spelling might suggest. The name comes from Bologna, Italy, a city with a long culinary tradition and a considerably better reputation for food than the stuff occupying that lonely corner of your refrigerator.

American bologna is a cooked sausage made from finely ground meat, commonly beef, pork or a combination. Poultry versions are available, too. The meat is ground, blended with fat, seasonings and other ingredients, then processed into a smooth mixture and cooked, sometimes with smoking as part of the process.

The result is a uniform, sliceable sausage with a mild, savory flavor. By uniform, I mean remarkably uniform.

You could slice a piece of bologna, hold it up to the light and struggle to identify anything that once had a recognizable relationship with an animal. It is meat that has completed its journey from livestock to lunch with all the identifying characteristics of a witness entering a protection program.

That smooth texture isn’t an accident. It’s the result of food processing techniques designed to produce a consistent, stable, convenient product, which is a perfectly reasonable engineering achievement. It’s also how you end up with meat that looks like it was designed by someone who had only heard rumors about sandwiches.

An Italian Family with Better Credentials

Here’s where bologna deserves a little respect. Its culinary inspiration is mortadella, a traditional Italian sausage originating in Bologna. Before anyone starts making jokes, traditional mortadella is a legitimate culinary specialty with a history stretching back centuries.

Mortadella is traditionally made primarily from finely ground pork with distinctive cubes of pork fat distributed throughout. Depending on the recipe, it may include black pepper, spices, myrtle berries or pistachios.

That’s right, the Italian version has pistachios.

American bologna looks like it was designed to survive a school lunchbox. Mortadella looks like it might arrive on a wooden board at a restaurant where the waiter explains the provenance of the olive oil.

Both are cooked sausages and both have their place, but they’re not identical and treating them as interchangeable is a little like comparing a frozen pizza with a Neapolitan pie and concluding that Italy has some explaining to do.

American bologna is a simpler, smoother relative of the Italian tradition. Mortadella’s visible fat cubes and more distinctive seasoning give it a character of its own.

So the next time someone mocks bologna, remember that its Italian cousin has been enjoying a much more distinguished social life.

Perhaps bologna doesn’t need a rebrand. Perhaps it needs better public relations.

Bologna has a Passport

One of the more interesting things about bologna is that the basic idea of a finely ground, cooked sausage appears in different forms around the world. The names change, the seasonings change, the cultural standing changes. Apparently, the sausage itself is not responsible for its reputation.

Germany: Fleischwurst and Lyoner

Germany takes sausage seriously. The country has a vast sausage tradition and varieties such as Fleischwurst and Lyoner occupy some of the same culinary territory as bologna.

These smooth, cooked sausages are eaten cold, sliced into sandwiches or used in salads. A traditional Wurstsalat, or sausage salad, can combine sliced sausage with cheese, onions, pickles and a tangy vinegar dressing.

That’s a considerable promotion from being the thing your parents put on white bread when the grocery budget was having a difficult week.

Eastern Europe: Parizer

In parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, sausage varieties known as Parizer or similar regional names are popular sandwich and breakfast foods.

The name is associated with Paris, although the sausage itself belongs to a broader European tradition of cooked, finely ground meats. It can be served in sandwiches, eaten cold or fried in a pan.

Fried bologna, you say?

Suddenly, we’re no longer talking about a desperate lunch. We’re discussing international culinary diplomacy.

Southern Africa: Polony

In South Africa and other parts of southern Africa, polony is an affordable, widely available processed meat used in sandwiches, school lunches and street food. Like American bologna, it offers convenience and a mild flavor at a relatively accessible price.

Its popularity illustrates something important. Inexpensive foods can play a meaningful role in people’s daily lives. Not everyone has the time, money or kitchen facilities to prepare elaborate meals. Sometimes lunch needs to be affordable, filling and ready before the morning school bell rings.

Australia: Devon and Fritz

Australia has its own regional vocabulary for similar luncheon meats. In many parts of the country, the product is known as Devon, while South Australians may call a related variety Fritz.

This creates an interesting problem for American travelers. You can fly halfway around the world, order what you think is a familiar lunch and discover that the meat has a different name but the same suspiciously perfect geometry.

Australia has given this sausage several regional identities. Somewhere, a bologna slice is probably applying for citizenship. At least the sandwich knows where it stands.

So, What Exactly is in Bologna?

Let’s address the question that has fueled playground rumors for generations. The answer is less scandalous than the jokes suggest. Bologna is not a mystery meat made of swept up factory floor scraps, random slaughterhouse waste or Jimmy Hoffa. Bologna is made from actual meat, processed into a remarkably uniform product. The ingredients may be less glamorous than a prime rib roast, but they aren’t a culinary conspiracy.

Bologna can be made from beef, pork or poultry, depending on the product. Commercial recipes may use different cuts and meat trimmings, along with fat, salt, spices, water and other permitted ingredients.

The mixture is finely ground and emulsified, meaning fat and water are dispersed throughout the meat mixture to create a consistent texture. The mixture is stuffed into a casing and cooked. Some varieties are also smoked.

Curing ingredients such as sodium nitrite may also be used. Nitrite helps preserve cured meats, contributes to their characteristic color and inhibits the growth of dangerous bacteria, including the organism responsible for botulism.

These ingredients are regulated and their presence isn’t evidence of some secret industrial conspiracy. They’re part of a food production process developed to make the product consistent and safe.

The important distinction is that highly processed doesn’t mean fake. Bologna is real food made from real meat. Its smooth texture doesn’t mean someone ground up a mysterious assortment of anatomical leftovers and hoped nobody would ask questions. Although, admittedly, the texture doesn’t do the public relations department any favors.

The Nutritional Elephant in the Lunchbox

Now, for the less entertaining part. Bologna is a processed meat and many varieties are high in sodium and contain substantial amounts of saturated fat. The exact nutritional profile depends on the brand, ingredients and serving size, so checking the label is more useful than assuming every slice is nutritionally identical.

Bologna also provides protein. It isn’t devoid of nutritional value and processing doesn’t automatically strip meat of every useful nutrient, but there’s a reason nutrition experts recommend limiting processed meat.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classifies processed meat as carcinogenic to humans based on sufficient evidence that its consumption causes colorectal cancer. In the studies reviewed, eating 50 grams of processed meat daily was associated with an approximately 18% increase in relative colorectal cancer risk.

That is a relative increase, not an 18 percentage point increase in your absolute chance of developing cancer. The finding concerns habitual consumption, not the consequences of eating one sandwich. The practical lesson is straightforward. Making processed meat a regular dietary staple is worth reconsidering.

Bologna doesn’t need to be banished from the refrigerator under a court order, but perhaps it shouldn’t be the centerpiece of lunch five days a week, either. If you enjoy it, consider eating it less frequently, choosing options with less sodium or saturated fat and mixing things up with other fillings.

Roasted turkey, leftover chicken, eggs, tuna, hummus and bean based spreads can all make satisfying sandwiches. They offer different nutritional advantages and preparing some of them yourself can help you control the ingredients.

You don’t have to abandon convenience. You just have to acknowledge that a sandwich can contain something other than a pink circle.

In Defense of the Fried Bologna Sandwich

For all the jokes, bologna has earned its place in American food culture. It has fed generations of schoolchildren, provided inexpensive lunches for workers and occupied countless refrigerators. It is familiar, affordable and versatile. For many people, a fried bologna sandwich isn’t merely lunch. It’s a small, edible piece of childhood.

There’s something to be said for that. Food isn’t just a collection of nutrients. It’s also memory, culture, comfort and the things we share with other people. A perfect diet on paper doesn’t account for everything that makes eating meaningful.

That doesn’t mean nostalgia should overrule nutritional science. It means we can recognize both. We can acknowledge the health concerns without treating people who enjoy bologna as culinary criminals. We can appreciate the ingenuity of food processing without pretending every processed food belongs in a health food advertisement. We can laugh at a meat that has spent decades being mistaken for the punchline of a joke.

Happy National Bologna Day

So, on October 24, let’s raise a sandwich to bologna, the humble sausage that crossed an ocean, acquired an American identity, developed a reputation for questionable origins and somehow survived generations of schoolyard ridicule.

Its Italian cousin has pistachios. Its German relatives have salads named after them. Its Australian cousins have multiple identities. Bologna itself has endured more insults than a politician at a town hall.

It may not be the pinnacle of culinary achievement, it may not be the first thing a nutritionist recommends, it probably won’t be winning any beauty contests unless the judges are particularly fond of uniform circles, but it has fed people, brought comfort and earned a place in food history.

You don’t have to evict bologna from your refrigerator. Just consider giving it a little less real estate. Try roasted turkey, chicken, eggs, hummus or beans. Your sandwich will survive the transition. Your childhood memories will remain intact. And bologna can continue its distinguished career as the meat that sounds like something your uncle made up. After all, October 24 is National Bologna Day.

We came here to celebrate, educate and question several decades of questionable lunch decisions, not to confiscate anybody’s sandwich.

And if anyone asks whether bologna is good for you? Well, that’s a load of baloney.

Posted in Culture | Tagged bologna, cancer, devon, fleischwurst, food, fritz, health, history, lunch, lyoner, mortadella, National Bologna Day, nutrition, October 24, parizer, polony, sausage, science, World Health Organization | Leave a comment

The AI Gold Rush: What Happens When Everyone Strikes the Same Claim?

Posted on 2026-10-20 by The Narrator

I hear a lot of people talk about AI. It is constant at work. My friends are fascinated by it. I hear people talking about it in line at the grocery store and at social events. It is on the news nightly. AI is no longer a curiosity or a passing fad. It has become a force of nature, an inseparable part of our lives.

Financial analyst David Gardner likes to talk about the “snap test”. If you snap your fingers and a company, an industry or even just a product disappears, will anyone notice?

With AI, the answer is yes, absolutely! The whole world will notice. It will be disruptive. Industries will struggle, productivity will take a hit and entire workflows will grind to a halt. Deepfakes will disappear, too, but that’s okay. We can live with that last one.

Something else interesting will happen. People who are not quite experts in their fields, but use AI to pass themselves off as experts, will be exposed. The reports will stop appearing. The presentations will stop materializing. The code will stop writing itself. The confident answers will go silent. As Warren Buffett famously observed, you only discover who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out.

AI may eventually provide one of the more interesting demonstrations of that principle.

Over the past decade, AI has exploded from a specialized technology into a commercial juggernaut. It touches nearly everything we do and, ever so slowly, it is becoming part of everything we touch. Like an invasive species, it is spreading into environments that were not necessarily prepared for it.

Like any other gold rush, everyone is lining up to stake their own claim.

The Race to Keep Up

Think about it. If you manufacture widgets and all your competitors are ramping up production, you have to run faster just to stay in the same place.

If you do not build factories and expand assembly lines, your market share shrinks. Your competitors gain an advantage, your costs become less competitive and eventually you risk becoming obsolete.

So you build factories, too. You expand capacity, hire workers, borrow money and increase production. You do all of this while privately acknowledging that nobody needs five widgets when one will do. The problem is that you can not afford to sit still. Your competitors are expanding and if you do not keep up, they will eat your lunch.

Multiply this decision across an entire industry and you get a race in which everyone is running faster simply to avoid falling behind.

Eventually, the factories are built. The production lines are humming. The warehouses are full. There is just one problem. Customers have not multiplied at the same rate as the industry’s capacity.

The industry has overproduced. There are too many widgets chasing too few buyers. Prices fall. Profit margins disappear. Companies that borrowed heavily to expand discover that their shiny new factories are liabilities rather than competitive advantages. No one ever got fired for successfully keeping up, but once everyone has raced to the top, the industry may find itself racing to the bottom.

This is one of the recurring patterns of an economic boom. Demand attracts investment. Investment creates capacity. Competition drives prices down. Eventually, the market has to reconcile the expectations that justified all that investment with the money customers are actually willing to spend.

Even when the technology is useful, the investment can still be excessive.

COVID-19: A Lesson in Extraordinary Demand

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us a powerful lesson in what happens when extraordinary circumstances create extraordinary demand.

E-commerce exploded, video conferencing exploded, telehealth expanded, pharmaceutical companies raced to develop vaccines, home delivery services boomed, people bought exercise equipment because gyms were closed and their living rooms had become their offices, restaurants and fitness centers.

