Tales of Many Things -Tales of Many Things

Gravity Didn’t Turn Off (and sadly, neither did the internet)

Posted on 2026-09-12 by The Narrator

I recently met up with a friend for lunch to catch up. He mocked me.

“It didn’t fail,” he said, struggling to contain himself.

“What didn’t fail?” I asked.

“Gravity. It didn’t turn off.” Then he laughed uncontrollably.

This was a reference to the prediction that gravity would supposedly turn off for seven seconds on August 12, sending humanity into chaos and causing us all to fall into the sky. Except, of course, for the bunker protected elite, who would apparently be safe underground, because when you are inventing a global catastrophe involving the fundamental structure of the universe suddenly malfunctioning, you should always remember to include a secret underground survival program for rich people and, apparently, the aluminum foil hatted enthusiasts who secured their own shelters and waited anxiously for the gravity flip.

This adds realism to the conspiracy.

Anyone who had taken an introductory physics course understood the absurdity of the claim. Everyone else? Well, I have little doubt that somewhere, someone secured their bunker, wrapped their head in aluminum foil and waited anxiously for the Great Gravity Flip.

Then August 12 came.

Gravity stubbornly continued doing its job. People remained attached to the Earth. Coffee stayed in coffee cups. Airplanes did not suddenly accelerate toward Alpha Centauri. The planet continued its long and apparently uneventful tradition of not turning fundamental physics into a seven second prank.

I am curious how long the conspiracy theorists sat chained to the wall in the dark, diligently snacking on beef jerky, waiting for the Great Gravity Flip to end the world. You have to figure that there’s a point where they say, “maybe that’s not going to happen”. Was it August 13? 14? September 12? Patiently waiting a full month is definitive, isn’t it?

My friend found this hilarious. Unfortunately, there is a more serious point hiding underneath the joke.

People struggle with gravity. It takes a physical toll. It takes an intellectual toll, particularly if you don’t know any better. And apparently, for some people, it takes a psychological toll severe enough that they become convinced the universe has an off switch that somebody forgot to password protect.

The strange thing is that gravity really is difficult, not because scientists don’t understand it. We understand an enormous amount about how gravity behaves. It is difficult because every day human intuition about gravity is wrong in ways that would surprise most people.

The Ground Is Pushing Against You

Let’s start with something that sounds completely backwards. You are not standing on the Earth because you are simply being pulled downward by a magical invisible suction force. Not exactly.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a freely falling object is doing something remarkably natural. It is following the closest thing possible to a straight path through curved spacetime.

Try to visualize this. The thing we call falling is, in a very real sense, the natural motion. The thing preventing you from falling is the ground.

When you jump out of an airplane, setting aside air resistance, you feel weightless. That is not because gravity has disappeared. Gravity is still very much there. You and the airplane are simply moving along paths determined by the geometry of spacetime. For a brief period, nothing is holding you up. You are in free fall and strangely enough, freefall feels weightless.

Now consider what happens when you stand on the ground. Your natural freefall path would take you toward the center of the Earth, but the Earth objects. Take that literally.

The atoms in the ground resist being pushed through one another. Electromagnetic forces prevent your feet from passing through the floor and continuing along their freefall path. The ground pushes upward on you. We’ll look at electromagnetic resistance when we talk about nuclear fusion in a couple of weeks.

That upward force is what you experience as weight. Near the Earth’s surface, the proper acceleration associated with standing on the ground is approximately 9.8 meters per second squared.

Then there is the bizarre part. When you are standing perfectly still on the ground, you are not following a force free path through spacetime. The ground is constantly interfering with you.

Gravity is not merely hard on your feet. From a certain perspective, your feet spend your entire life engaged in a furious argument with the planet. Spend a day hiking and you’ll probably concede that point.

Newton Wasn’t Wrong

At this point, Sir Isaac Newton deserves a defense. Newton described gravity as an attractive force between masses. The Earth attracts you. You attract the Earth. The Earth wins that particular argument because it has considerably more mass.

Newton’s explanation is not nonsense and it is not obsolete. Newtonian gravity remains astonishingly useful and astonishingly correct. Engineers use it. Astronomers use it. Space missions rely on it. It predicts an enormous range of everyday phenomena with extraordinary precision. NASA still notes that Newtonian physics works extremely well for spacecraft operating at ordinary solar system velocities, with relativistic corrections becoming important when greater precision is required.

If you are calculating the trajectory of a baseball, you do not need to solve Einstein’s field equations. You could use them, but that would be like hiring a symphony orchestra to play “Happy Birthday” for sixty seconds. Technically impressive, but wildly unnecessary.

Newton’s theory does have limits. It becomes inadequate when gravity is extremely strong or when measurements become sufficiently precise that relativistic effects matter. That is where Albert Einstein enters the story.

Einstein Didn’t Find a Giant Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner

Newton described what gravity does extremely well. Einstein provided a deeper description of how gravity works.

In general relativity, matter and energy affect the geometry of spacetime. The Earth changes the geometry of the spacetime around itself. The Sun changes it more. Black holes change it so dramatically that our ordinary intuition starts smoking and asking for a break. Blackholes probably deserve their own article.

Objects moving freely through this curved geometry follow paths called geodesics. You can think of a geodesic as the straightest possible path through a curved geometry. The problem is that “straight” stops meaning quite what you think it means when spacetime itself is curved. To the object following a geodesic, its path is locally perfectly straight. An observer using a different reference frame may describe that same path as curved or accelerated.

That is why the famous image of a bowling ball sitting on a stretched rubber sheet is useful, but also misleading. It helps people visualize curvature, but it also makes people ask what is pulling the bowling ball downward to create the dent in the first place.

The answer, unfortunately, is not another rubber sheet. Nor is the universe resting on a giant cosmic trampoline supported by three elephants standing on a turtle.

Physics has rigid standards. Usually.

The important point is that the Earth is not simply sucking you downward like a celestial vacuum cleaner. In general relativity, freely falling objects move through curved spacetime along their natural paths. The ground prevents you from doing that and that resistance is what you feel.

So, strangely enough, the feeling of standing still is not quite as physically simple as it appears.

Physics has an Annoying Habit

Physics is an odd scientific discipline in that it answers questions by asking other questions. Physics is often described as the science of understanding how the universe works, but it also addresses a particular kind of “why”.

Not the philosophical why, not the spiritual why, not the metaphysical “Why are we here?” Physics is unlikely to answer those questions, no matter how good we get at it.

Physics is more interested in questions like “Why does this object accelerate?” or “Why does light bend near a massive object?” or “Why did my coffee fall off the table immediately after I assured everyone that gravity was not going to turn off?”

Physics answers those questions through cause and effect, mathematical models and natural laws. It also has a particularly annoying habit in that every time it answers a question, it immediately creates another one.

Why do things fall? Gravity.

Why does gravity behave the way it does? It relies on the geometry of spacetime and its relationship with matter and energy.

Why does spacetime have those properties? Well, now we’re getting somewhere interesting.

Why do particles have mass? Some of the answer involves their interaction with the Higgs field, but that isn’t the whole story. Most of the mass of ordinary matter, such as protons and neutrons, comes from the energy associated with the strong nuclear force and the motion and interactions of their constituent particles.

Why do fundamental particles and fields exist at all? Well … we can do this all night. Eventually, someone will have to order dessert.

This is one of the great frustrations and joys of science.

There is no final PowerPoint slide labeled:

CONGRATULATIONS.

YOU NOW KNOW EVERYTHING.

Every answer opens another door. Behind that door is another question. Behind that question is another equation. Behind that equation is probably a physicist who hasn’t slept since 1979.

Physics was Supposed to Be Almost Finished

There is a famous story about Max Planck.

When Planck began studying physics in Munich in 1874, his professor, Philipp von Jolly, reportedly portrayed physics as an almost fully developed science and encouraged Plank to seek a different field of study. He said there were still things to clean up, but the basic structure was largely complete. Planck went into physics anyway, claiming that he simply wanted to understand.

This view of physics as being almost complete was not as ridiculous as it sounds. Newtonian mechanics were enormously successful. Maxwell’s equations had unified electricity and magnetism. Thermodynamics was well established. The universe appeared to be following a reasonably orderly instruction manual.

Then physics discovered a few minor problems. Atoms, relativity, quantum mechanics, radioactivity, the structure of matter, the uncertainty principle, the fact that particles sometimes behave like waves, the fact that measuring something can affect what you measure. And the minor inconvenience that our two most successful theories of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, still do not fit together into a complete theory of quantum gravity. Other than that, everything was basically done.

Planck helped launch the quantum revolution. Einstein transformed our understanding of space, time and gravity. Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Richard Feynman and countless others expanded our understanding of reality into territory that would have sounded completely insane just a few generations earlier.

Sit down, Doctor von Jolly. Your performance evaluation won’t be smooth.

For all we know, we still have enormous unanswered questions. We don’t know exactly how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity into a complete theory of quantum gravity. We don’t fully understand dark matter. We don’t know what dark energy actually is, although we have to acknowledge that it is less “dark” and more “invisible”. We don’t know why the fundamental constants of nature have precisely the values they do. We do not know everything about the universe. Not even close. And that is the point.

For all our accumulated knowledge, we are still scratching the surface of what the universe has left to reveal.

Ignorance is Not the Same as a Conspiracy

There is an important difference between saying, “scientists don’t yet know everything about gravity” and saying, “therefore gravity might turn off for seven seconds because the government is hiding the truth from you.” One represents intellectual humility. The other represents intellectual malpractice with an Instagram account.

Science does not claim to possess every answer. Science claims something much more modest and much more powerful. It provides a method for testing ideas against reality.

You make a prediction, you perform an experiment, you gather evidence. Other people try to prove you wrong. If the idea survives that process, it earns a little more confidence. Not eternal certainty. Not infallibility. Just a little more confidence.

That distinction matters because a scientific theory is not something scientists believe because it feels right. It is a model that survives repeated attempts to demonstrate that it is wrong by a bunch of competitive jerks, otherwise known as scientists, who would really prefer to get to the finish line first.

Gravity has been tested repeatedly and extensively. We have tested it with falling objects, planets, spacecraft, atomic clocks, gravitational waves and satellite systems. GPS, for example, has to account for both special and general relativity to maintain its accuracy.

Gravity has been subjected to far more scrutiny than most people put into reading their Facebook feed and yet a viral social media post can still convince someone that gravity is scheduled for a seven second maintenance outage.

The Real Problem Isn’t That People Ask Questions

Asking questions is good. Doubting is good. Questioning authority is sometimes essential. Science itself is built on skepticism. If Albert Einstein had accepted every scientific assumption handed to him, he would have had a much quieter career, probably staying a patent clerk for the rest of his life.

The problem is what happens when skepticism becomes selective. Scientists? Suspicious. Universities? Corrupt. NASA? Obviously hiding something. Tens of thousands of physicists working independently across scores of countries? Part of the conspiracy.

A guy with a profile picture of smoke rings explaining quantum gravity from the passenger seat of a pickup truck? Finally, an unbiased source.

Real skepticism applies the same standards to the things we want to believe as the things we want to reject. That is difficult. It requires admitting that we can be wrong. It requires changing our minds. It requires occasionally discovering that the person we mocked yesterday was correct and then being humble about it. Science can not survive without humility.

My friend and I have laughed about this gravity conspiracy for a good six months and he will undoubtedly continue reminding me of it for years to come. Gravity did not turn off. There is no known mechanism by which gravity can simply take a seven second coffee break.

That is a very different statement from saying that physics has solved every mystery surrounding gravity. It has not.

Small Minds Prefer Simple Conspiracies

Perhaps that is what bothers me most about treating gravity as a conspiracy theory.

The universe is already astonishing. We live on a small rocky planet orbiting a massive nuclear furnace whose mass curves the spacetime around it. That curvature influences the paths of planets, stars and light. We have learned to detect ripples in spacetime produced by collisions between black holes billions of light years away. We have placed atomic clocks in satellites and discovered that time passes at different rates depending on motion and gravity. GPS would not work properly without accounting for relativistic effects.

We have discovered particles so strange that even professional physicists sometimes have to stop and say, with astonishment, “Yes, that really is what the experiment says.”

Reality does not need to be made more exciting with imaginary secret bunkers and seven second gravity failures. The truth is already weird enough. Conspiracy theories offer something science often refuses to provide. Certainty, simple villains, hidden knowledge and, best of all, the opportunity to feel smarter than everyone else without doing the exhausting work of actually learning something.

That is the tragedy of the small mind. It looks at a universe filled with mystery and sees only a conspiracy. It looks at unanswered questions and mistakes uncertainty for weakness. It confuses “we don’t know yet” for “anything is possible”. But anything is not possible.

Reality has rules and although we may not yet understand all of them, we will spend centuries discovering new ones. We may discover that some of the things we currently believe require revision.

That is not science failing. That is science working.

Science is not a secret plot designed by the bunker dwelling elite. It is the collective, occasionally messy, frequently argumentative and remarkably successful effort to lay a few more inches of asphalt across the map of human understanding.

Gravity did not turn off on August 12. No one fell into the sky. The elite did not emerge triumphantly from their secret bunkers. The Earth continued rotating. The Moon continued orbiting. The universe continued behaving according to physical laws that took generations of human curiosity, mathematics, experimentation, argument, failure and genius to begin understanding. Tomorrow, gravity will almost certainly continue doing exactly the same thing.

Almost certainly, because science always leaves room for evidence. If someone tells you that gravity is scheduled to turn off again next Tuesday, don’t start building a bunker. Start by asking for their source. Then ask them how gravity is supposed to turn itself back on.

Those are reasonable questions. They are also the sort of questions that science is good at answering.

Until we cultivate some basic scientific literacy, however, the human appetite for sensational nonsense probably won’t turn off any more readily than gravity itself.

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Posted in Culture, Science | Tagged Albert Einstein, August 12, conspiracy theory, Erwin Schrödinger, general relativity, geodesic, gravity, Isaac Newton, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Philipp von Jolly, physics, relativity, Richard Feynman, science, spacetime, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli | Leave a comment

The Future We Have Yet to Build

Posted on 2026-09-08 by The Narrator

I like science fiction, but not all of it. A great deal of science fiction is little more than technological window dressing wrapped around a familiar story. Somebody gets a spaceship, somebody else gets a laser gun, somebody discovers a mysterious power and eventually somebody blows something up. That’s not a story. That’s a sequence of special effects.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Sometimes you want popcorn. Other times you want Shakespeare. The problem is when popcorn is mistaken for philosophy.

The science fiction that interests me is the kind that asks uncomfortable questions about where technology is taking us and, more importantly, where we are taking technology.

Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke asked these questions in very different philosophical ways. Jules Verne imagined technologies that did not yet exist and then explored what humanity might do with them. Alexander Belyaev similarly used speculative technology to examine the consequences of changing the boundaries of human capability.

All of them wrestled with the evolution of humanity running parallel to the evolution of technology. They examined how human ethics, societal structures and moral responsibility stretch when confronted with machine intelligence, deep space or automated power. While some of those early literary works could be structurally dry, their core inquiry was vital, “What happens to human nature when our capability outpaces our wisdom?”

Their stories were not simply about the machines. They were about us. What happens when technology changes faster than society? What happens when we acquire capabilities that our institutions, ethics and psychology are not prepared to handle? What happens when humanity becomes more powerful without becoming more mature?

Those are the questions I love about science fiction and they are the reason I keep coming back to Star Trek.

A Different Kind of Space Opera

I have written quite a bit about Star Wars over the years, most of it with varying degrees of affection and mockery.

I enjoy Star Wars, but I have never understood the insistence that it is some profound exploration of the human condition. At its heart, Star Wars is a classic good-versus-evil story. A young hero discovers a special destiny, acquires a mentor, joins a rebellion and confronts a tyrant. It is a wonderful story. It is also a very old one.

Dune gives us a young man on a desert planet who discovers a special destiny and eventually leads a rebellion against an empire.

The Last Starfighter gives us a young man who discovers that his videogame skills qualify him to fight an actual interstellar war.

The Lord of the Rings gives us a small humble young man who leaves his quiet home, receives the help of a wise mentor and embarks on a quest to destroy a powerful evil.

Harry Potter gives us an ordinary orphan who discovers that he possesses extraordinary powers, enters a hidden world and eventually confronts a dark wizard.

Eragon gives us a poor farm boy who discovers a mystical object, receives training from an older mentor and joins a rebellion against a tyrant.

There is nothing inherently wrong with classic archetypes and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this formula. It is a great formula, but it is a formula and in Star Wars we essentially get variations of the same basic story three times in three trilogies, operating on familiar, predictable tracks.

Different heroes, different villains, different planets, same mythological machinery, all linked together by the same thread.

Star Trek was doing something fundamentally different. It wasn’t asking “who is the chosen one?” It was asking, “What kind of civilization do we become if we survive long enough to reach the stars?”

That’s a much more interesting question.

The Future as a Mirror

When Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966, America was a very different place. The United States was wrestling with civil rights, racial violence, the Vietnam War, Cold War paranoia and profound social upheaval.

Television was filled with westerns, family comedies and conventional dramas. And then along came a television show about a starship traveling through the galaxy and in it the aliens were often the least important part.

The real subject was us. The genius of Star Trek was that it used the future to talk about the present. The stars were the setting. Humanity was the topic.

The Enterprise carried something extraordinary into the future, a crew that represented a world that had not yet arrived. Nyota Uhura was a black woman serving as a respected bridge officer. Hikaru Sulu was Japanese. Pavel Chekov was Russian. Spock was half human and half Vulcan.

They weren’t there as symbolic mascots of the show. They were professionals. They were scientists, engineers, officers, navigators and communicators. They worked together. They argued. They saved one another. They trusted one another. They were simply members of the crew. Instead of presenting a dystopian wasteland or a story of endless conquest, Star Trek imagined a future where humanity had overcome many of its oldest divisions and ventured into the cosmos not simply to conquer, but to learn.

The National Air and Space Museum notes that the show’s depiction of a racially integrated multinational crew working successfully together, alongside its treatment of contemporary social and political issues, pushed the boundaries of network television.

That wasn’t merely representation. It was a proposition that this is what the future could look like.

Nichelle Nichols later recalled that Martin Luther King Jr encouraged her not to leave the show because of the significance of Uhura’s role. NASA would eventually recruit Nichols to help attract women and minorities to its astronaut program and the agency credits her campaign with helping inspire hundreds of applicants.

Think about the impact of this. A fictional television character helped influence real people who would eventually explore actual space. That’s more than entertainment. That’s feedback between imagination and reality.

The Aliens Were Us

The genius of Star Trek was that it could talk about almost anything without appearing to talk about it. The Enterprise could encounter an alien civilization and suddenly the writers could ask whether racism was rational. They could encounter a strange culture and suddenly they could ask whether our assumptions about gender, sexuality or social class were actually universal or merely familiar. They could encounter a planet in crisis and ask what happens when economic interests collide with environmental survival. They could encounter an enemy and ask whether war changes the morality of the people fighting it.

The famous example from the original series is almost comically unsubtle. In the show’s last season the crew meets two aliens who hate one another because each has black skin on one side of his body and white skin on the other. Their markings are reversed. That’s it. That is the entire metaphor. And yet it worked, because the absurdity of the premise exposes the absurdity of the prejudice.

Star Trek didn’t need to tell us that racism was irrational. It gave racism a different costume and let us recognize ourselves.

The franchise kept doing this.

The Next Generation explored McCarthyism and political hysteria. It examined PTSD and the treatment of veterans. It confronted gender identity and sexual conformity.

Deep Space Nine went even further. It openly dealt with racism, colonialism, war, religious extremism, economic inequality and the morality of fighting an existential conflict. The Ferengi become a vehicle for discussing labor organizing. Starfleet’s supposedly enlightened morality collided with the ugly compromises of wartime. The question was no longer simply whether the Federation is good. The question became, “What happens when good people are forced to make terrible choices?”

That’s science fiction I can sink my teeth into.

Even environmental issues became part of the conversation. Star Trek repeatedly explored pollution, resource exploitation, ecological collapse and the tension between economic interests and environmental survival.

The formula was remarkably consistent. Identify a flaw in ourselves. Dress it as an alien problem. Put it on television. Let humanity recognize itself.

Then There Was the Technology

There is another reason Star Trek mattered.

It didn’t just imagine a better society. It imagined better tools. The communicator looked ridiculous until people started carrying mobile phones. The tricorder imagined portable medical and scientific sensing. The PADD looked suspiciously like a tablet computer decades before tablets became commonplace. Replicators made things. They developed needle-free medicine. The ship’s computer talked to its crew. Doors opened automatically. People conducted video conversations across enormous distances. Universal translation was treated as a mundane engineering problem. Computers became ubiquitous rather than mysterious.

Many of these ideas were not simply inventions that Star Trek magically predicted. The relationship between science fiction and technology is more interesting than that. Science fiction gives engineers something to imagine.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum notes, for example, that Motorola’s StarTAC flip phone was explicitly a nod to the Star Trek communicator. That influence goes in both directions. Technology inspires science fiction. Science fiction inspires technology. Then technology changes what science fiction can imagine.

That feedback loop is one of the most fascinating things about our civilization.

There is a temptation to give Star Trek credit for inventing the future. That’s not quite right. Automatic doors were not invented by Gene Roddenberry. Neither were mobile phones, tablets or video conferencing.

But Star Trek did something almost as important. It normalized them. It showed generations of viewers what a technologically integrated future might look like and gave engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs something concrete to imagine.

Of course, Star Trek got plenty wrong, too. We still don’t have transporters. We haven’t invented warp drive. And, frankly, I am perfectly happy not to have time travel. The implications of that are terrifying.

Then there is one particularly amusing miss. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean-Luc Picard worked on Fermat’s Last Theorem, describing it as an 800 year old unsolved problem. It wasn’t. Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, with the proof formally published in 1995.

Clearly, Picard skipped algebraic number theory that day and ended up in an embarrassing situation on screen.

Why Did I Love It?

The original Star Trek came and went before I was born, but when I was a middle school kid, the syndicated episodes became appointment television. I would run home from school to watch a show that had been canceled before I ever existed and I have occasionally wondered why.

The acting was frequently melodramatic. The special effects were primitive. The monsters were people wearing rubber suits. The aliens often looked suspiciously like humans with decorative forehead appliances. And yet something about it worked.

Perhaps it was the sense of possibility. Perhaps it was the Enterprise itself, a machine that could leave Earth behind and simply go looking. Perhaps it was Spock, teaching a kid that being different wasn’t necessarily a weakness. Perhaps it was Uhura and Sulu and Chekov, quietly presenting a future in which the divisions that seemed so enormous in my own world had become irrelevant. Perhaps it was the idea that the people on that bridge were not fighting over who owned the universe. They were exploring it.

Maybe that was what captured me. The future wasn’t presented as something to fear. It was presented as somewhere we might actually want to go.

The Part That Hasn’t Aged

I have not watched the newer Star Trek shows on Paramount+. I simply don’t have the time to binge watch television and there is only so much television one can consume before it begins consuming one’s life.

I also wasn’t particularly impressed by J.J. Abrams’ reboot. It was exciting. It was fast. It was spectacular. I felt he was much more interested in making Star Trek into an action movie than in making it into a philosophical one. To be fair, it did have its moments and I give it credit for continuing to push the characters in directions the original television series could not have explored as openly, but for me, something was missing.

The old Star Trek could spend an hour arguing about whether a machine had a soul. It could put two civilizations on opposite sides of an ethical dilemma and refuse to give the audience an easy answer. It could have Kirk, Spock and McCoy standing in a room talking and somehow that could be enough.

That is increasingly rare television and perhaps increasingly rare culture. We have become remarkably good at reacting to one another and remarkably bad at talking with one another.

Sixty Years Later

The greatest accomplishment of Star Trek might be that it didn’t simply predict some of our technology. It predicted a way of thinking about the future. It imagined that humanity might eventually become powerful without becoming monstrous, that technology might serve people rather than merely entertain them, that nations that once hated one another might eventually cooperate, that diversity could be an advantage rather than a threat, that exploration could be more important than conquest, that science could be something to celebrate, that diplomacy could be more heroic than violence and that the future could be better than the present, not because technology would magically fix us, but because we might choose to fix ourselves.

Not all of those predictions have come true. Some are still painfully far away. Some may never come true. And that’s okay, because perhaps the purpose of great science fiction isn’t to tell us exactly what tomorrow will look like. Perhaps its purpose is to give us something to aim at.

When I was twelve years old, I watched people step onto the bridge of the Enterprise and look toward the stars. Sixty years after Star Trek first appeared on television, we have not reached its 23^rd century. We have, however, inherited pieces of its imagination. We carry communicators in our pockets. We talk to computers. We hold entire libraries in our hands. We video chat with people on the other side of the planet. We can edit genes, land spacecraft on other worlds and look backward through billions of years of cosmic history.

And yet the most important part of Star Trek still isn’t the technology. It is the assumption underneath all of it that we can become better. That is an extraordinarily optimistic thing to believe about humanity. It may also be one of the most necessary, because the future is not something waiting for us. We are building it.

Every technology we create, every institution we preserve, every prejudice we abandon, every problem we decide is worth solving, every child who looks at the stars and thinks, “I want to go there”, is a reflection of this imaginary future.

Science fiction can give us weapons. It can give us monsters. It can give us empires and rebellions and chosen ones and dark lords, but the best science fiction gives us something much more difficult. It gives us a reason to believe that tomorrow might be worth building.

Sixty years ago, Star Trek invited us aboard and years later, after watching those syndicated reruns after school, the quiet optimism of this vision still holds its power for me. I’m still looking up to the stars. The greatest science fiction does not predict the future. It gives us a better future to aspire to.

Happy 60^th birthday, Star Trek.

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Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Society | Tagged Alexander Belyaev, Arthur C Clarke, Dune, entertainment, Eragon, Fermat’s Last Theorem, future, Gene Roddenberry, Harry Potter, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Robert A Heinlein, science, science fiction, space opera, Star Trek, Star Wars, technology, The Last Starfighter, The Lord of the Rings | Leave a comment

The One Percent Civilization: Why You Don’t Have to Be a Genius to Change the World

Posted on 2026-09-03 by The Narrator

A while back, I wrote about the daughter of a friend who reached an extraordinary milestone in her musical education. It was a story about talent, hard work, risk and the terrifying decision to pursue something difficult when there is absolutely no guarantee that the universe will reward you with fame, fortune or a Grammy.

As I reflected on her journey, a reader posed a provocative question about careers, “Does our culture focus too much on the average salary, missing the true fulfillment of reaching the top of a difficult field?”

It’s a fair inquiry, but it exposes a fundamental flaw in how we measure human success. Since the article touched on the tension between pursuing a “safe” career and chasing a dream, do we misinterpret true success?

My short answer is yes.
My longer answer is that I think we may be asking the wrong question entirely.

Our culture has developed a peculiar binary view of success. You are either a virtuoso or a failure, a Supreme Court litigator or a paper-pusher, a platinum-selling rockstar or a burnout. We build monuments to the winners, suffering from a reverse “Tall Poppy Syndrome” where we celebrate only the blossom and treat the root system supporting it as invisible infrastructure. We advertise glory, we aim for glory and we kneel before glory.

Somewhere along the way we developed a peculiar national obsession with deciding whether every educational choice can be justified by a spreadsheet.

We ask:

What is the average starting salary?
What is the return on investment?
How many jobs are available?
What percentage of graduates are employed?
Can you make enough money to afford a house before the Sun expands into a red giant?

These are reasonable questions. Unfortunately, they are not the only questions. Sometimes they quietly transform education from the process of developing a human being into a very expensive audition for the labor market.

The Cult of the Extraordinary

We love to teach history as if it were a sequence of dramatic “Eureka!” moments performed by solitary geniuses. Our culture loves extraordinary people. We love the NFL quarterback. We love the rockstar. We love the actor walking down the red carpet. We love the lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court. We love the entrepreneur who starts a company in a garage and becomes a billionaire before turning thirty-five. We especially love the scientist who stands in front of a whiteboard, has a sudden flash of inspiration and apparently discovers an entirely new branch of physics before lunch.

We celebrate the people standing on top of the mountain.

Then we look down the mountain and become strangely disappointed in everyone else. That is the problem. We have built a culture that advertises glory as if it were the expected destination.

Every child is told to dream big, which is wonderful, until “dream big” quietly becomes, “if you don’t become extraordinary, perhaps you didn’t dream hard enough.”

That is a terrible way to measure a human life and it is an even worse way to build a civilization. Maybe we’re educating children as contestants in a tournament when we should be educating them as contributors to a civilization.

Most Progress Does Not Come with a Nobel Prize

I wrote my master’s thesis years ago. The work was original, but it was not created in a vacuum. It was built on the work of people who came before me. They developed theories, conducted experiments, collected data, made mistakes, corrected mistakes and left behind a body of knowledge that allowed me to begin somewhere other than the Stone Age.

Then I added something of my own.

I did not discover a new fundamental force of physics. I did not create Nobel Prize level science. I did not emerge from the laboratory, rip off my safety goggles and announce to the world that I had solved everything.