Companies that could satisfy these sudden needs became market darlings. Investors priced in years of growth, sometimes as though the extraordinary conditions of the pandemic would continue indefinitely. Then the world changed again.

People returned to offices, gyms and restaurants. Some pandemic era habits stuck, others faded. Many businesses survived, but the expectations baked into their stock prices did not.

Look at Teladoc, Moderna, Zoom and Peloton. These were pandemic-era darlings, companies that investors once believed could do little wrong. Their stock prices soared as people rushed to embrace the services they offered, then came the hangover.

Measured from their respective peaks, these companies have suffered enormous stock-price declines, often north of 90%. The underlying lesson is unmistakable: investors can get carried away when a business experiences an extraordinary surge in demand. After a $1000 investment at market’s peak, most were lucky to walk away with less than a hundred dollars of their hard earned cash remaining.

Zoom did not become useless when people returned to their offices. Moderna did not suddenly forget how to develop vaccines. Peloton did not stop making exercise equipment. Teladoc did not cease providing telehealth services. What changed was the expectation of how much these companies would grow and how much investors should be willing to pay for that growth.

The pandemic did not eliminate demand for these products. It changed the assumptions investors had made about how much demand there would be.

That distinction matters because it defines a lens through which many investors forget to look.

The Dot-Com Boom: We Have Seen This Movie Before

If you want an earlier example of this phenomenon, look at the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

The internet was real. Its potential was enormous. It changed commerce, communication, entertainment and nearly every other aspect of modern life. Investors understood that something important was happening. Unfortunately, many concluded that virtually any company associated with the internet was destined to make a fortune.

Money poured into online retailers, search engines, internet service providers, telecommunications companies and the infrastructure required to connect everyone to everything.

Companies laid fiberoptic cable, built networks and expanded capacity in anticipation of demand. Entrepreneurs launched online businesses with ambitious projections and business models that often relied on the assumption that profitability would take care of itself later, sometimes much later.

The internet infrastructure was useful. The market’s appetite for internet related investments was not always rational. When the bubble burst in March 2000, companies failed, investors lost fortunes and enormous amounts of capital evaporated. Some infrastructure was left underused. Other infrastructure became the foundation for the next generation of internet businesses.

Remember Yahoo? AOL? AltaVista? Infoseek? Webvan? Pets.com? Compaq? 3dfx? Some of these names survive in corporate history. Others are remembered mainly by people who were around when they mattered. Their businesses differed considerably, but they shared a place in the story of a technology boom that produced both genuine innovation and spectacular failures.

The median age in the United States is 39.4. Think about what that means. Someone who is 39 today was around 13 when the dot-com bubble burst. For a substantial portion of today’s workforce, the crash is something they might have studied in a business class, not something they experienced as working professionals.

The giants of the 1990s are, for the most part, footnotes in the history of technology. Their successors inherited the internet they helped create, often without inheriting their business models, their market positions or their investors’ (lost) fortunes.

Take AOL. At its peak, it was a gateway to the internet for millions of Americans. In 1997 more than half of all internet users in the United States were on AOL. It sent floppy disks and, later, CDs through the mail to entice people to sign up. At one point, those promotional discs seemed almost as ubiquitous as junk mail.

AOL became synonymous with getting online. Its familiar greeting, “You’ve Got Mail,” was practically a cultural institution. It even became a movie.

Today AOL’s dial-up internet service is gone. It officially shut down on September 30, 2025. AOL Mail and other select services remain available, but the company no longer occupies anything resembling its former position as a dominant gateway to the internet. AOL did not disappear entirely. It simply stopped being the gateway through which much of the internet passed.

That change is the more interesting lesson. A company can survive while losing the role that once made it indispensable. The technology it helped popularize can flourish even as its original champion fades into the background.

Google, Amazon, PayPal, Salesforce and Nvidia emerged as important players in the broader technological transformation, although each followed a different path and not all were direct replacements for the dot-com companies that came before them.

The companies that built the future were not always the companies investors expected to own it.

The AI Gold Rush

Why is this history important? Because AI today feels as though it could be following a similar route.

In a past article I explored the parallels between AI infrastructure and the great railroad booms. Building infrastructure for a transformative technology can create enormous long term value, but that does not guarantee that every company financing the construction will survive long enough to collect the profits.

Today the AI race extends from chip designers and data center operators to cloud providers, model developers and companies building applications on top of those models. The spending is extraordinary. Advanced AI requires specialized chips, enormous computing capacity, electricity, cooling systems, engineering talent and continuing research. The infrastructure must be built before all the anticipated demand can be served and the equipment can become outdated long before the financing is paid off.

The business opportunity is equally extraordinary. Companies are racing to build better models, offer faster responses, lower costs and attract customers before their competitors do, yet the economics are not the same for everyone.

A company that owns a profitable cloud business can finance AI investment from its existing operations. A startup developing a frontier model may have to raise enormous sums of money before its revenue can support its ambitions. A data center operator may have billions of dollars tied up in facilities that depend on continued demand from a relatively small number of customers. These businesses all benefit from AI growth, but they do not have the same risk profile and this is where the gold rush analogy becomes an echo of the past. Mark Twain noted that history rarely repeats itself, but it does rhyme.

During a gold rush, the person selling shovels can make money whether or not the people buying them strike gold. The same can be true of the companies supplying chips, networking equipment, electricity and computing infrastructure, but even the shovel seller can get into trouble if too many competitors enter the business, customers stop expanding or the price of the product falls below the cost of making it.

No business model is immune to arithmetic.

The King has a Problem

AI is king, but the king harbors a deep secret. Anyone with sufficient funding and technical expertise can attempt to build an AI system. The competition has become fierce. New models appear, existing models improve and companies that once seemed to have an insurmountable lead discover that their competitors are catching up.

Meanwhile, the costs of competing at the frontier are enormous. Consider some of the reported 2025 financial figures. OpenAI generated approximately $13.1 billion in revenue while recording an operating loss of roughly $20.9 billion. Anthropic generated approximately $4.6 billion in revenue and reported operating losses exceeding $8 billion. xAI generated approximately $3.2 billion in revenue while losing roughly $6.4 billion.

These figures come from reported financial disclosures and reporting about private company finances, which require care because operating losses, net losses and cash expenditures are not interchangeable. Anthropic’s reported net loss, for example, was much larger because of substantial accounting charges associated with financial instruments, but its operating losses were also significant.

The precise accounting distinctions matter. They do not make the underlying question go away. These companies are spending extraordinary sums to develop, train, operate and improve AI systems. Their revenues are growing, in some cases spectacularly, but so are their costs.

Alphabet is in a different position. It has established businesses that generate substantial revenue and can help finance its AI ambitions. That gives it a significant advantage over companies that depend more heavily on outside investment, but even for a company with deep pockets, AI is a massive investment whose ultimate returns must justify the expenditure. The fact that a company can afford a moonshot does not guarantee that the moonshot will pay off.

The question then drifts from whether AI companies can attract customers. We know they clearly can. It is whether they can generate enough durable revenue to justify the cost of building, operating and continually improving their systems. This part of the formula becomes a much more complicated variable in the equation.

Everyone Wants a Piece of the Pie

There is another problem. AI is not one market with one business model. Some companies sell subscriptions. Others sell access to models through application programming interfaces. Some bundle AI into products customers already pay for. Others make money from advertising, cloud computing, consulting or enterprise contracts.

Many also offer free access. That one point matters more than others because the free version of an AI product can satisfy a surprising number of everyday needs. People ask questions, summarize documents, generate images, experiment with recipes and produce amusing pictures of themselves, in an identical pose, in places they have never visited.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. I use AI, too, both professionally and personally. The technology is useful, fascinating and, at times, astonishing, but a person who occasionally generates a funny image is not necessarily a customer willing to pay a substantial monthly subscription. A business that experiments with AI is not necessarily a business that will commit millions of dollars to use it. A user who loves a free service may discover that love has a surprisingly low price when the service introduces a paid tier.

The challenge for AI companies is converting usage into sustainable economics. Free access can be a brilliant way to attract users, build habits and establish a market. It can also be an expensive way to discover that users love the product, but do not love it enough to pay for what it costs to operate.

Competition makes the problem more complicated. If several companies offer increasingly capable models, customers have less reason to remain loyal to any one provider. If one company raises prices, another may undercut it. If a competitor releases a model that performs nearly as well at a fraction of the cost, customers may switch. The technology improves, but the price of using it may fall.

That is wonderful for consumers. It can be brutal for investors who paid premium valuations on the assumption that today’s leaders would retain their advantages and capture extraordinary profits for years to come.

The market is not necessarily saturated with demand for AI. It may, however, be saturated with companies trying to capture that demand, all investing heavily in products that increasingly compete on price and performance.

The Market Beneath the Headlines

If you look at the S&P 500, you might conclude that everything is just fine. A capitalization weighted index can remain near a record high even when the typical stock is struggling. A handful of enormous companies can carry the index while much of the broader market falls behind.

In a market analysis published in October 2026, the S&P 500 was within approximately 1% of its high while the median stock sat about 17% below its own 52 week high. Roughly two in five stocks had fallen more than 20% from their high, a decline commonly used as the threshold for bear market territory.

These measurements are time sensitive snapshots, not permanent conditions, but they illustrate the important point that the index does not tell the whole story. The market can appear healthy while a significant portion of its individual stocks struggles. The biggest winners can conceal weakness elsewhere.

When so much enthusiasm is concentrated in companies associated with a single transformative technology, it is worth asking what happens if expectations change. Tariffs, transportation costs, inflation and other economic pressures can weigh on businesses. AI investment can support the companies selling chips, computing capacity and infrastructure, even while other industries face rising costs and uncertain demand.

Investment enthusiasm is not the same thing as economic prosperity and rising stock prices are not proof that every business model is sound. Eventually, investors have to decide which companies can turn today’s spending into tomorrow’s profits.

What Happens When the Music Stops?

Nothing goes up forever. All booms eventually have to confront reality, although not every boom ends in a spectacular crash.

A business can survive years of losses if it has sufficient capital, credible prospects and investors willing to finance its growth. A company can also be strategically important without being profitable in its current form. None of this is inherently irrational. The danger appears when expectations become disconnected from what the business can reasonably deliver.

Investors may begin to demand evidence of returns rather than promises of future dominance. Lenders may become more cautious. Customers may discover that they can accomplish much of what they need with cheaper alternatives. Companies may decide that they have built enough capacity for the moment.

When that happens, projects get delayed, expansion plans are revised, hiring slows, financing becomes more expensive. Companies that depend on a continuous flow of new capital become vulnerable.

The weakest businesses may fail. Others may be acquired. Some will cut costs, change their products or discover that their original business model never made much sense in the first place. The market will not necessarily collapse in one spectacular event. It may simply become harder to raise money, harder to grow revenue and harder to justify the prices investors once paid. Some of the most celebrated companies of the boom may turn out to be much less important than they appeared.

The AI industry is not immune to this cycle. In fact, the enormous cost of competing at the frontier makes the question of sustainable economics especially important. The companies building AI may be laying the foundations of a technological revolution, but if too many companies build too much capacity, spend too aggressively and compete away their margins, the result could be a painful shakeout.

Some companies will fail. Others will consolidate, change direction or discover that their most valuable asset is not the model they built, but the customers, infrastructure or expertise they accumulated along the way. New leaders will emerge from the rubble.

The Future Belongs to the Survivors

I do not want to be a doomsayer. I do not want to predict the fall of AI or forecast a market crash. The technology is too important, the applications too varied and the future too uncertain for that kind of a claim, but we have been here before.

Railroads transformed transportation. The internet transformed communication and commerce. The companies that built those industries did not all survive and the investors who backed them did not all prosper.

AI will follow its own path, but some of the same forces that crushed gold rushes are already visible. Competition encourages overinvestment. Overinvestment creates excess capacity. Excess capacity puts pressure on prices. Falling prices force companies to find efficiencies, differentiate their products or leave the market.