What I did was smaller. I refined knowledge. I added decimal points. I explored a pathway that had not previously been examined. In the grand scientific vernacular, I extended the map of the known world and planted a little flag at the edge, where the pavement stops.

Then someone else can come along and keep laying asphalt. Someone did. My work is cited by others, those who came after me, refining science, just like I did.

That’s how science actually works. Not always through one magnificent leap. Often through thousands of people taking small steps. The breakthrough paper depends on the previous paper. The previous paper depends on another experiment. That experiment depends on a better instrument. The instrument depends on an engineer. The engineer depends on a technician. The technician depends on someone who figured out how to manufacture a component one percent more accurately than it was manufactured before. Eventually, someone gets the Nobel Prize.

But the Nobel Prize is standing on a mountain made of other people’s incremental work. We build monuments to the person at the summit. We often forget the people who built the mountain.

The One Percent Civilization

I increasingly believe that one of the greatest things we could teach young people is that you do not have to change the entire world. You can push your corner of it a little farther than you found it.

Imagine a civilization in which millions of people did exactly that. The teacher improved the way students understand a difficult concept. The nurse noticed a better way to communicate with frightened patients. The machinist improved precision by one percent. The programmer made a system slightly more reliable. The researcher reduced an error margin. The musician developed a technique that influenced the next generation of performers. The middle manager, yes, even the middle manager, figured out how to stop twelve people from attending a meeting that could have been an email.

Civilization advances.

Not because everyone became a superstar, but because everyone pushed. There is something profoundly powerful about that idea. We tend to think of human progress as a series of giant leaps. The printing press. Electricity. Antibiotics. The computer. The Internet. Artificial intelligence. But between every one of those headlines are millions of smaller improvements that made the giant leap possible.

Human progress is not simply innovation. It is compound innovation. A small improvement makes the next small improvement possible. And then another. And another. Over time, the world becomes unrecognizable.

The person who improves something by one percent may never become famous, but they may help create the conditions that allow someone else to make a ten thousand percent improvement fifty years later. That is not failure. That is civilization.

We Have a Survivorship Bias Problem

Our culture suffers from a severe case of survivorship bias.

We see the successful musician. We do not see the thousands of excellent musicians who never become household names. We see the billionaire entrepreneur. We do not see the engineers, accountants, technicians, designers and managers who built the company. We see the Supreme Court lawyer. We do not see the thousands of lawyers quietly helping ordinary people navigate the legal system. We see the Nobel Prize winner. We do not see the generations of researchers whose work made the discovery possible.

The problem is not that we celebrate extraordinary achievement. We absolutely should. Human beings accomplish astonishing things and those accomplishments deserve celebration. The problem comes when we treat extraordinary achievement as the only achievement worth celebrating.

That creates an impossible standard.

If the goal of becoming a musician is becoming Taylor Swift, virtually everyone will fail. If the goal of studying physics is becoming Albert Einstein, virtually everyone will fail. If the goal is becoming a lawyer like Gerry Spence, virtually everyone will fail. If the goal is becoming a double Nobel Laureate like Marie Curie, virtually everyone will fail.

Perhaps those aren’t the right goals. Perhaps the better question is not “Will you become the most famous person in your field?” Perhaps it is “Can you become good enough to move your field forward?”

That is a radically different definition of success and I think it may be a healthier one.

What Do You Want to Be?

We ask children this question constantly. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It sounds innocent, but it is a strange question when you think about it. It asks a child to select an identity before they have had the opportunity to discover the world or themselves in it.

Doctor.
Lawyer.
Engineer.
Musician.
Teacher.
Astronaut.
Superhero.
Professional dinosaur.

Children are flexible on the details, but the question also suggests that the purpose of education is to arrive at a title. You study so that eventually you can become something.

I wonder if we should occasionally ask a different question.

Where do you want to push?
Where is the frontier that interests you?
Where do you see something that could be better?
What problem do you want to spend your life trying to understand?
What craft do you want to master?
What corner of the world would you like to leave slightly improved?

That question does not require a child to become a superstar, but it does require them to become engaged and engagement may be more important.

The Safety Net of Competence

There is another reason I worry about our obsession with extraordinary success. A civilization can not survive on superstars alone. We need exceptionally competent people everywhere.

We need competent engineers designing bridges, competent nurses caring for patients, competent teachers educating children, competent electricians wiring buildings, competent scientists checking each other’s work, competent technicians maintaining the systems we barely notice until they stop working, competent musicians, writers, plumbers, accountants, farmers, programmers, mechanics and yes, even competent bureaucrats.

Especially competent bureaucrats. Nothing reminds you of the importance of competence quite like trying to renew a driver’s license.

There is enormous social value in raising the floor. We spend enormous energy asking how to produce the next genius. That is a worthwhile question, but perhaps we should spend just as much energy asking, “How do we create a society in which millions of people are exceptionally capable?”

A world filled with competent people who are constantly trying to improve what they do may be more resilient than a world that produces a handful of geniuses while everyone else is told they didn’t quite make the cut.

The future depends on brilliance. It also depends on the person who notices that the machine is making a strange noise and fixes it before the entire factory explodes. Both deserve our respect.

So What is Education For?

This brings me back to education.

I have written before about the value of higher education and the ways it can not be reduced to a simple salary calculation. That does not mean money doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. People have mortgages. People have children. People occasionally enjoy eating.

Telling an eighteen year old to ignore the economic consequences of their educational choices would be irresponsible, but reducing education to economic consequences is also irresponsible.

Education can be preparation for a career. It can also be preparation for citizenship, for curiosity, for community, for understanding the world, for discovering what you are actually capable of doing, for discovering what you are terrible at. That last one can save an enormous amount of time and, potentially, millions of unnecessary explosions.

My own education did not simply provide me with a credential. It gave me experiences, relationships, challenges and opportunities that helped shape the person I eventually became. Some of those experiences had very little to do with the jobs I ultimately held. That does not mean they were wasted.

We have become so obsessed with optimization that we sometimes forget that human beings are not investment portfolios. The goal is not necessarily to maximize every measurable outcome. The goal might be to build a meaningful life while contributing something useful to the people around us.

That is harder to put into a spreadsheet, which is probably why spreadsheets keep trying to avoid the subject.

The Dangerous All-or-Nothing Game

This is where I think our education system may have a genuine problem.

We increasingly measure everything. Test scores, class rankings, acceptance rates, graduation rates, employment rates, starting salaries, institutional rankings, individual rankings, national rankings, probably rankings of the people who rank the rankings.

Measurement is useful, but measurement can also distort behavior.

When every educational institution is competing to demonstrate that it produces winners, there is a powerful temptation to define success narrowly.

The student who attends an elite university and earns an enormous salary becomes evidence of success. The student who becomes a famous artist becomes evidence of success. The student who wins a prestigious award becomes evidence of success.

But what about the student who becomes an excellent teacher? What about the graduate who spends thirty years improving manufacturing processes? What about the musician who never becomes famous, but inspires thousands of students? What about the scientist who never wins a major award, but produces careful, reliable research that helps other people make discoveries? What about the person who discovers the career they originally wanted is wrong for them and changes direction?

Our systems are often uncomfortable with those stories because they do not fit neatly into a promotional brochure, but those stories are the majority of human progress.

Perhaps the problem is not that schools measure outcomes. Perhaps the problem is that we have become too dependent on measuring only the outcomes that are easy to photograph. We can photograph the red carpet. It is much harder to photograph a lab technician spending twenty years perfecting a diagnostic procedure that eventually helps save millions of lives. I know which photograph may matter more.

The Beautiful Risk of Trying

This brings me back to my friend’s daughter and her musical journey.

I do not think the value of her achievement depends entirely on whether she someday becomes famous.

Of course, I hope she achieves everything she dreams of achieving, but the deeper achievement is that she has earned the opportunity to push the boundary of her craft. She has chosen something difficult. She has worked to become better. She has entered a world in which excellence requires enormous discipline and where the odds of becoming a household name are extraordinarily small. And she did it anyway.

There is something beautiful about that.

The safe career versus dream career debate often assumes that there are only two possible outcomes. You pursue the safe path and succeed. Or you pursue the difficult dream and either become a superstar or end up playing violin for spare change outside a grocery store.

Real life is considerably messier. A person can pursue a difficult field and build a meaningful career without becoming famous. A person can study something they love and eventually use those skills in an entirely unexpected profession. A person can pursue a dream, discover it is not what they expected and change direction.

None of those outcomes necessarily represent failure.

I have written about the roads not taken before. Every life contains alternate versions of ourselves. The musician we might have become. The scientist. The entrepreneur. The teacher. The person who took the job in another city. The person who said yes. The person who said no.

We can not live all of those lives, but that does not mean the life we chose must be judged solely by whether it produced the maximum possible income or the greatest possible fame.

Sometimes the road is valuable because of where it takes us along the way.

From Individual Glory to Collective Progress

I think the deepest shift I would like to see in our culture is that we need to move the goalpost from individual glory to collective incrementalism. That does not mean abandoning ambition. It does not mean telling children not to dream big.

Please dream big. We need this! Try to become the greatest musician in the world. Try to discover something extraordinary. Try to argue before the Supreme Court. Try to win the Nobel Prize. Aim for the stars.

Just don’t assume that missing the stars means you failed to achieve lift-off. There is enormous value in becoming one of the thousands of people who move humanity forward. The researcher who adds another decimal point. The engineer who improves a process. The teacher who inspires a future scientist. The thespian who develops the next generation of performers. The technician who makes an experiment possible. The programmer who makes a system work a little better. The student who asks one good question nobody else thought to ask.

Progress does not require everyone to be extraordinary. It requires millions of people refusing to stand still.

Maybe That Should be the Lesson

So, is our education system capable of making this shift? I honestly don’t know. We are deeply invested in rankings. We compare schools. We compare students. We compare salaries. We compare test scores. We compare acceptance letters as if college admissions were the Olympic Games.

Competition has a role, measurement has a role, achievement has a role, but perhaps we need to become more comfortable with a broader definition of success.

Maybe education should not simply ask, “How high can you climb?” That’s the wrong question. Maybe it should ask, “How far can you push the boundary?” Because not everyone will stand on the podium. Not everyone will become famous. Not everyone will win the prize.

Thank goodness. Imagine how exhausting Thanksgiving dinner would be if every relative were a Nobel Prize winner.

Someone still needs to carve the turkey.

The future will be built by extraordinary people, but it will also be built by millions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in very small increments. Perhaps that is what we should teach our children. You do not have to become a legend. You do not have to become the best person who ever lived. You do not have to discover everything. You do not even have to know exactly where you are going. You need to find something worth caring about.

Learn everything you can. Become exceptionally capable. Then push. Push the boundary one percent farther than it was before you arrived. Leave a flag at the edge of the pavement. Someone else will come along and maybe they will keep laying the asphalt, building on what you built, on what the people before you built.

That is how we got here and, if we’re lucky, that is how we’ll get somewhere even better.

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Posted in Education | Tagged Albert Einstein, career, civilization, education, entrepreneur, excellence, fame, Gerry Spence, lawyer, Marie Curie, motivation, music, Nobel Prize, quarterback, red carpet, rockstar, STEM, success, Taylor Swift | Leave a comment

Take the Extra Minute Before You Go Batty

Posted on 2026-08-29 by The Narrator

It’s that time of the year. International Bat Night is August 29 to 30, 2026. Caves have everything Halloween has taught us to love. Darkness. Mystery. Bats. And the possibility that something unearthly is lurking just around the corner. Okay, maybe that last one is mostly Hollywood.

But if you’re thinking about exploring a wild cave because you’ve always wanted to see what is down there, #TakeTheExtraMinute before you go batty, because caves are fascinating places to explore, but they are not simply hiking trails with a roof.

While bats navigate total darkness with effortless echolocation, humans lack built-in sonar. Entering a cave without preparation turns an exciting subterranean adventure into a high stakes search and rescue operation, so if you’ve never been caving before, curiosity is not a replacement for experience.

Bats navigate in the dark. You don’t.

That may be the most important thing to remember before entering a cave. A wild cave can go from “I can see just fine” to “I can’t see my hand in front of my face” in an instant.

Your phone flashlight is not a cave light. Neither is the tiny flashlight you keep in the junk drawer. And having just one light is not a backup plan.

Bring three lights. Your primary light. A backup light. And a backup for your backup. Carry enough batteries or power to keep all three operating for the entire trip, because when your only light dies 1,000 feet underground, the solution isn’t to turn around and walk toward the sunlight. You can’t. There is no light except for the one you bring.

Your first caving trip should not be an adventure in improvisation

If you’ve never gone underground before, go with someone who has. Better yet, connect with a local chapter of the National Speleological Society. The NSS has more than 250 local chapters, known as grottos, and specifically describes them as a way for people who are just starting to learn caving skills and meet experienced cavers.

That’s a much better introduction to caving than watching a few videos on YouTube, picking up some dubious gear at a garage sale and deciding that you look more adventurous than Indiana Jones.

Experienced cavers can teach you things that are difficult to learn from a checklist:

How to move through tight spaces.
How to read the cave.
How to recognize hazards.
How to navigate.
How to protect fragile formations.
And perhaps most importantly, when to turn around.

Dress for the cave, not for the parking lot.

It may be a beautiful 80 degree afternoon outside. That doesn’t mean the cave is warm. Wild caves can be cold, wet, muddy, slippery and physically demanding. They can also be hot, have chasms instead of floors, water hazards, breakdown, pits… Conditions vary enormously from one cave to another, so learn what you’re getting into before you enter. If your target cave requires cave diving or vertical skills you don’t have, know that some caves can simply become a creative way to die.

Your clothing and equipment should match the actual cave environment. At a minimum, think about:

Gloves that provide protection and grip.
Ankle-high boots with good tread.
Knee pads and possibly elbow pads.
Synthetic wicking layers.
A properly fitted helmet.
Food and water.
Three reliable lights.
A map appropriate for the cave.

And remember what that helmet is actually for. It’s not a fashion accessory. It’s there because caves have ceilings. And ceilings have rocks. And those rocks love to hang around until an unsuspecting caver gets too close and then you discover that rock is hard. Wear a helmet.

What Goes in Must Come Out: The No-Maid Zone.

Eventually, on even the best planned wild cave trip, nature is going to call and unlike the trailhead, there is no bathroom around the corner. There is also no cleaning crew. There is no maid service in caves. Nobody comes through after your adventure romp with a mop, a bucket and a cheerful little name tag.

Cave environments are often exceptionally poor at dealing with human waste. Leaving anything behind pollutes fragile environments and ruins the cave for everyone. That means if your body has something to output, it leaves the cave with you. All of it.

So before you head underground, think about what happens when your bladder or your digestive system decides it has an agenda of its own.

For shorter trips, use the bathroom before you enter. For longer trips, pack a plan.

A pee bottle can be one of the simplest solutions for urination, particularly in a cave where finding an appropriate place to relieve yourself may be difficult or environmentally damaging. Label it clearly, keep it accessible and, this is important, make sure you know which bottle is the pee bottle. Because there are some discoveries you really don’t want to make underground.

For solid waste, cavers may use a “cave burrito”, a waste management system that allows human waste and toilet paper to be packed out rather than left in the cave. The exact system should follow the requirements of the cave, land manager and the local caving organization.

Think of the waste management system as a burrito with absolutely no salsa. Typically, you’ll pack a dedicated waste bag kit, affectionately known in the caving community as a “cave burrito”. This treasure includes double-layered heavy-duty zip-top bags, toilet paper, hand sanitizer and a dash of kitty litter or baking soda inside the outer bag to neutralize odor and securely contain everything until you can dispose of it properly.

It might feel a little awkward to discuss, but packing out your waste is standard speleological etiquette. Practice assembling your setup at home first so you aren’t surprised in the dark!

Seriously.

The first time you discover that your carefully packed waste-management system is confusing, awkward or impossible to operate should not be 1,000 feet underground, wearing gloves, covered in mud and holding a headlamp in your teeth.

Because there is no maid service in caves. There is no underground janitor waiting around the next corner.

There’s just you, your cave burrito and the realization that you packed it in, so you’re packing it out. Everything. That’s the deal.

Yes, it’s awkward.
Yes, it’s funny.
And yes, it’s part of being a responsible caver.
A distinguished elderly speleologist would do the exact same thing.

Pack it in.
Pack it out.
Everything.
Leave nothing but footprints.

Because caves are not disposable environments and your bathroom problem shouldn’t become someone else’s adventure, just because you crawled 500 feet underground. #TakeTheExtraMinute before you go underground and make a bathroom plan. Your future self and everyone else in the cave will thank you. Because no search and rescue team wants the description “subject last seen carrying an improvised toilet” to be a part of the mission briefing.

And you might find you like the cave burrito enough that you’ll use it everywhere you go.

Know where you’re going

Getting lost underground is a very different problem from getting lost on a hiking trail.

There may be multiple passages.
There may be intersections.
There may be crawlways that look remarkably similar.
There may be routes that become impassable because of water.

Navigation markers can help, but only when they’re used appropriately. Know the cave’s established navigation practices. Use maps. Pay attention to your route. Don’t assume you’ll remember every turn.

And never assume that because you entered through one hole in the ground, you’ll automatically find that same hole again.

Tell someone on the surface who’s not going with you where you’re going and when you expect to return. Give them enough information to recognize that you are overdue and know who to call for help.

That’s not paranoia. That’s planning. That’s your parachute to get out of the cave.

Leave the cave the way you found it

Caves aren’t theme parks. They’re ecosystems. They’re geological records. They’re archaeological and paleontological resources. And for bats and other creatures, they can be home.

Resist the temptation to touch formations, break things off, move rocks unnecessarily, disturb wildlife or leave anything behind. Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints and even those should be minimized where appropriate. Kill nothing but time.

Follow the landowner’s rules and the specific requirements for the cave. Some caves are closed seasonally or permanently. Some require permits. Some contain sensitive wildlife habitats. Some simply should not be entered by inexperienced visitors.

Respect those restrictions. A cave that isn’t open to you isn’t an invitation to find a secret entrance. It’s a boundary for a reason.

The bat in the room: White-Nose Syndrome

This is where the Halloween imagery stops being funny. North American bats are facing a devastating disease known as White-Nose Syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. The disease has had a major impact on bat populations across North America.

Cavers can inadvertently help spread the fungus by moving contaminated gear between caves. That’s why decontamination matters. Before entering a cave, know the landowner’s rules and any applicable precautions and restrictions.

If you’re caving in an area where White-Nose Syndrome precautions apply, follow the appropriate decontamination procedures, including the current National White-Nose Syndrome Decontamination Protocol from the U.S. Forest Service and its partner agencies. The current protocol was updated in March 2024.

Don’t assume that because your boots look clean, they’re clean enough. Clean for the bats. WNS fatality rates are north of 95%.

#TakeTheExtraMinute

Before you crawl into that dark hole, stop. #TakeTheExtraMinute Ask yourself:

Do I know where I’m going?
Do I know how I’m getting back out?
Do I have three functioning lights?
Do I have the right clothing and protective equipment?
Do I have enough food and water?
Do I have a map and a navigation plan?
Does someone know where I am and when I should be back?
Am I following the landowner’s rules?
Am I protecting the cave and its wildlife?

And if you’ve never done this before:

Am I going with someone who knows what they’re doing?

Because if the answer to any of those questions is ‘no’, that’s not a challenge. It’s your answer regarding going on this trip. Find an experienced caver. Find a local NSS grotto. Learn the skills. Start with an appropriate cave.

Then go have your adventure.

Safe and fun are not opposites

Caving can be an incredible experience. You can crawl through passages that have existed for millions of years. You can see massive formations that never see sunlight. You can discover an ecosystem that most people will never experience.

And yes, you might see a bat. Maybe even several. Maybe a swarm. That’s the magic of it.

But the best adventures aren’t the ones where you barely make it out. They’re the ones where you come home muddy, exhausted, grinning like an idiot, already talking about the next trip.

Safe and fun can absolutely coexist. In fact, a little preparation usually makes the fun better, so this International Bat Night, enjoy the bats. Respect the caves. Learn from people who know the underground world.

And before you disappear into the darkness, #TakeTheExtraMinute.

Because bats navigate in the dark.
You don’t.

Bonus trivia: “Blind as a bat” is a misnomer. In addition to top notch hearing and echolocation, bats also possess some of the keenest eyes among mammals and make up almost a quarter of all known mammal species, second only to rodents, which bats are not!

Happy International Bat Night!

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Posted in Adventure, Holidays, Search and Rescue | Tagged bats, cave savety, caves, caving, conservation, International Bat Night, National Speleological Society, NSS, outdoor safety, preventative SAR, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, search and rescue, spelunking, TakeTheExtraMinute, White Nose Syndrome | Leave a comment

Paleolithic Software and Molecular Magic: The Biohacks of 2126

Posted on 2026-08-24 by The Narrator

In response to my A Second Look at Life Expectancy: What the 1918 Flu Tells Us About the COVID-19 Pandemic, I received a fascinating question:

“The 1918 flu had no ICU, no mRNA platform, not even a flu shot. We built that in a century. What’s the one biohack we’re missing today that the next 100 years will fix?”

That’s a fantastic question. It’s also, inherently, a trap. Thing is, I have absolutely no idea. Nobody does.

Predicting the future is something humanity has proven spectacularly bad at doing. If you asked a physician in 1918 what the future of medicine looked like a hundred years down the road, they might have speculated about larger sanitariums, better mustard plasters or more refined bloodletting charts. They would not have envisioned a computer algorithm sequencing a viral genome in 48 hours and delivering a synthetic mRNA platform to millions of arms within a year.

Predicting what science will accomplish over the next century is a little like asking a medieval peasant to predict the smartphone. You might get an answer. It might even be entertaining, but there’s a pretty good chance the person will spend most of the conversation trying to figure out why you need a tiny illuminated monastery in your pocket.

So consider what follows to be a thought experiment rather than a prediction, with the mandatory disclaimer that I reserve the right to be generally right and precisely wrong.

That said, I suspect the biggest breakthroughs won’t simply be better versions of the medicine we have today. The fundamental “missing link” in modern medicine isn’t just a better pill or a faster vaccine. The breakthroughs may represent a fundamental change in how we interact with biology. And that’s where things get interesting.

The First Biohack: Stop Waiting Until We’re Sick

Modern medicine is astonishing. It is also, in some ways, remarkably primitive.

Imagine your computer’s antivirus software worked like modern medicine. You get infected with malware. Your computer starts behaving strangely. You wait until it crashes. Then you call a technician. The technician takes a look. He runs a diagnostic. You wait for the results. Two days later someone tells you which virus you have. Then they install a patch.

That would be a terrible antivirus system, yet that’s roughly how medicine works today. You don’t usually go to the doctor because your immune system has detected something interesting. You go because you feel terrible. The fever has arrived. The cough has arrived. The pain has arrived. Something is sufficiently wrong that you can no longer pretend everything is fine. Then we start investigating.

One potential revolution over the next century is not a better clinic, but moving from reactive medicine to continuous biological surveillance. Instead of waiting for symptoms, we could continuously monitor the body for changes in physiology, immune activity, molecular markers, infection, inflammation and other signals. Hours before you ever sneeze, a biological sentinel could potentially detect signs of infection and trigger an early warning and, eventually, a localized therapeutic response.

The technology doesn’t necessarily have to look like a microscopic robot swimming around your bloodstream while wearing a tiny lab coat. It could be wearable sensors. It could be increasingly sophisticated diagnostic devices. It could be molecular sensors. It could be some technology we haven’t invented yet because, inconveniently, the future hasn’t released its product roadmap.

The important change is not the gadget. It’s the timing. Imagine detecting an infection hours or days before you become seriously ill. Imagine knowing that your immune system is mounting an abnormal inflammatory response before your lungs are damaged. Imagine detecting a cancerous process when there are a handful of abnormal cells instead of waiting until there is a tumor large enough to introduce itself with a handshake.

The biological equivalent of antivirus software could become one of the most important medical technologies ever developed. In 1918, we couldn’t see the enemy. In 2020, we could identify and sequence it remarkably quickly, but we still didn’t know we were hosting the virus until symptoms flared.

The next step may be making sure we know what’s happening inside us before we feel it. That changes medicine from “You’re sick. Let’s figure out why.” to “Something is changing. Let’s stop it before you get sick.” The next century isn’t about making better medicine for when you’re sick. It’s about making sure the pathogen never gets to set up camp.

That’s a pretty significant upgrade.

The Second Biohack: Teach the Immune System to Stop Overreacting

There is another problem with having an immune system. It is extremely enthusiastic.

Your immune system exists to protect you from things that would very much like to kill you. This is generally useful. Unfortunately, it isn’t always particularly subtle. Sometimes the immune response itself becomes part of the problem.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, healthy young adults suffered unusually high mortality. One proposed explanation involves an aggressive immune response that contributed to severe inflammation and lung damage. We saw related forms of immune dysregulation during COVID-19. In other words, sometimes the body’s defense system can become part of the disaster.

Severe viral infections can produce overwhelming inflammation and immune dysregulation. The result can be devastating damage to organs and tissues even after the immune system has successfully recognized the threat.

We tend to think of infectious disease as a battle between the pathogen and the patient, but there are three combatants: the pathogen, the immune system and the unfortunate person standing in the middle.

That suggests another potential medical revolution. Instead of simply becoming better at killing pathogens, we could become dramatically better at controlling the host response. Think of it as giving the immune system a volume knob.

Right now, the immune system occasionally behaves like the guy who sees a spider in the kitchen and responds by calling in an air strike. The future could give doctors much finer control over the response. Turn inflammation up when it is needed. Turn it down when it becomes dangerous. Direct the immune response toward the pathogen. Prevent collateral damage. Maintain enough aggression to kill the invader without turning the patient’s own organs into the battlefield.

This would be a fundamental change in strategy.

Viruses mutate. Bacteria evolve. New pathogens appear. We currently spend billions of dollars trying to target specific pathogens, but viruses mutate rapidly, forcing us to write endless software updates. New vaccines, new boosters, new antivirals.

What we forget is that the human immune system is comparatively stable. The real biohack is mastering immunostasis, developing a precision control dial for the human immune system. Instead of trying to neutralize every novel strain, we upgrade the host hardware.

If we become extraordinarily good at controlling our response to infection, the precise identity of the pathogen may matter less. Instead of endlessly building better weapons against every new biological enemy, we could become much better at controlling the soldiers we already have. We wouldn’t necessarily need to make the immune system stronger. We might simply need to make it smarter.

The Third Biohack: Stop Making Old Bodies Fight New Diseases

This brings us to an even bigger possibility.

What if one of the greatest advances in infectious disease treatment isn’t an infectious disease treatment at all? What if it’s aging? Consider two people exposed to exactly the same pathogen. One is 20. The other is 80. They don’t arrive at the fight with the same biological equipment and as a result, often face vastly different outcomes. That discrepancy isn’t luck. It’s the result of immunosenescence and decades of accumulated cellular decay.

Age affects immune function, tissue repair, vascular health, cellular resilience, inflammation and countless other systems.

The pathogen may be identical. The battlefield isn’t. This is one reason the future of medicine may ultimately involve repairing the underlying biology of aging itself.

We already have active research into cellular reprogramming, gene editing, senescent cells, regenerative medicine and other approaches to repairing or reversing aspects of biological damage.

I have written about some of these possibilities before in The Age of Re-Engineering: How Science Is Rewriting the Limits of Human Life. As gene editing tools and epigenetic resetting (such as Yamanaka factor manipulation) mature, the goal post shifts.

The ultimate pandemic treatment might not be a better vaccine. It might be making the human body harder to kill in the first place. The ultimate protection against infectious disease might not be a pathogen specific vaccine at all. Imagine maintaining the immune system of a much younger person. Imagine repairing accumulated cellular damage. Imagine restoring tissues that have deteriorated with age. Imagine maintaining vascular systems that haven’t spent eight decades accumulating biological wear and tear. If you can keep the thymus gland operating like that of a 20 year old, an elderly body can fight off novel pathogens with youthful vigor and resilience.

We wouldn’t necessarily be making pathogens weaker. We’d be making their victims stronger. That is a very different approach to medicine. And potentially a much more powerful one.

Then There’s the Fourth Problem

So far, the future looks fantastic. We could continuously monitor our biology. We could control immune responses with extraordinary precision. We could potentially repair some of the damage associated with aging.

Fantastic.

Here is where the optimism runs face first into a brick wall. All of this needs to account for the fact that we’re dealing with humans.

Technology has been advancing at a breathtaking rate. Human social behavior has apparently requested a slower shipping option. This may ultimately be the most difficult problem of all, because the technology required to save lives isn’t enough. People have to trust it. They have to understand it. Governments have to distribute it. Hospitals have to deploy it. Supply chains have to function. Institutions have to communicate. And, perhaps most importantly, people have to agree that reality exists.

In 2020 modern science performed a literal miracle. Researchers designed a synthetic mRNA vaccine sequence in roughly 48 hours and had it deployed at global scale in under a year. It was one of the greatest technological achievements in human history. The science moved extraordinarily quickly.