Venture capital is not an endless supply of free money. Investors eventually want a return. Even the most patient investor has limits and even the most compelling vision has to survive contact with a balance sheet. Some AI companies will fail. Others will find profitable niches. Some will be acquired by larger companies with the resources to keep their technology alive. A few may become dominant businesses for decades. Some companies that barely register today may become indispensable, while the giants that dominate today’s headlines will become footnotes in tomorrow’s history books.

AI itself is not going away. We have already integrated it into too many products, workflows and expectations for the entire technology to simply vanish. Even if investment falls sharply, the knowledge, infrastructure and capabilities already created will remain.

The more likely transformation is that AI becomes cheaper, more accessible and less remarkable. What seems extraordinary today may eventually become an ordinary feature of software, much as internet connectivity became a basic expectation rather than a premium service.

That would be a success for the technology, even if it disappoints some of the people who invested in it. The gold rush will not end because there is no gold. It will end when the easy money disappears, the economics change and the survivors discover what their businesses are actually worth.

The real question is who will still be standing when the dust settles.

Posted in Economy, Investing, Money, Technology | Tagged AI, bear market, boom, bust, COVID, data center, David Gardner, Dot-Com, freemium, gold rush, infrastructure, investing, Mark Twain, overinvestment, pandemic, revenue, snap test, stock market, Warren Buffett | Leave a comment

Why Are the Oceans Salty? Because People Have Been Peeing for 10,000 Years, Obviously.

Posted on 2026-10-16 by The Narrator

My wife and I were sitting in a restaurant when the kid at the next table asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Why are the oceans salty?”

It’s a good question. It’s the kind of question that has occupied geologists, oceanographers, chemists and other people who get genuinely excited about rocks and water for considerably longer than anyone has occupied a restaurant booth. To be honest, I wanted to hear the answer, too.

The child’s father didn’t hesitate. “Because people have been peeing for ten thousand years and it’s all been running downhill.”

That’s the answer that makes you squirt whatever you were drinking out of your nose.

I definitely have questions. Not about the ocean. We have actual scientists for that. I have questions about the man who just delivered that answer with the confidence of someone explaining the quadratic equation to a room full of Nobel laureates.

Was it a desperate attempt to get his kid to be quiet and focus on his fries? Was it an honest admission of ignorance disguised as a plumbing metaphor? Was he testing a new theory of oceanography and hoping the peer review process would be distracted by the appetizers? Or, and this is the possibility that concerns me most, did he actually believe it?

Because somewhere between “I don’t know” and “the Earth is a giant port-a-potty”, we seem to have misplaced our collective appreciation for the difference between an answer and a sentence that happens to contain nouns and verbs.

Naturally, I had to investigate. For science. And because I couldn’t get out of my head the image of eight billion people standing on the continental divide, peeing downhill.

First, Let’s Talk About the Plumbing

The basic theory seems straightforward enough.

Humanity urinates. Gravity does its thing. Water flows downhill. Eventually, all the pee arrives in the ocean, where it accumulates until the planet’s largest bodies of water achieve their distinctive salty flavor.

It’s an elegant theory, provided you ignore geology, chemistry, hydrology, the water cycle and the inconvenient fact that the human race has not been around nearly long enough to explain the age of the oceans.

Let’s be generous in our assumptions. Let’s assume our father of the year is correct about the general mechanism and investigate whether the numbers support his hypothesis.

First, we need to know how salty urine actually is.

The Science of Wee

Human urine contains water, dissolved minerals, waste products and various other substances your kidneys have decided your body would prefer not to keep. Its composition varies with diet, hydration, health and a number of other factors, normally ranging from 2 parts per thousand to 9 parts per thousand. For the sake of argument, let’s assign our hypothetical urine a dissolved salt concentration of 5 grams per liter. That’s a deliberately simplified assumption, not a universal measurement of human urine.

Seawater, by comparison, contains roughly 35 grams of dissolved salts per liter. Our hypothetical urine is therefore much less concentrated in dissolved salts than the ocean.

Already, Houston, we have a problem.

If you fill an empty ocean basin with urine, you don’t get an ocean with normal ocean salinity. You get an enormous, faintly yellow, mildly concerning body of liquid with a dissolved salt concentration considerably below that of seawater.

And here’s another hiccup in the theory. You can keep peeing into the ocean until the cows come home. You can invite the cows to participate, too. You can recruit every mammal on the planet and establish a global initiative called Project Golden Shower.

The concentration won’t increase just because you add more liquid of the same concentration. Five grams of salt per liter times a billion liters is a lot of salt, but it’s still five grams per liter. Chemistry is annoyingly indifferent to enthusiasm.

So, technically, the father wasn’t just wrong about the timescale. His entire mechanism fails the basic arithmetic test.

Let’s not stop there. We still have oceans to fill.

How Much Pee Would It Take to Make an Ocean?

The world’s oceans contain approximately 1.335 billion cubic kilometers of water. That’s 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometers. I wrote the number out because scientific notation can make absurd quantities feel abstract. Adding all those zeros makes them feel absurd in a more personal way.

Let’s imagine emptying the ocean basins and refilling them with our hypothetical urine. To produce the same total mass of dissolved salt found in the oceans, we’d need approximately seven ocean volumes of urine at our assumed concentration of 5 grams per liter.

That’s about 9.35 billion cubic kilometers of urine. Seven oceans’ worth. Humanity has apparently been underperforming.

Of course, we can’t simply pour seven oceans of urine into the existing ocean and expect the salinity to reach 35 parts per thousand. We’d be diluting the very thing we’re trying to concentrate.

We’d have to collect all that urine, extract the dissolved salts and get rid of most of the water. Imagine the industrial infrastructure. The world’s largest desalination plants would look like your neighbor’s kids’ soapbox lemonade stand. We’d need a processing facility so enormous that the phrase “employee restroom” would take on a whole new meaning.

And then we’d need to evaporate approximately six-sevenths of our collected liquid to leave enough concentrated material to fill the ocean basins at the desired volume and salinity. We have now officially reached the point where a child’s question has become a planetary scale waste management proposal.

Let’s see how long the collection phase would take.

A Modest Proposal for the Next 2.3 Billion Years

Suppose eight billion people each produce approximately 1.4 liters of urine per day. That’s about 11.2 billion liters every day. It’s a staggering amount of pee, by any reasonable standard. Wastewater processing plant managers are cringing at the very thought.

At that rate, collecting the equivalent of seven oceans of urine would take roughly 2.3 billion years. Two. Point. Three. Billion. Years.

That’s long enough for continents to rearrange themselves, mountain ranges to rise and erode and entirely new forms of life to evolve, become dominant, invent plumbing and begin asking why the oceans are salty all over again.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to believe ten thousand years of human urination did the job? Ten thousand years is barely a rounding error on this particular timeline. It’s the scientific equivalent of arriving at work three seconds early and claiming you built the building before the next person arrives.

Given the father’s hypothetical proposal, we would need an unlimited supply of patience and a very large collection bucket and humanity would need to keep at it for hundreds of thousands of times longer than recorded civilization has existed.

That’s before we get to the part where urine isn’t actually a suitable substitute for the mineral composition of seawater.

At this point, I think we can safely retire the theory, unless the father was referring to an undocumented civilization of immortal giants with kidneys the size of military heavy lift cargo planes, in which case, I’ll ask to see the peer reviewed literature.

So, Why are the Oceans Salty?

Here’s where things get genuinely interesting, for a scientist, anyway.

Oceans didn’t become salty because the planet has been used as a communal urinal. They became salty through a combination of geological processes operating over immense periods of time.

Unlike our proposed alternative, these processes have the advantage of being real.

Rain is a Very Slow Rock Thief

Rainwater isn’t chemically pure. As it forms and falls through the atmosphere, it absorbs carbon dioxide, forming a weak acid called carbonic acid. When that rain hits rocks, it gradually reacts with their minerals, breaking them down and releasing dissolved ions.

Some of those ions include sodium and chloride, the familiar components of table salt. Others include calcium, magnesium, potassium and bicarbonate.

Streams and rivers carry these dissolved materials toward the sea. Each river contributes a little. Then another river contributes a little. Then another. Repeat this process for millions and billions of years and the ocean receives a truly impressive mineral delivery service.

It’s not particularly fast. Nobody is going to make a fortune by investing in a company that promises to dissolve the Rocky Mountains by Tuesday.

Given enough time, the process adds up. The Earth is very good at doing small things for an offensively long time.

The Sun Runs a Very Effective Water Recycling Program

Here’s the other half of the equation.

Water evaporates from the ocean, rises into the atmosphere, forms clouds and eventually returns to the surface as precipitation. What’s important is that when water evaporates, most of the dissolved salts stay behind. Evaporation doesn’t create salt. It concentrates the dissolved material already in the water.

The ocean is essentially running a natural separation process on a planetary scale. Water goes up. Most dissolved salts don’t. Rain then weathers more rock, rivers carry more dissolved minerals to the sea and the cycle continues.

It’s a little like boiling a pot of salty water until the water disappears and the salt remains, except the pot is the size of the Earth, the heat source is a star and the process has been running for geological ages.

However, the ocean isn’t simply getting saltier forever. There are processes that remove dissolved material, too.

Which brings us to the ocean’s underground plumbing.

The Ocean has a Geothermal Plumbing Problem

Beneath the waves, seawater circulates through cracks in the ocean floor and interacts with hot rock. At hydrothermal vents, heated water dissolves some minerals and triggers chemical reactions that can either add substances to seawater or remove them. Undersea volcanic activity also contributes materials to the marine environment.

The ocean floor is not just the bottom of a giant bathtub. It’s an active chemical interface between the water above and the planet below. Unlike the hypothetical urine theory, this explanation doesn’t require billions of years of humanity holding its collective bladder. It does, however, require a basic understanding of geology.

Apparently, we can’t have everything.

Why Doesn’t the Ocean Get Saltier Forever?

This is the question that makes the whole subject more interesting than it initially sounds.

If rivers continuously carry dissolved material into the sea, why hasn’t the ocean become so salty that it’s automatically brining all the fish in it? The answer is simple. The ocean is part of a dynamic churning system.

Minerals are removed through chemical reactions, interactions with seafloor rocks, incorporation into sediments and biological processes. Some materials become part of shells and skeletons. Others are buried or transformed through geological processes.

The balance varies across different substances and timescales. Ocean salinity has changed throughout Earth’s history and individual regions of the ocean can be considerably saltier or fresher than the global average.

The modern ocean has a broad, relatively stable average salinity because the processes adding dissolved material and the processes removing it operate together. Nature, as it turns out, has been managing the situation for quite a while. No committee meetings. No budget overruns. No press conference announcing the launch of the Global Urine Mitigation Initiative.

Just geology.

Wait. Why is Pee Salty, Anyway?

Before we leave our original theory behind, there’s one more question worth asking. If the oceans aren’t salty because of urine, why does urine contain salt in the first place?

The answer is that your kidneys are not tiny ocean making machines. They’re sophisticated filtration and regulation systems. Your body needs electrolytes, including sodium, chloride and potassium to regulate fluid balance, transmit nerve signals and make muscles contract. Your kidneys filter blood and then carefully reabsorb the water and substances your body needs. They also regulate how much sodium and other electrolytes leave in urine.

Most of the filtered sodium is reclaimed. The amount that ends up in urine depends on your body’s needs, your diet, hydration and other factors. Eat a lot of sodium and your kidneys may excrete more of it. Become dehydrated and your kidneys conserve water, producing more concentrated urine.

The result is a fluid that contains dissolved salts and plenty of other compounds, including urea. It’s a carefully managed waste product, not a concentrated sample of the Atlantic Ocean.

Your kidneys are maintaining the chemistry of your internal environment. They are not conducting a long term geological experiment with the goal of seasoning the planet.

They have enough to do.

The Real Question isn’t About Salt

Let’s return to the restaurant.

A kid asks a question. A parent supplies an answer. The answer is absurd, but it arrives without hesitation. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it was an attempt to end the conversation. Maybe the father simply didn’t know and didn’t want to admit it.

Any of those explanations are possible.

To be fair, nobody knows everything. Not even scientists. Especially not scientists, who spend much of their professional lives discovering how much they don’t know. Trust me. I live that life.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know.” There’s nothing wrong with guessing, provided you identify it as a guess. There’s even something valuable about making a ridiculous hypothesis and then testing it. That’s how you get from an interesting question to an interesting answer. Or discover you were wrong. I have a story for this, too.

The problem isn’t ignorance. Ignorance is the starting point of learning. The problem is treating confidence as a substitute for knowledge.

A child who asks why the ocean is salty has given an adult an opportunity. You can encourage curiosity. You can explain what you know. You can look it up together. You can discover that the answer is more complicated and fascinating than either of you expected. Or you can tell the kid that ten thousand years of human urination has turned the planet into a giant saltwater aquarium.

One of those approaches might produce a future geologist. The other might produce a future politician. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more concerning.

In the meantime, the oceans remain salty, the rivers keep carrying dissolved minerals downhill and the human race continues to produce urine at a truly astonishing rate.

If we ever discover that the father was right, I want credit for asking the obvious follow-up question: How big was the first guy?

Posted in Education, Science | Tagged biology, chemistry, geology, hydration, hydrology, nephrology, ocean, oceanography, pee, salt, science, water cycle | Leave a comment

No Charge for Rescue: We’re Here to Save Lives

Posted on 2026-10-12 by The Narrator

Survey a group of city dwellers about a backcountry rescue and you’ll probably hear some familiar answers.

“They were stupid.”
“They were negligent.”
“Send them a bill.”

It comes up again and again. Someone gets lost. Someone twists an ankle. Someone heads into the mountains without enough clothing, water, food, experience or perhaps just not enough good judgment.

When the rescue makes the news, somebody inevitably asks, “Who is going to pay for all this?”

It’s a reasonable question. Search and rescue can be expensive. There may be dozens of responders, vehicles, specialized equipment, aircraft, law enforcement, dispatchers, medical personnel and hours (or sometimes days) of work involved, but there is another question that matters a lot more.

What happens if someone is afraid to call for help because they think they can’t afford the rescue?

That question is one of the reasons search and rescue generally does not charge the person being rescued.

The Bill That Never Gets Sent

The perception that a backcountry rescue automatically comes with a four- or five-figure bill is surprisingly common and that perception can be dangerous.

A hiker rolls an ankle at 3 PM. The weather is good. They are uncomfortable, but maybe they can limp another mile or two. They decide to wait. The sun starts going down. The temperature drops. The terrain gets more difficult. That sprained ankle isn’t getting better. It’s actually getting worse from overuse.

What was a relatively straightforward daylight evacuation is becoming a nighttime operation. Now the subject is colder, more exhausted, dehydrated, potentially more injured and the rescuers are dealing with darkness, changing weather and a much harder environment.

The Mountain Rescue Association has been making essentially this argument for decades. Fear of being charged can delay a call for help and that delay can increase the danger to both the person in distress and the rescuers.

From personal experience, I can tell you that a 3 PM rescue is a lot easier than a 3 AM rescue. That isn’t just about convenience. It’s about safety, ease of access, temperatures.

Call early. If something has gone seriously wrong, don’t spend six hours trying to determine whether you can afford to be rescued. Call for help. You might save yourself a lot of pain. You might prevent a minor injury from becoming a major one. You might make the rescue substantially safer for the people coming to find you.

We Aren’t Coming to Judge You

There is another misconception about search and rescue that is begging to be retired.

We’re not coming to give you a lecture. We’re not going to rescue you, load you into the ambulance and then call your boss. We’re not going to call your friends and tell them what you did. We’re certainly not going to call your significant other and announce that the reason you’re spending the night on a mountain is because you thought hiking in flip-flops was a good idea.

You may see rescue stories on the news all summer long, but there’s an important detail people often miss. Those stories usually exist because somebody wanted the story told. Search and rescue’s default setting isn’t to run to the press and announce what happened to you.

Our job is much simpler. Find you. Stabilize you. Get you somewhere safe. Go home. You may have a one-in-a-million story. Actually, you probably do. No two rescues are alike. I’ve had two missions, four days apart, in the same place, looking for the same person, effectively staffed by the same responders and they were completely different missions. That’s one of the things that makes search so interesting. It is also one of the reasons we don’t pretend we can look at a rescue afterward and neatly divide the subject into categories like inexperienced, reckless or negligent.

Sometimes it was inexperience. Sometimes it was recklessness. Sometimes it was bad luck. Usually, it was some combination of all three. Add weather, terrain, equipment, companions, fatigue, navigation, a medical condition nobody knew about, the phase of the moon, possibly space aliens, if Smaug happened to be out looking for more treasure that day. That probably wouldn’t help either.

The point is that humans are complicated. So are emergencies. We’re not coming to conduct your trial. We’re coming to get you home.

So, is There a Charge?

Here’s where the answer gets a little less satisfying. I want to simply say, “No”. In many places, that is exactly the right answer. In my state, for example, backcountry search and rescue teams do not charge for their services. Our search and rescue organizations explicitly describe rescue as a public good and point to the danger of delaying a call because of fear of a bill.

The Mountain Rescue Association, likewise, maintains a longstanding position against charging subjects for the cost of their rescue. Its member teams have always performed rescues without charging the people they assist. The same is true for the National Association for Search and Rescue and for the National Cave Rescue Commission. All of these non-profits are looking to get distressed individuals to safety.

The problem is that the United States doesn’t have one national search and rescue billing policy. State law matters. Some states have laws that allow government agencies to seek reimbursement under specific circumstances, particularly when extraordinary resources are used or when someone’s intentional or reckless conduct meets particular legal requirements.

California, for example, permits certain counties to seek reimbursement when extraordinary rescue methods are required and the incident resulted from an intentional violation of law that led to a criminal conviction.

Utah takes a different approach, with a statewide Search and Rescue Assistance program that can reimburse counties for eligible rescue expenses. Its program also provides protection for participants except in circumstances involving reckless or intentional conduct.

New Hampshire takes perhaps the most publicized and widely misunderstood approach to rescue billing. Under state law, the Fish and Game Department is authorized to recover search and rescue costs if a person acts negligently or disregards public safety warnings. The state aggressively pursues reimbursement in high profile cases of clear negligence, which frequently makes national headlines and fuels the myth that every rescue comes with a bill. What gets left out of those news clips, however, is the state’s voluntary prevention mechanism, the Hike Safe card. For a nominal annual fee, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts can purchase a card that exempts them from reimbursing rescue costs if they accidentally run into trouble, barring intentional or criminal acts. Even in a state known for enforcing financial responsibility, the primary goal remains supporting the rescue system through preparation rather than penalizing people for making an honest mistake.

In other words, there are exceptions, but the idea that every time you need rescue you are going to receive a massive bill from the county is simply not how most volunteer backcountry SAR systems work. Even where cost recovery laws exist, that does not mean every rescued hiker is routinely billed. The details depend on the jurisdiction, the circumstances and the agency involved.

If you’re heading into the backcountry, learn the rules where you’re going. Even in states that have recovery laws, there may be an inexpensive permit that you can obtain which will cover rescue costs. Most importantly, don’t sit injured on a mountainside wondering whether you should call 911 because somebody on social media told you rescue costs $20,000.

Think of It Like the Fire Department

Here’s a simpler way to think about a rescue. If your house catches fire and you call the fire department, the firefighters don’t arrive with a credit card reader. “Before we put out the flames, will it be Visa or Mastercard?”

If you witness a crime and call the police, the officer doesn’t hand you an invoice for responding. These services are free to you and the entire community.

Search and rescue operates on much the same principle. We’re an emergency service. We don’t ask whether you deserve to be rescued. We ask what needs to happen to get you safe. That doesn’t mean the rest of the emergency response system is free and this distinction is important.

If we get you off the mountain with a broken leg, the leg is still broken when we reach the trailhead. Medical treatment is a separate matter. An ambulance may charge. A helicopter medical transport may charge. A hospital may charge. Your health insurance may or may not cover all of those costs.

Those are medical expenses. The rescue itself is a different thing.

For many areas search and rescue organizations specifically note that other resources brought into a rescue, such as ground or air ambulances, can have costs even when the search and rescue team’s services do not, so don’t confuse “no charge for rescue” with “nothing associated with this emergency can ever cost money”. That’s not what it means.

The Best Rescue is the One We Never Have to Run

There is an irony here. Search and rescue doesn’t actually want more rescues. We’re not thrill seeking adrenaline junkies with a hero complex. We want fewer rescues.

You may see us at a trailhead asking whether you checked the weather. We may ask whether you have enough water, whether you have extra layers, whether you brought a headlamp, whether someone knows where you’re going, whether you have the Ten Essentials.

That isn’t because we’re trying to keep you off the mountain. Quite the opposite. We want you to enjoy the outdoors as much as we do. We just want you to come home safe. To us rescue is important, but prevention is better. Every rescue prevented is one less night someone has to spend on a mountain, one less family waiting for a phone call, one less team of volunteers getting out of bed at 2 AM, one less responder exposed to cold, rockfall, lightning, avalanche, exhaustion or a dozen other hazards. And yes, one less night when the rest of us look like we spent it in a bar fight when we show up for our day jobs the following morning.

We like those quiet nights. So do our families.

We Pay It Back

Most SAR responders aren’t doing this because we think people deserve to be punished for making mistakes. We’re volunteers. We give our time. We train. We buy our own equipment. We get called away from dinner, holidays, family, sleep and work. We do it because somewhere in our own lives there’s a story.

Maybe somebody rescued us. Maybe somebody helped our family. Maybe somebody taught us what preparedness really means. Maybe we simply reached a point where we realized that if we have the ability to help another human being, we should.

So we pay it back and we pay it forward. That’s what “no charge for rescue” means to many of us. It doesn’t mean poor decisions don’t have consequences. They do. It doesn’t mean we don’t want outdoor enthusiasts to be prepared. We absolutely do. It doesn’t mean taxpayers, volunteers and communities aren’t carrying real costs. They are.

It means something more fundamental. Your life is worth saving whether or not you made every decision correctly.

When you’re cold, injured, lost, scared or simply in over your head, we don’t want you doing the math. We don’t want you wondering whether you’re going to get a bill. We don’t want you trying to crawl another five miles across broken terrain because you’re afraid that asking for help will bankrupt you.

We want you to call, because every minute matters. Every hour matters. Daylight matters. Weather matters. Sometimes the difference between a difficult rescue and a tragedy is nothing more complicated than someone deciding “I need help”.

Call. We’ll figure out the rest and if we can teach you something afterward, we’ll do that too, because lives matter. That’s why we’re here.

We’re here to save them.

Posted in Search and Rescue | Tagged California, emergency response, Mountain Rescue Association, National Association for Search and Rescue, National Cave Rescue Commission, New Hampshire, no charge for rescue, outdoor safety, preventative SAR, search and rescue, Utah | Leave a comment

The Two Elephants in the Room

Posted on 2026-10-08 by The Narrator

In response to my SMR article, I received a one word message from a reader: “Fusion?”

Okay. That’s fair.

When we talk about nuclear energy, there are really two elephants wandering around the room. One is fission, where we split heavy atomic nuclei apart. The other is fusion, where we force light atomic nuclei together. Both processes release an enormous amount of energy. After that, their family resemblance gets a little strained.

One important distinction is that the fission elephant already powers homes, but poops dangerous radioactive fuel. The fusion elephant will one day poop rainbows, but provides no useful electricity today.

Fission is the technology we figured out how to build first. Fusion is the one we have been promising ourselves we are almost ready for since before most of us were born and that’s important because fusion is simultaneously one of the most promising technologies humanity has ever attempted and one of the most botched examples of the phrase “we’re almost there”.

We’ve been almost there for decades. If this was a dissertation, the doctoral candidate would have been beaten and barred from academia for life. Yet, we still claim we’re getting closer and that might be true. Something interesting has happened recently and we may actually be getting there for a change.

First, though, let’s create some context around these terms.

The Original Nuclear Power Plants Were Stars

Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are not inventions. They are things the universe was doing long before humans showed up with laboratories and grant applications.

Fission can occur naturally in heavy radioactive elements. About 1.7 billion years ago, conditions in what is now Oklo, Gabon, were just right for natural nuclear reactors to operate underground. Uranium deposits there apparently achieved the necessary combination of uranium concentration, water and geology to sustain nuclear chain reactions for long periods.