And what did humanity do with this miracle? We fractured into conspiracy theories, argued over basic high school biology, choked supply chains and turned public health into a partisan arena sport.

The molecules were fast. The humans were not. And this may be the biggest gap in our technological civilization. We have built extraordinary tools while continuing to manage them with a social operating system that was designed for a species whose primary communication technology was yelling across a campfire.

We can edit genes. We can talk with someone on the other side of the planet instantly. We can manufacture molecules designed to train an immune system against a newly discovered pathogen. And somewhere on the same planet, someone is still absolutely convinced that the Earth is flat. Someone believes the Moon landings were filmed in a studio. Someone believes vaccines are simultaneously designed to cause autism, contain tracking devices, alter DNA and somehow accomplish all of this while being administered by a nurse who gets paid approximately $37.

Humanity contains multitudes. Some of them are spectacularly well informed. Others are wearing aluminum foil hats while selling crystals on Facebook. And the really interesting part is that civilization has somehow decided all of them get a microphone. And, yes, a vote.

The Real Missing Biohack

The single most critical biohack missing today isn’t biological. It’s psychological and institutional. We have engineered 21^st century molecular magic, but we are running it on paleolithic social software.

This is why I suspect the most important biohack of the next century may not actually be biological. It may be social. We need better ways to move trustworthy information through society. We need institutions that can communicate uncertainty without destroying credibility. We need systems that can distinguish genuine scientific disagreement from somebody who watched a fourteen minute video made by a guy named Boba in his garage. We need citizens who can understand that changing your mind when new evidence appears isn’t weakness. It’s science. And we need to become better at recognizing the difference between “I don’t understand this” and “therefore it’s a conspiracy”.

I have high confidence that science will figure out continuous molecular sensors, immune modulation and epigenetic resetting over the next few decades. I have almost zero confidence in our ability to cure the human passion for believing that the Earth is flat. Ancient Greeks proved our planet was a sphere. Two and a half millennia later that news had not reached everyone.

I would not be particularly surprised if the first three breakthroughs, or something much more impressive, arrive within the next generation.

Continuous biological monitoring? Plausible.
Precision immune modulation? Plausible.
Substantial rejuvenation of damaged tissues? Increasingly plausible.
Humanity collectively developing the emotional maturity to use all of these technologies responsibly? Well…

Let’s not get carried away. I wouldn’t bet heavily on 2126.

The Technology Keeps Winning Anyway

But there is an important reason not to become cynical. Look at where we started.

In 1918, we didn’t have intensive care medicine as we know it. We didn’t have modern antiviral drugs. We didn’t have influenza vaccines. We didn’t have molecular diagnostics. We didn’t have genomic sequencing. We didn’t have mRNA vaccine platforms. We didn’t understand viruses nearly as well as we do today.

A century later, we have all of those things and much more. None of this happened because humanity suddenly became wise. It happened because people kept experimenting. They made mistakes. They learned. They argued. They occasionally made spectacularly stupid decisions. Then someone built something useful anyway.

That’s the strange thing about technological progress. It doesn’t require us to become better people before it starts making our lives better. We can be irrational, tribal, impatient, gullible and occasionally spectacularly foolish. And we can still invent antibiotics. We can still sequence genomes. We can still develop vaccines in record time. We can still replace failing organs, repair damaged tissues and build machines that can see farther into the universe than our ancestors could have imagined.

It is easy to look at our public discourse and feel despair. Humans evolve biologically at a crawl and socially at a slight stumble. Yet, beneath the noise, the slow relentless iteration of technology continues to stack the deck in our favor. Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired, once put this beautifully: “From reading the news, you learn that things have never been worse. But from reading the olds, you learn that things have never been better.” It is a piece of wisdom that should be carved into the entrance of every research lab on Earth.

That may be the most important lesson here. We are terrible at predicting the future. We are even worse at agreeing on what to do about it. But somehow, generation after generation, we keep building things that would have looked like magic to the people who came before us.

So what is the one biohack we’re missing today that the next hundred years will fix? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a biological firewall. Maybe it’s an immune system volume knob. Maybe it’s cellular rejuvenation. Maybe it’s something so bizarre that nobody has thought of it yet.

That’s the fun part. The future is under no obligation to make sense to us, but I suspect there is one thing we can predict with reasonable confidence. By 2126 humanity will have invented technologies that would astonish us today and humanity will still be arguing about them on the future version of the internet.

Some things, apparently, are immortal.

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Posted in Science | Tagged 1918, 2020, 2126, biohack, biology, COVID-19, epidemic, flu, future, history, immunology, immunotherapy, influenza, longevity, medicine, mRNA, pathogen, psychology, science, Spanish Flu, vaccination, virology, virus | Leave a comment

The Unholy Alliance: Why Enemies Sometimes Find Common Ground

Posted on 2026-08-19 by The Narrator

When we think of evil, we often imagine it as selfish, ruthless and uncompromising. It seems unlikely that such forces would ever work together. After all, two predators fighting over the same prey rarely cooperate.

Yet history and fiction are full of unlikely alliances. Dictators who despise one another’s ideologies make treaties. Villains with incompatible ambitions join forces. Rivals temporarily set aside their differences when a greater obstacle stands in their way.

At first glance, it seems counterintuitive, but cooperation doesn’t require friendship. It doesn’t even require trust. Sometimes, it requires nothing more than a shared interest.

That is the real secret behind the unholy alliance. Two parties can have completely incompatible ultimate goals while recognizing that, for the moment, working together is more profitable than fighting each other.

The arrangement is transactional. Each side sees the other not as a friend, but as a useful tool and that creates an interesting paradox: self-interest doesn’t prevent cooperation. It can make cooperation possible.

The problem comes later. When the common objective disappears, the reason for cooperation disappears with it. And when the benefits of betrayal become greater than the benefits of loyalty, the alliance can collapse with remarkable speed.

The Pact of Steel

The relationship between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini provides an early example of how regimes with overlapping ambitions can form a powerful strategic partnership.

By 1939, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had developed increasingly close ideological and geopolitical ties. Both sought to overturn aspects of the post-World War I international order, expand their territorial influence and challenge the existing European powers.

That convergence produced the Pact of Steel, a military and political alliance signed in May 1939.

The relationship was hardly one of equals with identical interests. Germany’s ambitions increasingly centered on domination of continental Europe, while Mussolini pursued his own vision of an expanded Italian empire in the Mediterranean and Balkans. Their strategic priorities did not always align and Italy’s military preparedness lagged far behind Germany’s.

Yet cooperation offered advantages to both. Germany gained a stronger partner and greater strategic depth in southern Europe. Italy gained the backing of Europe’s most powerful revisionist regime and an opportunity to expand its own influence.

Their interests overlapped enough to make cooperation worthwhile. That is an important distinction. The alliance didn’t require Hitler and Mussolini to want exactly the same future. They simply wanted enough of the same things in 1939.

A Pact of Convenience, Not Conviction

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 is an even more striking example.

On an ideological level, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were bitter enemies. Nazism was built around racial hierarchy and virulent anti-communism, while the Soviet regime was founded on Marxist-Leninist ideology and regarded fascism as an existential political enemy.

Yet Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin temporarily put that hostility aside.

Why?

Because their immediate interests aligned.

Hitler wanted to invade Poland without immediately facing a two-front war against both Poland’s allies in the West and the Soviet Union in the East. Stalin wanted time to rebuild Soviet military strength while securing territory and strategic depth along the Soviet Union’s western frontier.

The resulting agreement included a secret protocol dividing much of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland was invaded and partitioned between the two powers.

Neither leader suddenly became a believer in the other’s ideology.
Neither trusted the other.
Neither abandoned his ultimate ambitions.

They simply concluded that cooperation was temporarily more useful than confrontation and the arrangement had an expiration date.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. The alliance didn’t fail because the two regimes suddenly discovered that they disagreed. They had always disagreed.

It failed because the strategic calculation changed. The moment Hitler believed he had more to gain by attacking Stalin than by cooperating with him, the pact was finished. It just so happened that Hitler arrived at this conclusion first.

The Villain Who Needed a Villain

Fiction loves this kind of arrangement because it creates an inherently unstable relationship.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Loki and Thanos provide a particularly entertaining example. Loki wanted power, recognition and ultimately the throne of Earth. Thanos had a far more expansive objective: collecting the Infinity Stones and using their power to reshape the universe according to his own vision.

Their goals weren’t merely different. They were operating on completely different scales.

Thanos gave Loki something he desperately needed: resources.

Loki, in turn, became an instrument for advancing Thanos’ immediate objective. He received an army and the opportunity to seize the Tesseract. Thanos got an agent capable of creating chaos on Earth and distracting the Avengers.

Neither needed to embrace the others worldview. They only needed to believe that the arrangement benefited them individually. And Loki made the classic mistake of assuming that being useful to someone means being indispensable to them.

It doesn’t.

An unequal alliance can be even more dangerous than an alliance between equals, because the weaker party may believe it is manipulating the stronger party while the stronger party regards it as disposable.

The relationship works only as long as their interests overlap.

The Wizard Who Wanted to Be the Dark Lord

The relationship between Saruman and Sauron in The Lord of the Rings demonstrated an even more deceptive version of the same principle.

Saruman was ostensibly working for Sauron. He raised an army, destroyed the Shire’s political order and attacked Rohan, all while contributing to the larger war against the forces opposing Sauron.

But Saruman wasn’t truly loyal. He wanted the power for himself.

His ultimate ambition was not to spend eternity as Sauron’s servant. He wanted the One Ring and the power it represented, potentially allowing him to become a rival to the Dark Lord. That made their relationship less an alliance than a temporary convergence of interests.

Sauron believed Saruman was serving him. Saruman believed he could exploit Sauron’s war for his own purposes. Both were trying to use the other.

That is the dangerous beauty of an unholy alliance: both sides can believe they are the one doing the exploiting.

The Master and the Apprentice

The relationship between Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine takes the concept in another direction.

This wasn’t really an alliance between equals. This was a hierarchy. Palpatine was the master. Vader was the apprentice.

Yet, the relationship was built around a peculiar tradition of the Sith that the apprentice is expected to eventually overthrow the master, while the master spends his time making sure the apprentice never becomes powerful enough to succeed.

That creates a permanent contradiction at the heart of their partnership. Vader provided something Palpatine desperately needed. He brought overwhelming military power, physical intimidation and a ruthless enforcer capable of hunting Jedi and crushing dissent.

Palpatine provided Vader with something equally important. He was the political power, source of resources, knowledge of the dark side and the machinery of the Empire.

Together, they were extraordinarily effective, but their relationship was poisoned by the knowledge that the partnership could not remain equal forever. Palpatine wanted Vader powerful enough to be useful, but never powerful enough to replace him. Vader, meanwhile, eventually began to imagine a future in which Palpatine is no longer necessary.

Their cooperation worked because their interests overlapped. Their rivalry existed because those interests ultimately could not remain aligned.

It was not friendship. It was not trust. It was a mutually beneficial dependency, maintained by fear.

When Allies Become Rivals

The Sino-Soviet Split provides a remarkable real-world parallel to the relationship between Saruman and Sauron.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union and Communist China appeared to be natural allies. Both were communist states. Both opposed Western capitalism. Both sought to expand communist influence around the world, but shared ideology proved insufficient to guarantee shared interests.

The relationship began deteriorating after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. Mao Zedong viewed Soviet “de-Stalinization” and Khrushchev’s doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the West as evidence that Moscow was abandoning revolutionary principles. The dispute soon became much larger than a disagreement over doctrine. China increasingly challenged Soviet leadership of the international communist movement, while Moscow viewed Beijing’s increasingly militant policies as reckless and potentially dangerous.

Beneath the ideological arguments was a more fundamental struggle: who was going to lead the communist world? China was no longer content to be Moscow’s junior partner. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had little interest in sharing its position at the top of the communist hierarchy with Mao.

The two countries also had competing national interests. They disagreed over strategy toward the United States, revolutionary movements in the developing world, relations with other communist states and the proper balance between national security and revolutionary expansion. China and the Soviet Union even competed for influence among communist parties outside their own borders.

The fracture eventually became much more than an ideological argument.

In 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew its technical advisers and terminated much of its economic assistance to China. By the 1960s, the two governments were openly attacking each other’s legitimacy. Their rivalry spread throughout the international communist movement, with Moscow and Beijing competing for allies and influence.

Then the unthinkable happened. The two communist powers began treating each other as security threats.

Border tensions escalated into armed clashes in 1969 and the Soviet Union subsequently built up substantial military forces along its border with China. The countries that had once presented themselves as partners in a global ideological struggle were now preparing for the possibility of war against one another.

The irony is striking. The alliance didn’t collapse because either China or the Soviet Union suddenly stopped being communist. They remained communist. It collapsed because being communist wasn’t enough to overcome competing ambitions, national interests and the struggle for power.

That makes the Sino-Soviet Split particularly revealing.

Saruman and Sauron wanted the same broad outcome, a Middle-earth dominated by evil, but each wanted to be the one holding the throne.

Chinese and Soviet leadership shared a broad vision of a communist world, but neither was willing to permanently accept the other as the unquestioned authority over it. The lesson is the same in both cases. Two powers can agree about what they oppose while violently disagreeing about who gets to decide what comes next.

Shared enemies can create alliances. Shared ideologies can create alliances. But neither guarantees loyalty.

Eventually, the question becomes unavoidable: Who gets the power?

Strength in Numbers

There is another reason unlikely alliances form. Numbers create power.

A coalition can appear stronger than the sum of its parts. It can intimidate opponents, provide legitimacy and create the perception that resistance is futile.

History is filled with examples.

During the Cold War, countries with very different political systems and domestic priorities often aligned themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Membership in a larger geopolitical bloc provided economic, military and diplomatic advantages that individual countries might not have been able to obtain on their own.

The same basic principle can be seen in modern international organizations and economic groupings. The G7 brings together Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. BRICS brings together countries with dramatically different political systems, economic models and foreign-policy priorities, including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Neither grouping represents a perfectly unified worldview. Their members frequently disagree with one another, yet cooperation can still make sense because collective action can produce benefits that individual countries can not achieve alone.

The lesson isn’t that one bloc is “good” and the other is “evil”. It’s that shared interests can produce cooperation even when deeper disagreements remain unresolved.

That principle is far broader than villainy. Corporations cooperate with competitors. Political parties form coalitions with factions they distrust. Nations trade with governments they consider hostile. And people who would never choose each other as friends can still work together when the alternative is worse.

The villains simply make the mechanism easier to see.

The Fragile Nature of the Unholy Alliance

The weakness of an alliance built primarily on immediate interests is not necessarily that it can not work. It can work extraordinarily well. The weakness is that it can be difficult to know how long the interests will remain aligned. As long as cooperation produces more benefit than betrayal, the alliance survives.