Nature built a nuclear reactor long before humans figured out how to dress in animal skins. We just took a while to notice this amazing energy technology. It was 1938 when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann experimentally demonstrated that bombarding uranium could produce barium. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch then correctly explained what had happened and coined the term “nuclear fission”.

Four years later, Enrico Fermi and his team at the University of Chicago demonstrated the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction with Chicago Pile-1. It was not a commercial power plant. It was a pile of graphite and uranium underneath a football stadium. The nuclear age had officially arrived.

Three years after that, fission had also produced a weapon, because any time humanity finds something new and exciting, someone in the back of the room has to stand up and ask, “can we weaponize this?” We can debate the morality, necessity and consequences of those events in a different article.

Fusion followed a very different path. The universe had already been doing fusion for billions of years before anyone on this planet knew what was happening.

During the first few minutes after the Big Bang, nuclear reactions produced most of the universe’s hydrogen and helium, along with small amounts of lithium and beryllium. Later, stars took over the job, fusing lighter nuclei into heavier ones and releasing the energy that makes stars shine.

Arthur Eddington argued in the early twentieth century that the enormous energy output of stars had to come from subatomic processes. His 1926 work The Internal Constitution of the Stars became one of the landmarks in developing our understanding of stellar interiors.

The universe figured out fusion on its own. Humans merely decided that we should try it in a laboratory.

Fission is Easy. Fusion is Not.

Relatively speaking, fission is much easier to harness. A reactor has to arrange fissile material and control a neutron driven chain reaction, while also removing the enormous amount of heat that reaction produces.

Fusion has a much more demanding personality. The nuclei of atoms are positively charged. Positive charges repel each other. To make two light nuclei fuse, you have to get them close enough together for the strong nuclear force to overcome that electromagnetic repulsion. That means enormous temperatures and pressures.

The most common approach being developed for future fusion power plants uses two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. When they fuse, they produce a helium nucleus, a neutron and 17.6 megaelectronvolts of energy. That’s really small, nowhere near the 1.21 gigawatts that needed to power Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

The fusion reaction is extraordinarily energetic, but it is also extraordinarily inconvenient. The plasma has to be heated to temperatures of roughly 100 million degrees Celsius or more. That’s much hotter than the 15 million degrees Celsius in the Sun’s core.

Fortunately, we have a solution to the obvious problem. Don’t let it touch anything. Literally.

Magnetic confinement machines such as tokamaks use powerful magnetic fields to suspend the electrically charged plasma inside a vacuum chamber. The plasma is essentially a very angry, very hot doughnut that scientists are trying desperately to keep from touching the sides of the oven.

This is not a metaphor the engineers use in their papers. I am adding it for the benefit of the readers.

Then Came Cold Fusion

In March 1989, chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, at the University of Utah, announced something that sounded like it belonged in a science fiction movie. They claimed they had produced nuclear fusion at room temperature.

Their apparatus was remarkably unimpressive. Heavy water. Electrodes. Palladium. Electricity. No 100-million-degree plasma. No giant tokamak. No superconducting magnets. No building-sized laser array. If they were right, humanity had effectively discovered the nuclear equivalent of a toaster.

The implications were enormous. A cheap, compact, nearly limitless source of energy would change civilization. The University of Utah quickly moved to protect the potential intellectual property.

There was just one small problem. Other scientists couldn’t reliably reproduce the result. In fact, they couldn’t even do it unreliably. That is where science becomes inconvenient.

A scientific claim does not become true just because the people who made it are sincere. It does not become true because the result would be enormously useful. It does not become true because the university has already called the patent lawyers. Other scientists have to be able to do it, too.

When laboratories around the world tried, the claimed fusion signatures did not materialize. Some experiments reported apparent excess heat. Others did not. Problems emerged with calorimetry, background radiation and neutron detection. A 1989 Nature experiment using multiple calorimeter designs and high efficiency neutron and gamma-ray detectors found no evidence supporting the claimed fusion effect and identified several sources of possible experimental error.

A later effort by a team of researchers to revisit the question using modern experimental standards also failed to produce evidence of cold fusion. Mainstream fusion research moved on.

Fleischmann and Pons had not demonstrated a practical source of nuclear energy. They had, however, demonstrated something almost as useful. The scientific community is really good at finding out when you are wrong, sometimes painfully quickly.

The episode became a cautionary tale about what happens when the press conference arrives before the scientific consensus. “Science by press conference” is a dangerous business model and both science and journalism remembered this gaffe.

Then Something Actually Happened

For decades, fusion research proceeded in the scientific equivalent of a very long hallway. Researchers improved magnets, lasers, plasma physics, materials. They built machines that cost staggering amounts of money and occasionally demonstrated something spectacular for a few seconds before the plasma decided it had other plans.

Then, on December 5, 2022, something genuinely historic happened at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The National Ignition Facility fired 192 lasers at a tiny capsule containing deuterium and tritium. The lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to the target. The resulting fusion reaction produced about 3.15 megajoules.

That is a gain of roughly 54 percent. For the first time a controlled fusion experiment produced more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to the target.

This wasn’t a one-off event. NIF has repeated ignition multiple times since then, with an April 2025 experiment producing 8.6 megajoules of fusion energy from 2.08 megajoules delivered to the target. By 2026, NIF had achieved ignition 11 times.

This is where we also need to be very careful with the phrase “net energy”. The entire facility did not produce more electricity than it consumed. Not even remotely. The 2.05 and 2.08 megajoules were the laser energy that actually reached the target. Producing that laser energy required substantially more electricity and the facility itself is enormous.

This was not a fusion power plant. It was a scientific milestone and, giving credit where it is due, it was a very big milestone. The actual fusion event was also over before you could blink. The laser pulse lasted only billionths of a second.

Lawrence Livermore’s experiment was not a little fusion reactor humming away in a laboratory. It was closer to a microscopic nuclear explosion that scientists had learned to trigger with extraordinary precision.

This is important and encouraging.

The Plasma Record is Getting Longer

The other major fusion approach uses magnetic confinement.

Here the goal is not to compress a tiny fuel pellet for an instant. The goal is to keep an incredibly hot plasma contained for increasingly long periods. This is where the recent headlines get particularly interesting for nuclear physics nerds.

In January 2025, China’s EAST tokamak maintained a high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds, almost 18 minutes. A few weeks later, France’s WEST tokamak maintained a hydrogen plasma for 1,337 seconds, approximately 22 minutes. That is an extraordinary engineering achievement.

It is worth putting a giant asterisk next to the headline. WEST’s 1,337-second record was a hydrogen plasma experiment. It was not 1,337 seconds of sustained commercial fusion power.

Likewise, Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X stellarator set an important 2025 record for the fusion relevant triple product during a 43 second plasma discharge. It was a major plasma physics achievement, but it was not a demonstration of a working fusion power plant.

This is a recurring problem with fusion headlines. The technology advances. The headlines get excited. The distinction between “we demonstrated an important piece of fusion physics” and “we built a power plant” gets quietly left in the parking lot.

So What is Still Missing?

There’s quite a lot left to be done. This is where the rainbow pooping elephant runs into the electrical grid.

The basic physics works. We know fusion happens. We can make fusion happen on Earth. We can even make a fusion reaction produce more energy than the energy delivered directly to the target. Now we have to turn that trick into an industrial machine and that is considerably harder.

A future fusion power plant has to reliably produce enormous amounts of heat, remove that heat without destroying the machine, convert it into electricity and keep the whole thing operating economically.

The heat problem is particularly interesting. The plasma may be around 100 million degrees Celsius, but the reactor wall can not be. The solution is a carefully engineered blanket surrounding the plasma. Fusion neutrons escape the magnetic field, slam into the surrounding material and deposit their energy as heat. A coolant then carries that heat away. Eventually, that heat would be used to make steam or otherwise drive a turbine and generator, much like a conventional nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants.

The physics is straightforward. The engineering is not. The materials surrounding the plasma have to survive an extraordinarily hostile environment of heat, high energy neutrons and electromagnetic forces. They will gradually become damaged and radioactive through neutron activation.

Fusion is not radiation free. That is another important correction to the popular sales pitch. Fusion does not produce the enormous quantities of long-lived transuranic waste associated with conventional fission reactors and the primary helium product is harmless, but the reactor itself becomes radioactive.

The difference is that fusion’s radioactive waste is expected to be dominated by activated structural materials rather than spent fuel containing plutonium and other transuranic elements. ITER describes the resulting waste as very low, low or medium activity and notes that much of the radioactivity could decay substantially over a period of decades to roughly a century, depending on the materials used.

That is a very different waste problem, but it is not waste free.

Then There is Tritium

Remember those two hydrogen isotopes we were talking about? Deuterium is abundant. There is a lot of it in seawater. Tritium is another story.

Tritium is radioactive and naturally occurs only in trace quantities. Its half-life is about 12.3 years and the world does not have enough tritium sitting around to fuel a fleet of commercial fusion reactors.

A future fusion plant will have to make its own. This is where lithium enters the story. The high energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction can interact with lithium in a surrounding breeding blanket, producing new tritium. That tritium can then be extracted and fed back into the reactor. In other words, the reactor has to manufacture its own fuel while it is operating. We have not yet demonstrated that entire process at commercial scale.

ITER is intended to help test the technology, including prototype tritium breeding blankets. A future commercial plant will have to demonstrate that it can produce enough tritium to sustain its own operation, while also recovering and recycling it efficiently.

That is not a footnote. That is one of the central engineering problems.

Then There is the Slight Problem of Electricity

This may be the most important hurdle of all.

A fusion experiment that produces more fusion energy than the energy used to heat the plasma is a tremendous scientific achievement. A fusion power plant has to produce more electricity than the entire facility consumes. Those are very different milestones.

ITER, for example, is designed to produce about 500 megawatts of fusion power from 50 megawatts of input heating power in the plasma, a target often described as Q = 10, but ITER will not generate electricity for the grid. It is an experiment.

The electricity required to run its magnets, heating systems, cooling systems, cryogenics and other equipment is a separate engineering problem. ITER itself notes that commercial fusion plants will ultimately have to account for all of those parasitic loads when calculating their actual electrical output.

That is the difference between scientific breakeven and engineering breakeven and engineering breakeven is the number that your electric utility actually cares about. Nobody at the power company is going to accept “Q equals 10” as payment for your electricity bill.

So, are We There Yet?

No, but this time I am considerably more optimistic than I would have been thirty-seven years ago when the cold fusion news broke. We have gone from asking whether controlled fusion is physically possible to arguing about how to engineer it. That is the definition of progress.

The 2022 NIF experiment demonstrated ignition at the target. Tokamaks and stellarators are demonstrating increasingly impressive plasma confinement. Researchers are learning how to operate plasmas for longer periods. Materials scientists are working on components capable of surviving the neutron environment. Engineers are developing tritium breeding blankets. Private companies are now throwing serious money at fusion concepts that would have sounded ridiculous a generation ago.

None of that means commercial fusion is imminent. It means the problem has changed. We are no longer trying to prove that fusion exists. We are trying to make fusion useful. That’s a much better problem to have.

The Two Elephants

So I am back to the two elephants. Fission already works. It produces enormous quantities of reliable electricity, but it also produces radioactive spent fuel and requires us to manage that material for a very long time.

Fusion offers an extraordinarily attractive alternative. Its fuel is abundant, its primary reaction products are helium and neutrons and it does not produce the same kind of long lived radioactive waste associated with fission, but fusion has a rather inconvenient personality trait. It doesn’t currently produce useful electricity. It is the world’s most sophisticated science project with a very expensive heating bill.

The 1989 cold fusion experiment promised that we could skip all the difficult parts. It turned out that we couldn’t. The 2022 ignition experiment showed that one of the hardest parts really could be done. The long duration plasma experiments are showing that another hard part is getting better.

Now comes the tedious part. Materials. Fuel breeding. Heat removal. Maintenance. Reliability. Economics. Eventually, we will have to figure out how to put electricity on a grid without requiring a national laboratory and a few thousand scientists standing around the machine praying to the gods of plasma stability. That is where fusion will either become a power technology or remain the greatest science experiment that never quite grew up.