Change the calculation and everything can change. The common enemy disappears. The balance of power shifts. One side becomes stronger. A new opportunity appears. Suddenly, the person who was useful yesterday becomes the obstacle standing between you and tomorrow’s prize.

That’s why some of history’s strangest alliances can also be some of its shortest-lived. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany did not need to resolve their ideological differences to cooperate. They simply needed to postpone them.

Saruman did not need to become loyal to Sauron. Vader did not need to love Palpatine. Loki did not need to share Thanos’ vision. They only needed a reason to cooperate for now.

And that may be the most uncomfortable lesson of all. We often assume that shared values are the foundation of cooperation. They aren’t always. Sometimes cooperation is built on something much simpler: “I need what you have and you need what I have.”

That can be enough to turn enemies into partners, at least temporarily.

The opposite of friendship isn’t always hatred. Sometimes it’s calculation. An alliance doesn’t require trust. It only requires a reason not to betray each other. Not just yet.

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Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Society | Tagged Adolf Hitler, alliance, Avengers, Benito Mussolini, BRICS, China, Cold War, Communism, Dark Lord, Dark Side, Darth Vader, de-Stalinization, diplomacy, Emperor Palpatine, evil, Fascist, G7, Germany, good, Infinity Stones, Italy, Jedi, Joseph Stalin, Loki, Mao Zedong, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Middle Earth, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi, Nikita Khrushchev, One Ring, Operation Barbarossa, Pact of Steel, partnership, Poland, Russia, Saruman, Sauron, Sino-Soviet Split, Sith, Soviet Union, Star Wars, Tesseract, Thanos, The Lord of the Rings, United States | Leave a comment

My Social Security Day: We Know the Cliff Is Coming, So Why are We Still Arguing About the Guardrail?

Posted on 2026-08-14 by The Narrator

August 14, 2026, is the 91^st anniversary of Social Security.

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. It was an ambitious idea for its time to create a national system that would provide some protection against the possibility of reaching old age with no income and no safety net.

Ninety-one years later, Social Security is still doing exactly that and we have a birthday present for it. A funding problem.

Don’t worry, Washington has a plan. It involves forming two committees, releasing seventeen reports, appearing on television, accusing the other political party of trying to murder grandma and then doing absolutely nothing until the problem is crawling up the Capitol steps.

At least, that’s the traditional approach. Maybe we can do better this time.

First, let’s celebrate the thing we’re trying to save

Before we talk about Social Security’s finances, it’s worth remembering what the program actually is. It isn’t a savings account with your name on it. It isn’t a 401(k). It isn’t a government investment portfolio waiting for you to withdraw what you personally deposited.

Social Security is social insurance. Today’s workers pay payroll taxes that finance benefits for today’s beneficiaries. In return, workers earn eligibility for benefits of their own in the future.

Social Security also does something a private retirement account doesn’t necessarily do very well. It protects people against risks they can not predict. You could live to 95. You could become disabled. You could die young and leave a spouse or children behind. You could spend your entire working life earning modest wages and arrive at retirement with very little accumulated wealth.

Social Security is designed to provide a floor underneath all of those possibilities. For millions of Americans, that floor matters enormously, so when we talk about “fixing Social Security”, we shouldn’t lose sight of the people standing on it.

What began as a modest social safety net forged during the desperation of the Great Depression has evolved into the financial bedrock of American retirement. It has pulled millions of seniors out of poverty and guaranteed that after half a century of alarm clocks, shift work and payroll deductions, you don’t face your golden years on a tightrope without a net.

The goal of fixing Social Security isn’t to win an ideological argument. The goal is to make sure the floor doesn’t disappear.

And that’s the problem

The Social Security Trustees are not predicting that Social Security will suddenly vanish. That’s an important distinction. The system will continue collecting payroll taxes.

The problem is that, under current law, those ongoing revenues eventually won’t be enough to pay the benefits that have been promised.

The latest Trustees Report projects that the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, continuing income would be sufficient to pay about 78% of scheduled OASI benefits.

The combined Social Security trust funds, OASI and Disability Insurance, are projected to remain able to pay full scheduled benefits until 2034. After that, continuing income would cover about 83% of scheduled benefits.

In other words, the check doesn’t go to zero, but without legislation, the law eventually requires the system to pay only what it can afford from incoming revenue. That means a very large automatic benefit reduction and that is the cliff.

It isn’t a cliff because Social Security suddenly stops existing. It’s a cliff because waiting makes the eventual solution dramatically more painful.

The Trustees themselves make this point. Their projections show that if policymakers wait until trust fund reserves are depleted, maintaining long term solvency would require something roughly equivalent to a 4.27% permanent increase in the combined payroll tax rate, a 25.8% reduction in scheduled benefits or some combination of the two.

That’s the difference between fixing a leak and waiting until the basement is underwater.

We’ve been here before

This isn’t the first time Social Security has stared down a financial crisis. In the early 1980s, the program was in serious trouble. Inflation was high. Unemployment was high. Demographic and economic assumptions had changed. A flawed indexing formula had contributed to the problem. The system was approaching the point where its reserves were dangerously low.

President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill did something that sounds almost mythical today. They negotiated. In December 1981, they created the National Commission on Social Security Reform, chaired by Alan Greenspan. The commission’s recommendations became the foundation for the 1983 bipartisan Social Security amendments.

The solution wasn’t one magical fix. It was a pile of things that different politicians could hate in different ways. Payroll taxes went up. The self-employment tax increased. The timing of annual cost of living adjustments was changed. Some Social Security benefits became subject to federal income taxation for higher income beneficiaries. The age for receiving unreduced retirement benefits was gradually increased from 65 to 67 for later generations.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t painless. It was uncomfortable for everyone involved, which is usually the hallmark of an honest compromise.

The problem today is bigger

The 1983 problem was largely a financing problem that could be addressed with relatively near-term changes. Today’s problem has a deeper structural component.

There are fewer workers supporting each beneficiary than there were when Social Security was designed. In 1955, there were about 8.6 covered workers for every Social Security beneficiary. By 1983, that had fallen to about 3.1. Today, that ratio has sunk to about 2.7 workers per retiree. By the 2040s, it will drop closer to 2. That’s the fundamental problem. We built a system in an America where there were many workers for every retiree.

Now Americans are living longer, having fewer children and spending a larger portion of their lives in retirement. That is wonderful news for human beings, but it is considerably less wonderful news for a pay-as-you-go retirement system. In 1983 Congress patched a short-term liquidity leak. Today, we are dealing with a permanent demographic shift that is changing the foundation of the system.

And this connects directly to something I wrote about recently in The Retirement Problem: What Happens When You Don’t Have to Die? If we eventually solve aging itself, we will have a much bigger problem.

Immortality is a fascinating mental exercise. What does retirement look like if you live to be 500 or 1,000? But back in the present, biogerontology hasn’t eliminated the biological clock just yet. For the current generation of retirees and those staring down the runway over the next decade, those last twenty or thirty years of life are not a speculative sci-fi question. They are an immediate, month-to-month financial reality.

And right now, that reality is heading toward a cliff. We don’t have to live for 1,000 years to create a retirement problem. We only have to live longer than the people who designed the system expected.

The draining of the OASI Trust Fund means an automatic cut of around 20% to 25% of scheduled benefit levels, regardless of income or need. For a senior living on a fixed income where every dollar is calculated down to the grocery aisle, a 25% drop isn’t a minor budget adjustment. It’s a catastrophe.

So how do we fix it?

In Washington, Social Security is famously referred to as the “third rail” of American politics. Touch it and you die.

The resulting political behavior is a masterclass in collective cowardice. Lawmakers treat the program like a volatile explosive in a glass case. They bow in reverence to it on the campaign trail, promise never to look at it sideways and run in sheer panic if anyone suggests opening the box to perform routine maintenance.

Instead of treating Social Security as a vital engineering system that needs periodic calibration, politicians prefer to wait until the engine is shooting sparks into the cabin before touching a wrench.

The truth is that there is no magic fix. Fundamentally there are really only three levers.

We can collect more money.
We can pay less money.
We can change when we pay.

Everything else is merely a variation on those themes.

Tax more earnings

In 2026, Social Security payroll taxes apply to the first $184,500 of wages. Earnings above that amount are not subject to the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax, although they are subject to Medicare taxes.

That creates an obvious question. Why $184,500 and what does it really represent?

The Social Security tax cap was originally established to limit both the taxes high earners paid and the maximum benefits they could receive, reflecting the program’s design as a baseline social safety net rather than a comprehensive welfare system. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, the original cap was set at $3,000 per year and it grew every year after that.

Millions of American workers earn more than the taxable maximum. Once they cross that threshold, their wages are no longer subject to the Social Security portion of the payroll tax. The people with the greatest ability to absorb additional taxation are also the people whose earnings escape the Social Security payroll tax once they cross the cap.

Congress could raise the taxable maximum or eliminate it all together. Or create a second taxable tier, essentially a “donut hole”, where wages above a higher threshold become subject to Social Security taxes again.

There are different ways to structure it and the details matter enormously because changing the taxable maximum also affects benefit calculations, but conceptually, the argument is simple:

If you earn $50,000, you pay Social Security tax on all of it.
If you earn $500,000, you don’t.

Congress could decide that the highest earners should contribute more.

Raise the payroll tax

The combined employee and employer Social Security tax is currently 12.4%, split between worker and employer at 6.2% each.

Increasing it gradually would spread the cost across the working population. The political problem is obvious. Nobody wants to hear, “Good news! Your paycheck just got smaller!”

But that’s the nature of the problem. If we want to preserve today’s benefits for tomorrow’s retirees, someone has to pay for them. Taxes are not a particularly mysterious concept. Money has to come from somewhere.

I suppose there’s another option. We can convince Americans to have a lot more children. Unfortunately, those children won’t become productive taxpayers for roughly twenty years. But Social Security has a cash-flow problem now and babies are a remarkably slow financial instrument.

Raise the retirement age

The full retirement age is already scheduled to reach 67 for people born in 1960 or later. Congress could gradually increase it further. The argument is straightforward. If Americans live longer, perhaps we should spend a little longer working before receiving full benefits.

The problem is that “life expectancy” isn’t the same for everyone. A professional who spends forty years behind a desk and a construction worker who spends forty years carrying heavy equipment don’t necessarily experience aging in the same way.

Neither does a nurse. Or a miner. Or a farm worker. Or someone who has spent decades doing physically demanding labor.

A higher retirement age therefore shouldn’t simply be treated as a universal number. If we go this route, we should think carefully about the people for whom “just work another three years” isn’t remotely equivalent to what it means for everyone else. It may not be reasonable to expect a 70 year old to be hauling bricks at a construction site.

Change the COLA formula

Social Security’s annual cost of living adjustment currently uses the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (the CPI-W).

One proposal is to use a chained version of the CPI instead. The basic argument is that consumers change what they buy when prices change. If beef becomes expensive, for example, people may buy more chicken. That produces a slightly lower measured inflation rate.

The difference in any one year is small. Over decades, however, small differences compound. That’s precisely why this proposal is controversial. A change that looks tiny to an economist can become very real to an 85 year old retiree.

And if we’re going to reduce the growth of benefits, we should be honest about what we’re doing. We’re not changing a formula. We’re reducing future benefits and moving a retiree from a good meal to a poor meal to the dogfood aisle. Let’s be honest, we want America to be more humane than this.

Slow the growth of benefits for higher earners

Another approach is progressive price indexing.

The basic idea is to preserve stronger benefit growth for lower income workers while slowing the growth of benefits for higher earners.

This recognizes something important about Social Security. $1,000 means something very different to a retiree living on $20,000 a year than it does to someone with substantial investment income and a large pension, raking in a solid six figures per year.

We could preserve the program’s role as a basic retirement floor while asking wealthier retirees to accept slower benefit growth.

Of course people will legitimately say, “I’ve worked hard to earn what I have and you are reducing my benefits because of my hard work.”

Means-test benefits

This takes the progressive indexing idea one step further.

If someone has substantial income from other sources, perhaps their Social Security benefit should be reduced. It’s politically attractive because it appears to target the people who need the money least. but there is a philosophical problem.

Social Security has always been structured as social insurance, not welfare. People pay into it and earn benefits. If we turn it into a program that says, “You made too much money, so you don’t get what you paid for,” we fundamentally change the nature of the program.

Maybe that’s a change worth making. Maybe it isn’t. But we shouldn’t pretend it isn’t a change. Every thread you pull in a web affects other threads.

What I would do

If I were designing the compromise, I wouldn’t look for one heroic solution. I’d build another 1983-style package and I’d make almost everyone share a little of the burden.

Gradually increase the taxable wage base. Increase payroll taxes modestly over time. Raise the full retirement age, but do it slowly and protect workers in physically demanding occupations. Preserve stronger benefit growth for lower-income workers. Slow benefit growth somewhat for higher income workers. Consider additional taxation of benefits for retirees with substantial outside income. And, critically, make the changes gradual and predictable.

Give a 25 year old plenty of warning.
Give a 45 year old less burden to adjust to.
Give a 65 year old essentially no change.

That’s an important principle. If we’re going to change the rules, don’t change the rules on people who have already played most of the game. The people who have already retired shouldn’t be forced to rebuild a financial plan they executed over decades under an entirely different set of assumptions.

The politics are the ridiculous part

The math behind saving Social Security isn’t actually that complex. Actuaries at the Social Security Administration have modeled every variation of these policy levers down to the decimal point. The obstacle isn’t a lack of options. It’s the theatrical terror of our political system.

Here’s where I think we should stop pretending. Everyone in Washington knows the basic math. Republicans know taxes may have to rise. Democrats know benefits will eventually have to be adjusted. Republicans know that raising the retirement age is politically radioactive. Democrats know that eliminating the taxable maximum isn’t going to solve everything. Everybody knows this.

And yet we periodically get treated to political theater in which one side announces that the other side wants to destroy Social Security. Then the other side announces that the first side wants to destroy Social Security. Then both sides go home.

Meanwhile, the actuarial tables sit quietly in the corner. The tables don’t care about campaign slogans. They do not care whether the president has an R or a D after his name. They do not care which cable news network you watch. They certainly do not care about congressional fundraising emails.

They just keep adding up workers, wages, beneficiaries and dollars. And the math keeps moving toward us.

The funny thing is that Social Security doesn’t actually require political genius. It requires political courage. That’s a considerably rarer trait.