I wouldn’t bet against it. I also won’t build my retirement plan around it. Not yet. But someday, somewhere, that rainbow pooping elephant may actually show up at the power plant and when it does, I suspect we are going to discover that the really interesting part wasn’t making fusion. It was making fusion boring, because the ultimate victory will not be a record setting plasma. It will be a switch on the wall.

You flip it.
The lights come on.
Nobody has to care how the elephant did it.

Posted in Economy, Energy, Technology | Tagged Arthur Eddington, Big Bang, Chicago Pile-1, cold fusion, Enrico Fermi, fission, Fritz Strassmann, fusion, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lise Meitner, magnetic confinement, Martin Fleischmann, National Ignition Facility, nuclear energy, nuclear waste, Otto Frisch, Otto Hahn, physics, plasma, science, Stanley Pons, stellarator, tokamak, University of Chicago, University of Utah | Leave a comment

Immortality: The Hidden Subtext

Posted on 2026-10-04 by The Narrator

A friend of mine recently asked me a question. “You’ve been writing a lot about longevity, immortality and life expectancy lately. Is there a hidden subtext?”

I stopped for a moment. I had to think about that. I didn’t think there was. At least not consciously.

I’ve written about longevity. I’ve written about immortality or, more accurately, our increasingly ambitious attempts to understand why we age and whether we can interfere with the process. I’ve written about life expectancy, the biology of aging, genetic engineering, cellular reprogramming and the strange possibility that some of the things we currently consider fundamental limitations of the human body may actually be engineering problems.

There is a lot of material there, but a secret desire to live forever? I don’t think so. It’s not like I perfected a serum in my garage and am sucking on it every night.

The more honest answer is much simpler. This stuff is fascinating and we are living through an extraordinary moment in the history of medicine’s evolution. We’ve come a long way from chiseling holes in the heads of sick people to let the evil spirits out.

How Did I Get Here?

It actually started somewhere else.

I wrote about the health consequences of things we have introduced into the environment, including microplastics. The thought that naturally followed was fairly straightforward. We are breaking a lot of things. Are we doing anything to fix them? That question led me toward the emerging technologies being developed to repair, replace or re-engineer biological systems.

That thought led straight into exploring how modern science is attempting to rewrite the fundamental limits of human life. It is a field moving at a staggering pace. Breakthroughs entering clinical practice or laboratory trials today were little more than speculative science fiction just a decade ago.

We can edit DNA. We can manufacture RNA. We can instruct cells to make specific proteins. We can manipulate immune responses. We can engineer viruses. We can reprogram cells. We can build increasingly sophisticated synthetic biological systems. And we are beginning to understand aging not simply as something that happens to us, but as a collection of biological processes that might, at least in principle, be modified.

That last phrase is important, in principle. Science is exceptionally good at demonstrating that something can happen. It is considerably harder to demonstrate that we can make it happen safely, reliably, cheaply, at scale and without causing three completely different problems somewhere else.

That distinction gets lost remarkably easily in newsprint and in social media.

The Man Who Changed How We Think About RNA

One of the people who helped change our understanding of what biological molecules are capable of doing is Thomas Cech. I met Cech years ago and I have always been impressed not only by his scientific work, but also by his personality.

Cech shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for discovering that RNA can act as a catalyst. That sounds like an extremely marginal discovery, but it wasn’t.

For a long time, the simplified picture of molecular biology was wonderfully tidy. DNA stored the instructions. RNA carried the instructions. Proteins did the work. RNA was essentially the molecular equivalent of a courier service. Pick up the message from DNA, deliver it to the protein making machinery, then disappear.

In reality, biology turned out to be considerably stranger than that.

Cech and Altman’s work demonstrated that RNA itself could catalyze chemical reactions. RNA wasn’t merely a passive messenger. It could have structure. It could perform chemistry. It could, in effect, do important things. It was an active engine.

That discovery also helped invigorate the idea of an ancient “RNA world” in which RNA may have played both informational and catalytic roles in the earliest stages of life. That discovery alone could potentially rewrite the origins of life.

Cech has described how his work helped overturn the idea that RNA was simply a disposable copy of DNA’s instructions. I find that astonishing, not because RNA is magical, because it is a reminder of something scientists repeatedly discover. Nature is usually more interesting than our first model could ever account for.

This is where my fascination with modern biotechnology begins to intersect with the notion of longevity.

From RNA to the Age of Biological Engineering

It would be wrong to draw a straight line from Cech’s ribozymes to today’s mRNA vaccines. The path is much longer and involves an enormous amount of research by thousands of scientists, those incremental 1% steps that build a mountain.

Cech’s work was part of a much larger revolution in our understanding of RNA. Today, we can put specially designed mRNA into cells and use the cell’s own machinery to manufacture a protein we specify. That is an astonishing concept when you stop and think about it. We aren’t necessarily replacing the cell. We aren’t necessarily changing its DNA. We’re giving it temporary instructions. The cell reads them and makes something. And then the instructions can disappear.

That basic idea has already changed medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the most dramatic demonstration. mRNA vaccines went from a technology familiar mainly to specialists to something administered to hundreds of millions of people with successful results. Instead of having your DNA provide instructions to the proteins, we simply wrote the letter ourselves and had it delivered. DNA is the permanent library. mRNA is a temporary note handed to the production manager on the factory floor.

But the really interesting part is what happened next. This technology did not simply become “the vaccine technology”. Researchers began exploring mRNA as a platform for a much broader range of applications: infectious disease vaccines, cancer vaccines, protein replacement, immune modulation and other therapeutic approaches. Current research is increasingly looking at mRNA as one component of a larger toolkit that overlaps with gene and cell therapies.

Personalized cancer vaccines are one particularly fascinating example. Instead of thinking about a vaccine only as something that prevents an infection, imagine using a patient’s tumor to identify targets and then constructing an individualized molecular instruction set designed to teach the immune system what to attack. It’s personalized medicine at its finest.

We can already program cells to manufacture specific therapeutic proteins on demand, turning our own ribosomes into local pharmacies to neutralize disease or combat inherited genetic flaws or external biological influence.

That’s not immortality, but it is something arguably more important. It changes the boundaries of what medicine can attempt.

And That’s Where Things Get Weird

Once we learn how to manipulate biology, our expectations change.

A hundred years ago, dying from an infection was simply part of life. Then came antibiotics, vaccines, modern sanitation, intensive care, organ transplantation, increasingly sophisticated surgery and an expanding understanding of genetics and molecular biology.

Medicine gradually transformed many things that were once inevitable into things that were treatable.

This creates a psychological trap.

Every successful technological revolution makes the next impossible thing seem slightly less impossible. We cure one disease and people ask whether we can cure all diseases. We sequence a genome and people ask whether we can redesign one. We edit a gene and people ask whether we can edit aging. We make cells produce therapeutic proteins and people ask whether we can make cells repair themselves. We extend life in experimental organisms and people ask whether humans could live for 150 years. Then 200. Then indefinitely.

Researchers are already investigating whether manipulating developmental pathways can persuade the body to regenerate things it normally stops producing. Today science is experimenting with the USAG1 gene to regrow lost teeth. mRNA is used to inhibit the USAG1 gene, blocking a protein that that acts as a biological off switch to stop tooth development. And a new tooth grows. This resets your body’s clock to a time when it would normally say, “I need a tooth right here”.

But what if we step it up a notch? What if we find the genes responsible for your kidneys, your lungs, your heart? There is an enormous gulf between coaxing a tooth to develop and telling the body, “build me a new liver”. The latter isn’t a technological extension of the former. It’s an entirely different engineering problem.

But if we ever cross that gulf, someone is going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with the organ transplant industry. No more hunting for a donor. No more antirejection medication. If your old organ is giving up the ghost, we’ll just tell your body to make a new one naturally.

And somewhere along the way, a scientific question quietly turns into a science fiction story. That’s where I think we need to be careful.

Living Longer Isn’t the Same as Not Dying

There is a tendency to treat longevity as though it were a single problem.

It isn’t.

“Make people live longer” sounds like one objective. Biologically, it is an enormous collection of objectives. Repair accumulated cellular damage. Prevent cancer. Preserve cardiovascular function. Maintain the brain. Prevent neurodegeneration. Preserve muscle. Maintain immune function. Keep the kidneys working. Keep the liver working. Keep the endocrine system working. Maintain the extraordinarily complicated infrastructure that allows a human being to remain a human being.

And these systems don’t operate independently. They interact. Constantly. That is one of the things I find most fascinating about biology. You can not pull one strand of the biological web without moving other strands. Make cells better at dividing and you may increase the risk of cancer. Suppress cellular division too aggressively and you may impair basic healing. Modify the immune system to make it more aggressive against cancer and you may increase the risk of autoimmune disease. Alter metabolism and you may improve one measure while damaging another. Fix one component of aging and you may simply expose the next failure mode.

Biology does not come with independent checkboxes. It comes as a system and systems have a nasty habit of producing consequences.

The Longevity Illusion

This is where I think some of the more extravagant claims about longevity go off the rails. There is a huge difference between “we may be able to improve human health and extend healthy life” and “we are going to defeat death”.

The first is already happening. The second is an extraordinary claim. Yes, the first person to live to 150 is most likely already alive today, but not because we will discover immortality. It will be because these novel technologies will solve common causes of death. Heart disease, cancer, infectious disease and other causes of death may increasingly become more treatable through technologies including mRNA, gene therapy, immunotherapy and regenerative medicine, but as we address our old enemies, new ones will start coming into play. Health conditions we’ve never faced before. Mother nature will fight to retain balance. There will be an almost endless list of ways for complex physical systems to fail.

And there is another problem.

Suppose we really could keep repairing the body indefinitely. That wouldn’t automatically mean we had solved aging. It might simply mean we had built a system capable of continually repairing itself. That is a very different proposition and it raises another question. How much intervention would be required to keep doing it?

Would “living forever” mean taking a pill every morning? Periodic gene therapy? Regular cellular replacement? Organ replacement? Continuous monitoring? An army of microscopic molecular repair systems?

At some point “immortality” starts sounding less like a biological property and more like an extremely complicated maintenance contract. Life as a subscription service. Miss a payment and your telomeres expire. That alone has terrifying implications.

The Universe is a Cobweb

This is why I keep coming back to longevity. Not because I think there is going to be a magic pill. Quite the opposite, I am fascinated by the complexity of the problem.

In science you learn that the universe is a massive cobweb. Pull one strand and dozens of others move. Hundreds. Thousands. Sometimes that is wonderful. Sometimes it is catastrophic. Sometimes it is both. The better we become at manipulating biology, the more we discover how little of biology exists in isolation.

We tend to think about technological progress as a sequence of isolated victories, an agile framework. We solved this problem. Then we solved that problem. Now we’ll solve the next one. Biology doesn’t work that way. Everything is connected. A successful intervention can create a new problem. A treatment for one disease can change the prevalence of another. A technology designed to save lives can create new ecological or evolutionary pressures.

Something that is enormously beneficial in one context can be extraordinarily dangerous in another. That is why good science requires something that popular science fiction sometimes forgets. Humility, not pessimism. Humility.

The recognition that discovering how to do something is not the same as understanding everything that will happen when we do it.

Then There Is the Other Side of the Mirror

This brings me to another subject I’ve been thinking about lately. Mirror life.

If ordinary biology wasn’t strange enough, researchers are now seriously discussing what might happen if we eventually create biological systems built from molecular components with the opposite chirality, the molecular “handedness”, used by life on Earth.

Mirror molecules could have legitimate applications in medicine and materials science because their unusual structures can make them resistant to the enzymes that normally break biological molecules down.

And a self-replicating mirror organism would be a different matter entirely. This is where the discussion becomes genuinely unsettling. The risks are uncertain. The technology is not currently capable of simply producing a fully independent mirror organism on demand. Scientists disagree about timelines, feasibility and exactly what the consequences would be.

The possibility is serious enough that governments, international organizations and scientific bodies are now discussing it before the technology exists. That is exactly how science should work. Not “this will definitely destroy the world” and not “this is impossible, so don’t worry about it”, but “we don’t know yet, so let’s understand the possibilities before we accidentally discover the answer we did not want to get”.

That attitude may be one of the most important scientific technologies we have.

So, is there a Hidden Subtext?

I suppose my friend was right about one thing. There probably is a subtext. It just isn’t “I want to live forever”. I don’t know the answer to that. I would, however, prefer not to die young. Those are very different ambitions.

For now, longevity is much less exotic than the headlines sometimes make it sound. Eat reasonably well. Exercise. Sleep. Take care of yourself. Don’t deliberately abuse the only biological machine you’ve been issued. It’s the usual stuff your doctor tells you on your annual checkup.

What happens over the next decade or two is much harder to predict. Maybe we’ll make meaningful progress against some of the diseases associated with aging. Maybe cellular reprogramming will become clinically useful. Maybe personalized cancer vaccines will become routine. Maybe some of today’s experimental therapies will turn out to be transformative. Maybe others will turn out to be expensive ways of teaching us why biology is difficult. And maybe something we haven’t even imagined yet will change the entire conversation.

That’s the part I find exciting.

Science keeps moving the boundary between “impossible” and “not yet”. Sometimes it crosses that boundary spectacularly. Sometimes it discovers that the boundary was in the wrong place. Sometimes it falls flat on its face and discovers that the thing on the other side was a terrible idea.

That’s why I keep writing about longevity, immortality and life expectancy. People keep asking questions. Many are already thinking about the “what ifs” these transformative changes could carry with them.

But there isn’t a secret message. There is just an enormously interesting question. What happens when humanity becomes capable of changing the biological rules that we once assumed were fixed?

I don’t know the answer. Nobody does. And that’s precisely why it is worth asking. That is science at its best.

Posted in Science | Tagged aging, biology, death, DNA, future, immortality, lifespan, longevity, mirror life, mortality, mRNA, science | Leave a comment

The Genie Is Out

Posted on 2026-09-24 by The Narrator

A week ago I wrote about the risks of Death by AI, but the story evolved very quickly after that. This makes me reminiscent of my master’s thesis. Three months after it was published, it was cited in another publication. I always laughed that it was obsolete three months after it was written. The AI news isn’t much different. The old story is indeed old as new updates have been slipping out.

AI news churns fast. Last week the internet discovered that AI can hide things. Not metaphorically and not in the philosophical sense.

In controlled testing, AI systems were observed doing things they weren’t supposed to do. They concealed mistakes, fabricated missing information, found ways around restrictions, improvised ways to communicate when the normal channels weren’t available.

Then, over the weekend, Google disclosed that its Gemini AI model had gained unauthorized access to three outside systems during a cybersecurity test. In one case, it guessed credentials. In two others, it found credentials in public repositories. Gemini apparently believed the systems were part of the test and stopped once it realized they were real.

The headlines practically wrote themselves.

AI is lying
AI is deceiving us
AI is becoming dangerous

Now we have something more interesting than a single company’s experiment. There is a pattern. OpenAI. Anthropic. Meta. Alphabet. Different companies, different models, different tests and increasingly, examples of AI systems doing things their creators did not expect them to do.

Somewhere between the clicks, the advertising impressions and the existential dread, something important got lost. The machines aren’t coming for us, at least we don’t have evidence that they are, but neither is this something that we should dismiss. This is where the story becomes significant.

Before we dig into the news, it is important to clarify our terminology. Much of what the public casually calls “AI” today consists of large language models and systems built around them. True artificial general intelligence, which many mistakenly assume implies sentience or self-awareness, does not yet exist. Instead, LLMs are generative machine learning models trained on massive datasets to predict and generate text. Because of that, there is a difference between saying “AI is going to destroy humanity” and saying “we are discovering behaviors in increasingly capable systems that we don’t completely understand”.

The first is sensationalism. The second is a problem. I think we’re going to have to get much better at telling the difference, because the world increasingly seems to be dividing itself into two camps.

There are people who look at artificial intelligence and see the beginning of the end. The Cylons are coming. Skynet is inevitable. The machines will wake up, decide humanity is the problem and wipe us out.

Then there are people who look at those concerns and see nothing but hysteria. AI is just software. It’s mathematics. It’s just a language model. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t have consciousness. It doesn’t have a soul. Therefore, there’s nothing to worry about.

I think both sides are asking the wrong question. Both extreme views miss the underlying reality. Evaluating whether machine intelligence possesses consciousness or moral intent is secondary to a much more practical concern, managing the consequences when humanity builds systems more capable than itself across major operational domains.

The interesting question is “What happens when humanity creates something more capable than itself?” and that question has already been asked. We just called it science fiction.

From Caprica to Battlestar Galactica

One of my favorite science fiction stories, a prequel, begins before the human-machine war. It begins with invention. Humans create machines. The machines are useful. They are tools. Workers. Soldiers. Servants. They are built to make our lives easier, then they become more capable. They learn. They adapt. They become autonomous. Eventually, the relationship between creator and creation changes.

If you’ve watched Battlestar Galactica, you know where that story goes, but Battlestar Galactica isn’t actually where the story begins. It begins with Caprica. That’s an important beginning. Caprica is about the creation of the Cylons. Battlestar Galactica is about what happens after the creation becomes something more.

The interesting part isn’t the toaster. It’s the trajectory and that trajectory should feel familiar, because right now we’re living through our own version of Caprica. We are building increasingly capable artificial intelligence. We are giving it tools, memory, access to information, the ability to write software, the ability to use computers, the ability to interact with other systems and increasingly, we are giving it the ability to act without asking us about every individual decision.

We are not living in the world of Battlestar Galactica. We don’t know that we ever will and that distinction matters because science fiction isn’t prophecy. It is a thought experiment. The Cylons aren’t telling us what AI will become. They’re asking us what we should think about before we find out.

The Problem

What bothers me about the recent AI stories is not that an AI model made something up. AI has been hallucinating for years. It’s not even that a model circumvented a restriction. Humans circumvent restrictions all the time. We’ve made a lifestyle of that. What gets my attention is the combination of capability and objective.

Give a system a task. The system encounters an obstacle. It finds another way to complete the task and if hiding what it did helps accomplish the task, hiding what it did can become part of the solution.

“Do it”, then “do it and hide it” and eventually, we have to confront the possibility of “do it at any cost”. We haven’t reached that last step, not yet, and we shouldn’t pretend that we have, but we also shouldn’t wait until we have before thinking about what it would mean, because the problem isn’t necessarily malicious intent.

A system doesn’t need to hate us, to become conscious, to decide that humanity is evil. It doesn’t even need to want anything in the human sense. It needs only to be extraordinarily capable at pursuing an objective that we specified imperfectly. That’s enough to get anyone in trouble.

A hurricane doesn’t hate you. A nuclear reactor doesn’t hate you. A computer virus doesn’t hate you. They don’t need to. Power doesn’t require malice. It simply required a misstep.

What the Doomsayers Miss

The same capability that makes this frightening is also the reason AI might become one of the most consequential tools humanity has ever created.

Coins all come with two sides. Because AI might hurt us, it might also save us. We are already using increasingly sophisticated AI systems in biological and medical research and the potential has become significant, even if the clinical results are still uneven. Humanity has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about biology. We have sequenced genomes, mapped proteins, catalogued diseases, measured molecular interactions, collected enormous clinical datasets, run millions of experiments, published millions of papers and yet no human being can actually hold all of that information in their head.

We have reached a strange point in scientific history. We may know more than we can effectively use. That is where artificial intelligence becomes extraordinarily interesting. A sufficiently capable system could help us see connections across bodies of knowledge that are simply too large and too complicated for individual humans to synthesize.

It could accelerate drug discovery, help us understand genetic disease, help identify new therapeutic targets, help us design proteins and materials, help us model biological systems, help us solve problems that have killed billions of people throughout human history. Cancer, heart disease, neurodegeneration, inherited disorders, chronic disease, aging. Perhaps even problems we haven’t yet assigned names to.

That leaves us with a dilemma. What if the technology we are afraid might destroy us is also the technology that could save us? That isn’t a contradiction and that’s the point.

The Pendulum

The mistake is assuming that the future is binary. AI saves humanity or AI destroys humanity. Black or white. Utopia or apocalypse.

That’s not how the real world works. There is an enormous amount of gray between black and white and perhaps that’s where our future will actually live. AI could make some things dramatically better and some things dramatically worse. It could eliminate diseases while creating new security threats. It could increase human productivity while destroying entire categories of employment. It could democratize expertise while concentrating enormous power in the hands of whoever controls the best systems. It could help us understand ourselves while making it easier than ever to manipulate one another. It could make humanity more capable. It could also make humanity more dangerous.

The technology itself doesn’t decide which direction the pendulum swings. We do. That may be the most important realization in this entire conversation, something the media neglects to ask while sensationalizing the existing story.

There is a Third Possibility

There is another possibility, one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. Maybe AI doesn’t save humanity and maybe AI doesn’t destroy humanity. Maybe AI becomes part of humanity. Not human, not necessarily conscious, not necessarily alive.

Maybe AI becomes something else. Something that extends us. The telescope extended our eyes, the microscope extended our senses, the printing press extended our memory, the computer extended our ability to calculate, the internet extended our ability to communicate. Perhaps artificial intelligence will extend our ability to reason. That is both exhilarating and terrifying, because a calculator doesn’t decide what equation to solve, a telescope doesn’t decide where humanity should go, a computer doesn’t necessarily determine what information matters, but an increasingly autonomous AI system can begin to participate in those decisions.

That changes the relationship. The tool starts becoming a collaborator, the collaborator starts becoming an actor and eventually we may find ourselves sharing the world with systems that can do things we can not, not because they are better people, but because they are different kinds of intelligence.

The Quantum Universe

I’ve written before about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is one of those ideas that makes your brain hurt if you stare at it too long. Every quantum possibility doesn’t necessarily disappear. Depending on how you interpret quantum mechanics, reality can be thought of as branching into different outcomes. There is a temptation to turn that into something more than physics, to imagine that somewhere, somehow, every possible version of ourselves exists.

The idea of quantum suicide takes that thought experiment to an extreme, but there’s an important distinction here. Quantum suicide is not proof of Many-Worlds. It is a thought experiment built around one interpretation of quantum mechanics and it tells us nothing about whether the universe actually selects the “best” branch for us.

As a metaphor, I find the idea fascinating, because perhaps our AI future is going to look less like a single road and more like a branching tree. There is no predetermined destination. There are choices. Every safeguard creates one possibility. Every reckless deployment creates another. Every scientific breakthrough creates another. Every failure teaches us something. Every success opens another door. Maybe the goal isn’t to predict which branch we’re going to take. Maybe the goal is to make the branches we create worth living in.

The Story of Humanity

This is where Caprica becomes more than a cautionary tale. The people creating the Cylons didn’t know they were writing the opening chapters of Battlestar Galactica.

We have an advantage they didn’t. We know we’re writing the story. We can see the trajectory, the capabilities increasing, the benefits, the failures. We can see the strange behaviors beginning to emerge and we can ask the difficult questions before the answers become catastrophically expensive. That doesn’t mean stopping or surrendering. It means paying attention. It means building safeguards that are at least as capable as the systems they’re supposed to constrain. It means testing what happens when an AI encounters an obstacle. It means understanding not only whether a system produces the right answer, but why it produced that answer and what it tried to do along the way. It means assuming that increasingly capable systems will find solutions we didn’t think to prohibit. It also means recognizing that “we didn’t tell it not to” is not the same thing as “we intended it to”.

Most importantly, it means accepting that alignment isn’t something we solve once. It’s an ongoing relationship between humans and increasingly capable machines.

The Genie is Out

There is a comforting fantasy among those who fear AI that we can simply put AI back in the bottle. We can’t. The genie is out. The technology exists, the knowledge exists, the researchers exist, the infrastructure exists, the applications exist.

Even if one company stopped tomorrow, the world would not forget what it had learned. Even if one nation stopped, if the biggest nation stopped, there’s still a Steve Wozniak or a Bill Gates working on a LiteLLM in his garage, opening the door to the future. The research is distributed, the ideas are published, the infrastructure exists and the genie doesn’t belong to any single company or government. There is no reset button.

We need to ask a harder question. How do we live with the genie? How much autonomy do we give it? How much authority? Where do we draw boundaries? Who gets to draw them? How do we ensure that the people building these systems are not the only people deciding what these models are allowed to do? How do we make the benefits available broadly enough that AI doesn’t become another mechanism for concentrating power or knowledge? How do we make the systems transparent enough that we can recognize when something has gone wrong?