We don’t have to choose between “do nothing” and “destroy Social Security”

That is the false choice that makes this debate so frustrating. There is a huge space between those two extremes. We can preserve Social Security. We can protect current retirees. We can protect lower income workers. We can ask more from higher earners. We can ask workers to contribute a little more. We can ask future retirees to work a little longer. We can slow the growth of some benefits. And we can do it gradually enough that nobody gets thrown over a cliff.

The Social Security Trustees have been telling policymakers for decades that acting sooner makes the necessary changes smaller and gives people more time to adjust. That isn’t a partisan statement. It’s arithmetic.

So here’s what I want you to do on August 14

Don’t panic. Don’t write your congressman an angry letter declaring that Social Security is being “stolen”. Don’t put your retirement plan in the hands of whichever politician happens to be shouting loudest on television.

Instead, go look at your actual Social Security record. August 14 is the anniversary of the day the Social Security Act became law and AARP is calling it “My Social Security Day”. There’s a remarkably useful way to celebrate it. Go to the Social Security Administration’s website and create or log into your Social Security account. Look at your earnings history. Make sure the numbers are correct. Check your estimated benefits. See what happens if you claim at 62, at your full retirement age or at 70.

And then ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question, “How much of my retirement plan assumes Social Security will be there exactly as it exists today?”

Your earnings record matters. The Social Security Administration specifically recommends reviewing it because errors or missing earnings can reduce the benefits you’re ultimately entitled to receive.

Your account also provides personalized estimates of future benefits and lets you compare different claiming ages.

Do it.

Then have your spouse do it. Have your parents do it. Have your kids do it.

Not because Social Security is about to disappear. It isn’t.

Do it because you should know what you’ve earned, what the government currently promises and how much of your retirement depends on a promise that Congress still needs to repair.

Ninety-one years is a pretty good run

Social Security has survived presidents, recessions, wars, inflation, political revolutions, pandemics, market bubbles, demographic changes and several generations of politicians insisting that the sky is falling.

It has also been changed repeatedly. That’s important. The Social Security Act of 1935 wasn’t carved into stone any more than our constitution. Neither were the rules created in 1983.

The program survived because Americans were willing to change it when circumstances changed.

We have different circumstances now. People live longer. Families are smaller. The worker-to-beneficiary ratio has changed. The economy has changed. Retirement has changed. America has changed. So Social Security has to change, too, but changing something isn’t the same as abandoning it. And fixing a problem isn’t the same as betraying the people who depend on the program.

The worst possible outcome isn’t raising taxes. It isn’t raising the retirement age. It isn’t slowing the growth of some benefits.

Our seniors did their part. They spent 45 years paying into a contract built on trust. They deserve stability, respect and predictable checks.

Younger generations are doing their part right now, watching a portion of every single paycheck head out the door to fund today’s benefits, while wondering what will be left when their own turn comes.

Social Security doesn’t need a miracle and it doesn’t need hyper-partisan warfare. It needs adults at the table willing to make a series of modest pragmatic adjustments before the clock runs out.

The worst outcome is waiting until there are no good choices left, because then politicians won’t be choosing between painful options. They’ll be choosing which painful option hurts the most and that’s a terrible way to run a retirement system.

So on August 14, let’s celebrate Social Security’s 91^st birthday.
Check your account.
Check your earnings.
Check your benefits.
Then, perhaps, send a small birthday card to Congress.

It can say:

“Happy birthday, Social Security. Please stop waiting until the last minute to fix things.”

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Posted in Economy, Leadership, Society | Tagged AARP, Alan Greenspan, August 14, COLA, Consumer Price Index, Disability Insurance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, My Social Security Day, OASI, Old Age and Survivors Insurance, payroll taxes, pension, retirement, Ronald Reagan, Social Security, taxes, Tip O’Neill | Leave a comment

The Power Plant That Comes to You: Why Small Modular Reactors Could Change Everything

Posted on 2026-08-09 by The Narrator

When we think about electricity, we tend to think in one direction. Power plants stay put. Electricity travels.

For more than a century, that’s how we’ve built civilization. We construct enormous coal plants, hydroelectric dams, natural gas stations, wind farms, nuclear reactors and solar arrays, then string tens of thousands of miles of transmission lines across the continent to bring power to our homes and businesses.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) ask a radically different question. Instead of asking how to extend the grid to reach a power plant, they ask how to bring generating capacity to the grid that already exists, even if it’s severed from the master grid.

It sounds like science fiction.

In reality, it’s a technology that’s been quietly operating for decades.

The Nuclear Elephant in the Room

Mention nuclear power and most people immediately think of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. That’s understandable. The conversation around nuclear energy is rarely a quiet one. People are either violently for it or violently against it. The fear is easy to understand.

When nuclear energy goes bad, it doesn’t just break. It creates a generational scar. It is a cinematic, terrifying kind of failure. But nuclear accidents are rare. When they happen, they capture the world’s attention in a way few other industrial disasters can. Radiation is invisible. Its effects can last decades. The fear is deeply rooted and entirely rational.

So when someone proposes putting small nuclear reactors closer to communities, the first reaction is often, “Absolutely not!” The idea of placing “mini nuclear power plants” closer to our neighborhoods feels, to some, like inviting a wolf into the backyard.

But that reaction assumes that an SMR is simply a miniature version of a conventional nuclear power plant. How new is this technology, really?

In many ways, it isn’t new at all.

A Technology That Isn’t New

The phrase Small Modular Reactor sounds like something invented last year, ready to be installed as a warp core on Space-X’s next moonshot.

In reality, versions of the technology have existed for multiple generations. The U.S. Navy has operated nuclear-powered submarines since the 1950s. Aircraft carriers rely on compact reactors to remain at sea for years without refueling.

Collectively, navies around the world have accumulated thousands of reactor years of operating experience using reactors that are, in many respects, predecessors to today’s SMRs.

Think about that for a moment.

Every sailor aboard a nuclear submarine literally entrusts their life to one of these reactors. They sleep a few feet away from it. They sail beneath the ocean for months at a time with no possibility of simply stepping outside if something goes wrong.

If that sounds terrifying, it should also tell us something else. Small reactors are not an untested experiment. They are an evolution of a technology that has quietly been proving itself for decades.

If you live in a coastal city, an American nuclear submarine has almost certainly patrolled the waters just off your shore. Those submarines do not run on extension cords. They are powered by small, self-contained nuclear reactors. We don’t twitch when a submarine passes the harbor. Nobody panics. Nobody evacuates. We celebrate it. Yet, the moment we talk about putting that exact same physical footprint on dry land to power a hospital or a data center, the panic button gets pressed.

Smaller Doesn’t Mean More Dangerous

Traditional nuclear plants produce enormous amounts of electricity, often more than a gigawatt. They’re engineering marvels, but they’re also incredibly complex.

SMRs typically generate a fraction of that output. That smaller size changes the engineering.

Many designs rely on passive safety systems, using gravity, natural circulation and basic physics rather than pumps, backup generators and constant operator intervention. If power is lost, many proposed SMRs are designed to cool themselves without human action.

Some designs are buried underground, providing additional protection from natural disasters or deliberate attacks.

No technology is perfectly safe, but modern SMRs are being designed around a very different philosophy than the reactors built half a century ago.

The Real Innovation Isn’t Nuclear

Ironically, the most revolutionary thing about SMRs isn’t the nuclear technology. It’s the logistics.

Traditional nuclear plants are among the largest construction projects humanity undertakes. They can require billions of dollars, thousands of workers and close to a decade to complete.

SMRs turn much of that process upside down. Instead of building everything from scratch on-site, the reactors are manufactured in factories, shipped as modules and assembled where they’re needed.

That dramatically changes where nuclear power becomes practical.

An isolated island.
A remote mining operation.
A military installation.
A retiring coal plant.
A rapidly growing industrial park.

Places that would never justify building a conventional nuclear power station might suddenly have another option.

Power as a Service

The idea becomes even more interesting during emergencies. Imagine a category 5 hurricane or a 7.0 earthquake devastates a city. Transmission lines are down. Fuel deliveries are disrupted. Hospitals need reliable electricity. Water treatment plants can’t operate. Communications infrastructure is failing. Your focus is no longer recovery driven by existing power infrastructure. You have to provide security and resources to people first.

Your only solution is mass evacuation of a major metropolis because you can not immediately ship in enough solar panels, wind turbines or millions of tons of coal to restore an entire city’s infrastructure in an afternoon. Historically, the solution has been fleets of noisy diesel generators and an endless stream of fuel trucks as an evacuation is under way. None of this goes fast, but SMRs suggest another possibility.

Some future transportable reactor designs envision shipment by heavy haul truck, rail or barge. Instead of constructing an entire power station from scratch, the generating unit itself could be delivered largely complete, reducing deployment from years to weeks or even days and, longer term, this technology can become “plug and play”, establishing a massive on demand stable power supply within days, if not hours.

Instead of transporting fuel to thousands of generators, you transport one compact power plant capable of supplying continuous electricity for decades.

It transforms energy from a permanent geological monument into a logistical asset. Power on Demand. Power as a Service.

It isn’t quite as simple as parking a trailer and flipping a switch. Civilian SMRs still require site preparation, regulatory approval and connection to the electrical grid, but the underlying concept represents a profound shift in how we think about energy infrastructure.

Instead of building one enormous power station intended to serve millions of people for decades, we begin thinking in terms of scalable building blocks that can be deployed where and when they’re needed.

It’s less like constructing a cathedral and more like assembling with Lego bricks. The ultimate allure of the SMR isn’t just about baseline electricity. It is about mobility.

The question isn’t whether small reactors are technically possible. We’ve known the answer to that for decades. This technology has been quietly humming underneath the ocean waves for decades. The real question is whether our institutions, our regulations and our collective psychology can handle a nuclear reactor that doesn’t sit behind a massive concrete cooling tower on the horizon, but arrives on the back of a truck and if we can deliver this economically at scale.

The Tradeoffs

That doesn’t mean SMRs are a silver bullet. They have real challenges.

Because they’re smaller, they lose some of the economies of scale enjoyed by traditional nuclear plants. The first commercial units are expected to produce electricity at a higher cost than today’s utility-scale wind and solar farms.

Some advanced designs require specialized HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium) fuel, whose commercial supply chain is still developing.

Radioactive waste remains a long-term responsibility and some studies suggest certain SMR designs could produce more waste per unit of electricity than conventional reactors.

Then there’s regulation. Nuclear licensing rightly moves cautiously, but that caution also means years of reviews before many new designs can be deployed commercially.

These are not trivial obstacles. They’re engineering, economic and political challenges that still need solutions.

How Do SMRs Compare with Renewables?

This is where the conversation often becomes unnecessarily polarized. People tend to frame the debate as nuclear versus renewables.

It doesn’t have to be.

Wind and solar are extraordinarily effective at producing inexpensive electricity when the weather cooperates.

SMRs excel somewhere else. They produce electricity twenty-four hours a day, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. One technology provides abundant clean energy when conditions are favorable. The other provides reliable clean energy when they aren’t.

The future electrical grid will not belong to one technology. It will belong to all of them working together.

The economics tell the final story through the Levelized Cost of Energy, the lifetime cost of building and operating a system divided by its total output:

Utility Scale Solar: ~$40 to $98 / MWh
Onshore Wind: ~$37 to $99 / MWh
Traditional Large Nuclear: $175 to $255 / MWh
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): $90 to $130+ / MWh for First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) builds.

Projections suggest that if we reach mass commercial assembly lines, Nth-Of-A-Kind (NOAK) manufacturing, SMR costs could plummet to $60 to $80 per MWh, bringing SMRs right into the competitive ring.

A Different Way to Think About Energy

For over a century our answer to growing demand has been to build larger power plants. Larger dams. Larger coal stations. Larger nuclear reactors. Larger transmission networks.

SMRs represent a different philosophy.

Don’t build bigger. Build smarter. Build smaller. Build them in factories. Deliver them where they’re needed. Scale them like building blocks instead of monuments.

Whether SMRs ultimately become commonplace remains to be seen. They still face economic, regulatory and technical hurdles. But if they succeed, history may remember them not as a new kind of reactor, but as the moment electricity itself became modular.

SMRs challenge the assumption of permanent energy infrastructure. Instead of asking, “Where should we build the next giant power plant?” They ask, “Where is power needed today?”

Every major civilization has been shaped by how it produced energy. Wood built the ancient world. Coal powered the Industrial Revolution. Oil transformed the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may not be defined by a new fuel at all. It may be defined by a new idea, that power doesn’t always have to come from somewhere else.

Sometimes, the power plant can come to you.

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Posted in Economy, Energy, Technology | Tagged coal, electricity, energy, HALEU, nuclear energy, Power as a Service, power grid, power plant, small modular reactors, SMR, uranium | Leave a comment

The Retirement Problem: What Happens When You Don’t Have to Die?

Posted on 2026-08-05 by The Narrator

Recently, we waded into the deep end of the genetic pool to talk about extreme human longevity. We looked at how medical engineering is steadily rewriting the limits of human life, and what happens to a finite planet when humans simply stop leaving it.

Out of that discussion came a much more personal and deeply practical series of questions from readers. If science actually cures aging, what happens to the back half of our lives? The following three questions are among the ones I received in response and, together, they are a variation on a single thought.

One reader asked, “Our Social Security is already a mess. What happens when everyone is on it?”

Another wandered into philosophical territory, “Time to retirement would vanish—instead of saving for 40 years, you’d accumulate skills & compound interest over centuries. Would boredom or curiosity kill you first?”

And yet a third simply asked, “What does retirement look like if you’re immortal?”

Those three may sound like three different questions, but they’re really the same one.

Just like the overpopulation dilemma, extreme longevity doesn’t just stretch our current problems, it completely obliterates the math they are built on. If death becomes optional, the traditional concept of retirement goes out the window with it.

What happens to retirement when death is no longer waiting at the end of it?

It turns out that retirement, like so many of our institutions, makes a lot more sense when human life has an expiration date. Remove the expiration date and the entire concept starts to look rather strange.

The Three Act Life

For most of modern history, we’ve organized adulthood into something resembling a three act play: Education. Work. Retirement. You can almost see this as a play written by Aeschylus himself, the Greek master of tragedies.

You spend your first couple of decades acquiring knowledge and skills. Then you spend roughly four decades converting those skills into money. Then, if you’ve been fortunate enough to save enough money and live to enjoy it, you stop working and spend the remaining years doing whatever you want. Eventually, you die.

The whole system is built around a fairly simple assumption that there aren’t that many years available, at least not an infinite number. Retirement exists because working forever isn’t particularly appealing and because eventually the human body stops cooperating.

So we created a financial mechanism that allows us to trade some of our productive years for some of our later, less productive ones.

Save while you’re young.
Spend while you’re old.
Die before the money runs out. Or at least bounce the last check that you write.