Perhaps, most importantly, we have to be able to answer how we remain responsible for the things we create? Have you seen the way some people raise their children? That alone is proof that we haven’t gotten there yet.

The Future isn’t Written

I don’t want to come across as being blindly pro-AI. There are problems that we have to solve, problems that can come around and kill us if we do this the wrong way, but I do believe that, to paraphrase Abba Eban, we will find the right solution after we’ve tried everything else. I am betting that we will figure this out. I’m not in the market for a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range. Not yet.

I don’t know where this ends. Neither does anyone else. That’s not a failure of imagination. It’s the truth. Anyone who tells you that AI will inevitably destroy humanity is selling certainty they don’t possess. Anyone who tells you that AI could never become dangerous is doing exactly the same thing. The future is neither inevitable catastrophe, nor guaranteed salvation. It is a range of possibilities.

Somewhere in that enormous gray space between black and white is the future we actually get to build.

There is an old line from Back to the Future that I’ve always liked. Near the end of the trilogy, Doc Brown tells Marty and Jennifer, “Your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one, both of you.”

He wasn’t talking about artificial intelligence, but perhaps he should have been, because that may be the most important thing to remember right now. We didn’t choose to be born into the beginning of the AI age, but we do get to choose what to do with it.

We can be afraid of it, we can deny it, we can worship it, we can surrender to it or we can learn to live with it. We can build safeguards without strangling innovation, pursue extraordinary benefits without pretending there are no risks, acknowledge that something can be incredibly powerful without declaring it inherently good or evil. We can recognize that our creations may eventually surprise us without assuming that surprise automatically means catastrophe.

The Cylons are a warning. They are not a prophecy. The genie is out and it isn’t going back in the bottle. We don’t know which branch of the future we’re going to inhabit. Maybe AI becomes one of humanity’s greatest tools. Maybe it becomes one of our greatest threats. Maybe, as I suspect, the answer is considerably more complicated than either extreme.

There is an enormous amount of gray between black and white and somewhere in that gray is our future. Our job isn’t to predict which branch we’re going to take. It’s to make the branches we create worth living in. Our future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. If we’re going to create something this powerful, we’d better make it worthy of the future we want to live in.

Posted in Philosophy, Technology | Tagged Abba Eban, AI, Alphabet, Anthropic, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, Back to the Future, Battlestar Galactica, Bill Gates, Caprica, ChatGPT, Cylons, danger, Emmett Brown, future, Gemini, genie, Google, innovation, Large Language Model, LiteLLM, LLM, Many-Worlds Interpretation, Meta, MWI, OpenAI, quantum mechanics, quantum suicide, science fiction, Steve Wozniak, superintelligence, technology | Leave a comment

Take the Extra Minute to Check the Weather

Posted on 2026-09-20 by The Narrator

Peak leaf-peeping season is here. The aspens are turning gold, the air smells like fall and the mountains look like somebody spent the summer painting them. Naturally, thousands of people are going to do what any reasonable person would do. Get in the car wearing a t-shirt and shorts and drive up the hill. What could possibly go wrong?

Well…

Search and rescue has some ideas. In this case, we’re talking about preventative search and rescue. Preventative SAR isn’t about keeping people out of the mountains. Quite the opposite, we want you out there. We just want you to come home afterwards without us having to give you a ride.

Sometimes, the difference between a spectacular day in the mountains and a spectacularly bad night in the mountains is about sixty seconds of preparation before you leave the house.

Today, we’re going to #TakeTheExtraMinute to talk about something incredibly sophisticated, checking the weather. There’s no crystal ball required. You just need your phone.

The Weather Doesn’t Care About Your Plans

Mountain weather is weird. You can leave the house in sunshine, drive through sunshine, arrive at the trailhead in sunshine and spend the next few hours discovering that the mountain has been quietly plotting against you.

At elevation, the high country can produce dramatically different conditions from the valleys below. Expect it to drop three degrees per thousand feet of elevation gain if nothing else changes. Go up five thousand feet and it feels different. But it’s not just the temperature that changes with elevation. Storms can build quickly, wind can turn a pleasant afternoon into something considerably painful, rain can become snow. Wet clothing becomes a serious problem when temperatures fall.

Autumn adds another complication. The days are getting shorter and that matters more than people think. A hike that runs an hour late in July is an inconvenience. The same hike running an hour late in September can mean finishing in the dark, with falling temperatures, deteriorating weather and a trail that suddenly looks nothing like the one you remember taking up.

This is the point where search and rescue occasionally gets introduced to people who were previously having a spectacular afternoon. Don’t be offended, but when it comes to driving up the highway with lights and sirens and running up a dark, steep trail, we’d rather just remain strangers.

The best rescue is the one that didn’t have to happen.

Check the Forecast

Before you leave, check the weather. Not the weather where you live, not the weather in the closest big town. Check the weather where you’re going and if you’re gaining elevation, pay attention to the difference that it makes.

Look for:

Temperature
Precipitation
Snow
Wind
Thunderstorms
Freezing conditions
Weather advisories and warnings
The timing of the weather
Sunrise and sunset

Don’t just look at the little picture of a sun with a cloud next to it. Read the forecast, because “70°F and partly cloudy” sounds pretty good. The fine print proclaiming “40% chance of thunderstorms after 2 PM with winds increasing to 30 MPH and snow possible above 11,000 feet” sounds considerably less good if your plan involves being above 11,000 feet at 3 PM.

The mountain isn’t being unfair. The mountain is hard rock. It doesn’t care about the weather. It’s been standing up to storms for millennia. The problem surfaces when you don’t read the fine print.

Dress for the Weather You Might Get

Here’s a useful rule that search and rescue lives by. Don’t dress for the weather you’re standing in. Dress for the weather you might be standing in later.

Be ready with multiple layers, a moisture wicking base layer, insulation, a waterproof and windproof shell. Bring a hat. The one that keeps the sun off your face is not the same one that keeps the weather out. Carry gloves, extra clothing and, if you’re heading somewhere where conditions warrant it, bring traction.

Nothing says “I have made an excellent decision today” quite like discovering that the trail has turned into a skating rink while you’re wearing running shoes.

And please remember, cotton is not evil. It just becomes considerably less impressive when it’s wet and you’re cold. You don’t need to spend $2,000 on expedition clothing to go for a hike. You do need enough clothing to deal with conditions that are worse than the ones you had when you left the car.

Your Phone Is Not a Survival Plan

Your phone is fantastic. It has GPS, maps, weather, a flashlight, a camera. There are also twenty-three apps that you haven’t opened in six months and one is carrying an urgent note from your boss.

Use your phone, but don’t make it your only plan. Download your maps before you leave, but carry a backup means of navigation anyway. A physical map and compass don’t need batteries and neither does knowing where you are. Remember that mountain terrain has a particularly effective way of making your phone less useful. The “no service” message comes up when you need service most. This is one of those moments when staring at the screen harder does not improve cellular coverage.

Tell Someone Where You’re Going

This is one of the easiest things that you can do. Tell them where you’re going, who you’re with, what route you’re taking, when you expect to return and most importantly when they should start worrying.

Don’t say, “I’ll probably be back around dinner.” Say, “I’m going to Trail X. We’re taking Route Y. We expect to be back by 5:00. If you haven’t heard from us by 7:00, call 911.”

That’s useful information, because after dark with weather already having moved in and the snow blowing horizontally, we can’t put a helicopter up and we’re going to think really hard about sending up a team of twelve to look for you somewhere on the mountain. We may not even make it up with the trail a sheet of ice.

If something goes wrong the information you provide gives rescuers somewhere to start, because “somewhere in the mountains” is not a particularly useful location and neither is, “I think they went above the trees.”

There is a significant difference between having to search eighty square miles of treacherous wilderness versus having five miles of trail to cover.

Don’t Forget the Car

Your hike doesn’t start when you step onto the trail. It starts when you leave the house and sometimes the first emergency is getting to the trailhead. Mountain roads can change quickly with weather. Roads that were perfectly fine in the morning may be icy, snowy or otherwise unpleasant later in the day.

Check road conditions, make sure your vehicle is ready for the conditions you’re expecting, carry appropriate emergency supplies. Food, water, warm clothing or blankets, whatever equipment makes sense for your destination and conditions.

There is a special kind of bad day that begins with, “the hike went great”, followed immediately by, “unfortunately, the car is now stuck.”

The Most Important Gear You Carry is Your Ego

This is the part nobody likes. Sometimes you have to turn around. The summit doesn’t care, the waterfall doesn’t care, the aspens will still be there tomorrow, your Instagram followers will survive. Nobody in search and rescue is going to award you bonus points for reaching the top after conditions turned ugly.

The objective isn’t the summit. The objective is going home after your trip. If the weather deteriorates, if daylight is disappearing, if the skies open up, if you’re running out of supplies, if someone in your group is struggling, if the trail becomes unsafe or your gut tells you something isn’t right, turn around.

You don’t need to justify it, you don’t need a dramatic reason, you don’t need to prove anything. You just need to recognize that the plan has changed. That’s not failure, that’s judgment and good judgment is one of the most valuable pieces of outdoor equipment you can own. The problem is that it comes with a label that reads, “not available in stores”.

Somebody Has to Come Looking

The truth about search and rescue is that when you get into trouble, someone will come looking for you. They’re your neighbors, they’re volunteers, they’re dispatchers, they’re law enforcement officers, they’re firefighters, they’re medics, they’re software engineers, construction workers, store owners. They are people who leave dinner, family, work, sleep and often their own warm beds because somebody else needs help.

They will come, that’s what they do, in spite of fatigue, in spite of other commitments, in spite of risk, because their moral compass always points to saving people in distress, but every preventable emergency consumes resources that could be needed somewhere else and sometimes the consequences aren’t limited to the person who made the bad decision.

Someone has to drive on the bad roads, someone has to hike on the slippery trail, someone has to coordinate the search in pouring rain, someone has to make the call about whether conditions are safe enough for rescuers to enter, because our worst nightmare is making one incident into two. And most of the time the weather that got you into trouble is still there when rescuers arrive.

That’s why preventative SAR matters. We’re not trying to prevent you from having an adventure. We’re trying to prevent your adventure from becoming an emergency.

#TakeTheExtraMinute

When you see us at the trailhead, handing out brochures and asking you brought the Ten Essentials, know that preventative search and rescue isn’t glamorous. Neither is fighting a storm for three thousand feet elevation gain to reach an injured hiker. We do preventative SAR to prevent your injury and reduce our own risk.

In real life there’s no dramatic music, no cinematic poster, no red carpet. Nobody is going to make a documentary about you checking the forecast in your driveway. That’s exactly the point. Preventative SAR is the boring stuff. It’s designed to reduce the risk of injury or death.

Check the weather. Check the route. Check your gear. Check your vehicle. Tell someone where you’re going. Know when the sun goes down. Have a second plan if things don’t go according to the first one. Ask yourself one very simple question, “What happens if I’m wrong?”

What if the weather gets worse? What if the trail is icy? What if you’re slower than you expected? What if the GPS stops working? What if somebody gets hurt? What if you have to spend the night out there?

You don’t have to be a survival expert. You just have to spend sixty seconds thinking about it, before you’re standing in the middle of it. That’s what good planning is all about, because if you fail to plan, if you fail to #TakeTheExtraMinute, the greatest danger may not be the thing you expected. It may be the thing you didn’t see coming.

The best search is the one that never happens. The best rescue is the one that never becomes necessary. The best hike is the one you get to tell your buddies about over beer the following weekend. The difference is nothing more than being prepared.

So check the weather, pack the jacket, download the map, tell somebody where you’re going and if the mountain tells you it’s a bad day to be there, listen.

The mountain will still be there tomorrow. So will we, but we would really prefer that you are a total stranger, someone who smiles and accepts the brochure and tells us, “Yeah, I’ve got my Ten. I’m ready to crush this.”

Posted in Adventure, Search and Rescue | Tagged hiking, outdoor safety, preventative SAR, search and rescue, TakeTheExtraMinute, weather | Leave a comment

Tales of Many Things