The concept of a government funded “end of work” period is a very recent human invention and it was built on a rather morbid mathematical foundation. When the retirement age was broadly set around 65 in the early 20th century, life expectancy was roughly exactly that. The system worked precisely because half the population was statistically expected to die before they could collect a dime.

It was a safety net designed for a brief twilight, not a three decade long vacation. Our modern system is failing because eligibility age did not keep up with life expectancy.

If the human lifespan extends to 500 or 1,000 years, the current model of Social Security doesn’t just bend under the weight. It vaporizes. No economic system on Earth can support a population where an individual works for forty years and then draws a state pension for the next five hundred. The idea of a permanent state sponsored retirement at age 65 will be viewed by future historians as a brief, 20^th century anomaly that meant well, but whose gears started out rusty and were never fixed.

It’s not a particularly elegant system, but it works reasonably well when “old” means you probably have another 15 or 25 years left.

Now imagine that you don’t.

Imagine medicine eventually gives us a world where someone reaches 65, remains healthy and productive and has no particular reason to expect death at 85.

Or 100.
Or 150.
Or 300.

At some point, “retirement age” becomes a rather arbitrary number wrapped around a meaningless concept.

Why 65?
Why not 85?
Why not 120?

And if someone can remain healthy for 200 years or 500 years, why retire at all? That’s where things get weird.

Congratulations. You Are Now Retired for the Next 237 Years.

Let’s start with Social Security.

Our current Social Security system was designed around the concept of generations.

Workers pay into the system.
Retirees receive benefits.
Eventually, those retirees die.
The next generation takes their place.

It’s essentially a gigantic financial relay race.

But imagine a world in which people stop dying. Someone retires at 65 and lives another 150 years. They aren’t collecting Social Security for 20 years. They’re potentially collecting it for 150. And while they’re collecting it, the next generation is still arriving. The pool of retirees doesn’t naturally empty. It accumulates.

At some point, “retirement benefits” stop looking like old age insurance and start looking suspiciously like a universal basic income for people who have decided they don’t want to work anymore.

And that raises an awkward question, “Why should age determine eligibility?” If a healthy 140 year old can still work, why should that person receive a benefit simply because they’ve accumulated enough birthdays?

The answer can’t be “because they’re old”. Eventually, “old” stops meaning what it means today.

And then Social Security isn’t the only thing that breaks. Pensions break. Life insurance breaks. Annuities become very interesting financial instruments indeed. Estate planning becomes downright bizarre. And inheritance becomes a problem for a very different reason. Imagine telling your eighty year old child, “Don’t worry. You’ll inherit the house someday.” Then imagine realizing that “someday” might be 2186. Or 2386. Or maybe some time after the year 3000.

The Wealth Problem

There’s another little problem with living forever.

Compound interest. Albert Einstein reportedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. Now, imagine applying it over four centuries.

We usually think about compound interest over thirty or forty years. That’s because that’s about how long we have to prepare for retirement.

But give someone 200 years. Or 500.

At that point, compound interest stops being a retirement strategy and starts becoming an existential threat to economic equality. A dollar compounded at 5% for 500 years would, mathematically, become an absurd amount of money.

Of course, that isn’t actually going to happen. The economy would change. Currencies would change. Tax laws would change. Companies would disappear. Entire industries would be born and die.

And nobody is going to let one person quietly accumulate the GDP of a small galaxy simply because they opened a brokerage account in 2026. There’s simply not enough money in our universe to pay off that one patient investor.

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” And that’s precisely the point. If you view life as a linear path: you go to school, you build a career, you stop working, you rest. Immortality sounds like an absolute nightmare. The human brain isn’t wired to play golf and complete crossword puzzles for four centuries. If you don’t have to work for money, what do you do with the time? There’s only so long that you can lay on a Florida beach.

The financial system would have to change because the assumptions underneath it had changed. Today, death eventually redistributes wealth. People die. Businesses change hands. Homes are inherited. Fortunes are divided among children. New generations get opportunities to build their own wealth.

Remove death and you remove one of the great mechanisms of economic turnover. A person who became extraordinarily wealthy at fifty could be even more extraordinarily wealthy at 250. And 450. And 650. Today, at 95, Warren Buffett is worth $145 billion. What do you think he’ll do if you give him another 500 years?

Suddenly, today’s arguments about generational wealth would look like a dress rehearsal. You could end up with people who aren’t merely wealthy. You could end up with people who have been uber wealthy for centuries. At some point, governments might have to decide that fortunes can’t simply persist indefinitely.

Perhaps wealth would be taxed periodically rather than primarily at death. It’s an estate tax that doesn’t wait for the estate. Imagine that you don’t have to die to discover the government is interested in your accumulated fortune. You just have to live long enough.

So What Exactly Are You Retiring From?

The financial problems are actually the easy part. The harder question is psychological.

Why retire?

At 65 retirement sounds wonderful. You’ve been working for forty years. You’ve raised children. You’ve paid mortgages. You’ve endured meetings that should have been emails. You’ve sat through meetings about meetings that should have been emails. You’ve spent about 20,000 hours commuting in traffic. Maybe 38,000. You are mortally tired. You would like to spend some time doing whatever the hell you want to do. The statistical abstract says you’ve got twenty years to do that.

Fair enough.

But suppose you retire and the aging problem has been solved. Now you’ve been retired for fifty years. What next?

You’ve traveled the world.
You’ve played over 200,000 holes of golf.
You’ve restored the old house. And the house after that. Then you’ve built one from scratch.
You’ve learned to paint.
You’ve written a novel. And a sequel.
You’ve taken up woodworking.
You’ve visited every national park. Eight times.
You’ve finally figured out how to use the television remote.

Now what?

This is where the question “Would boredom or curiosity kill you first?” gets interesting. Maybe curiosity wins.

Humans are extraordinarily good at finding things to become interested in. Give someone 500 years and they could become an engineer, then a musician, then a historian, then a biologist, then a teacher, then an entrepreneur, then a novelist, then an obsessive amateur astronomer, then something that doesn’t even exist yet.

Why should a person have only one career? Why should education happen primarily between ages 18 and 22? (Or 23, if you took a semester off to drink abroad.) Why should the skills you acquire at 25 determine what you do at 55? Or 155?

Those assumptions exist largely because time is scarce. If time isn’t scarce, they become increasingly difficult to justify.

Retirement Might Become a Sabbatical

This brings us to the final question, what does retirement actually look like?

The answer is that “retirement” ceases to be a final destination. The word itself implies retreating or withdrawing from productive life because your biological battery is running out. When the battery no longer drains, the concept of a permanent retreat is meaningless.

Perhaps the answer isn’t that people stop working. Perhaps the answer is that work stops being a permanent phase of life.

Instead of Education → Career → Retirement → Death, we get something more like Learn → Work → Stop → Explore → Learn → Work → Reinvent → Stop → Create → Work → Lather → Rinse → Repeat.

A person might spend thirty years as an engineer, then take fifteen years off, then study biology, then spend forty years doing research, then become a teacher, then disappear for twenty years to travel, then start a company at 140, then retire from that company at 165, then decide they want to become a sculptor before taking two decades off to raise a family.

That’s not really retirement. It’s a life composed of chapters and that might be one of the most profound changes longevity would bring.

Instead of saving for the last twenty years of your life, you might be saving for the next chapter. Retirement becomes a sabbatical. Careers become temporary. Education becomes lifelong.

And “What do you want to be when you grow up?” becomes a question you can ask someone repeatedly, because like a six year old, they will give you a different answer every time. Becoming a starving artist or an entrepreneur today is a hard decision, but given immortality, it’s just an experimental phase in your life, like that semester of drinking abroad.

But There’s Still a Catch

There’s a dark side to having forever. When time is scarce, it creates urgency. If you know you have eighty years, you have to make choices. You have to decide which books to read, which places to visit, which people to love, which ambitions to pursue. You can’t do everything.

But if you have 500 years? Why not do everything eventually? Why climb Everest this year? You have another century. Why write the book? Next decade will have a gap in the calendar. Why learn Japanese? Eventually, maybe. Why start the new company? There’s always tomorrow.

Immortality might create the ultimate procrastination problem. When you have forever, nothing has to happen today. And that could fundamentally change human psychology.

Our bucket lists exist because the bucket has a bottom. Remove the bottom and the list becomes very different. Perhaps we become more curious. Perhaps we become less ambitious. Perhaps we become extraordinarily patient. Perhaps we become incredibly bored. Or perhaps something stranger happens.

Maybe humans discover that meaning doesn’t come from having limited time. Maybe it comes from choosing how to spend unlimited time.

The Workplace Has a Problem, Too

There’s another problem that isn’t immediately obvious. Promotion.

Today, people eventually leave organizations. Executives retire. CEOs step down. Professors give up tenure. Partners move on. Managers make room for the next generation.

Now imagine a company where nobody has to leave.

Your CEO has been CEO for 140 years. Your boss has been in the same position for ninety. The person above you has been waiting for the CEO to retire for seventy years. You’ve been on the team for fifty and you’re still the junior member. Good luck with that promotion.

Longevity could create the opposite problem from the one we have today. We worry now about people being forced out of productive careers because they are “too old”.

An immortal society might have to worry about people refusing to leave. That could force organizations to develop term limits, mandatory sabbaticals, rotational leadership or entirely new concepts of succession.

The question wouldn’t be “When are you too old to work?” It would become: “When is it time to make room for someone else?” That’s a very different philosophy.

Age Stops Being a Useful Number

Age may ultimately be the biggest conceptual change.

Today, chronological age is an incredibly useful shorthand. You’re 25. You’re 50. You’re 70.

We have a rough idea what those numbers mean, but if biological aging can be slowed, stopped or reversed, chronological age starts losing its predictive power.

A 100 year old might be a middle-aged professional. A 150 year old might be starting a company. A 200 year old might be returning to university. A 300 year old might decide they’ve finally had enough of accounting and become a musician. Age becomes less important than condition and intention.

Important questions change. Are you healthy? Are you capable? Do you want to work? Do you have something to contribute? Do you have enough resources to support yourself?

Those become much more meaningful inquiries than the number of times you’ve gone around the Sun.

And Then There Is the Generational Problem

This is where retirement connects back to my earlier article about longevity and the finite planet. If people stop dying, society doesn’t simply gain more years. It loses generational turnover. That matters, because generations aren’t just biological cohorts.

They’re economic units. Cultural units. Political units. Generations bring new ideas. They replace old institutions. They inherit property. They take over companies. They become parents. They eventually become grandparents. Then they disappear, making room for everyone who came after them to “advance”.

Death is terrible for the individual, but civilization has always relied upon it for orderly turnover. Remove it and you have to deliberately create the turnover that biology used to provide automatically.

That’s true for population. It’s true for wealth. It’s true for politics. And it’s true for work. If a 200 year old engineer is still working and a 300 year old college professor is still teaching and a 180 year old CEO is still running the company, the problem isn’t simply that they don’t get to retire. The question becomes “How do we build a civilization in which people can keep living without preventing everyone else from getting their turn?”

Maybe Retirement Was Never the Point

Perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is that we may have misunderstood retirement from the beginning. Maybe retirement was never really about stopping work. Maybe it was about getting permission to stop doing one particular kind of work.

The problem is that we built the system around a biological deadline. You work until your body won’t let you anymore. Then you stop. Then you die.

Extreme longevity breaks that sequence and once it does, we might discover that a healthy human life doesn’t need to have one career, one profession or one retirement. It can have many. You can work. You can stop. You can learn. You can start over. You can become someone else. And then, decades later, you can do it again.

Maybe the future of retirement isn’t retirement at all. Maybe it’s reinvention.

The Retirement Question is Really a Time Question

The more I think about extreme longevity, the more I suspect that the biggest change won’t be financial. It will be psychological.

We have built an entire civilization around the assumption that time is running out. We save because time is running out. We hurry because time is running out. We retire because time is running out. We leave something behind because time is running out. We worry about what we haven’t accomplished because time is running out.

Take away the clock and we don’t simply get more life. We get an entirely different relationship with life and that may be the real retirement revolution.

Perhaps someday the question won’t be “When can I afford to retire?” It will be “What do I want to do next?” And if the answer changes every fifty or eighty years, that’s okay. You’ve got time.

For once, perhaps the hardest part won’t be figuring out how to make enough money to survive the rest of your life. It will be figuring out what you want to do with all of it.

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Posted in Science, Society | Tagged compound interest, compounding, death, economy, employment, generational wealth, immortality, longevity, retirement, science, Social Security, wealth | Leave a comment

The High-Altitude Hangover: When Hype Meets the Weighing Machine

Posted on 2026-08-01 by The Narrator

A coworker of mine is furious at Elon Musk. It isn’t about electric cars, social media algorithms or controversial tweets. It’s about space.

It’s been about six weeks since SpaceX went public. The IPO was priced at $135 per share. If you weren’t an insider and bought in the secondary mania of the first day of trading after the market opened, you likely paid north of $160. Within a week the stock reached a high of $225.64. For anyone who got in early and sold quickly, it was an impressive return.

My coworker wasn’t one of the early buyers. At least not in the first few hours of the stock trading. He bought at $217. Today, the stock is trading around $108, well below its original IPO price. For the legions of retail investors who bought into the initial launch surge, their portfolios are under water. Naturally, the search for someone to blame began immediately.

How could a company building reusable rockets and global satellite constellations drop like a rock from Low Earth Orbit?

What happened? Nothing, really. The market simply shifted from pricing a dream to pricing a business, the way markets always do. And for that there is a reason. You simply have to look past the rockets and examine the ledger.

SpaceX is not profitable.

According to SpaceX’s S-1 filing, the company lost roughly $4.9 billion over the previous year and reported a loss of approximately $1.69 per share. Its price-to-earnings ratio is negative because there are no earnings. It also debuted with an extraordinarily high price-to-sales ratio of 78, meaning investors are willing to pay $78 today for every single dollar of revenue the company brings in. Revenue, not profit.

Think about the mathematical leap of faith required for that calculation. A price-to-sales ratio of 78 means investors are valuing the company at 78 times its annual revenue. For comparison, mature industrial companies often trade at a small fraction of that, often at price-to-sales ratios below 5. With SpaceX investors aren’t buying today’s business. They’re paying for extraordinary future growth that may never pan out.

I should note that the investment isn’t necessarily irrational. Many successful companies spent years losing money before becoming enormously profitable, but that does mean investors today are paying for what they believe the company will become in the future, not what it is today.

Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett’s mentor, famously observed, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” IPOs often begin as a full throttle voting machine. Hopeful investors vote with their emotions, their excitement and their fear of missing out. They buy the story. The voting machine rewards possibility. The weighing machine rewards execution. Between those two lies one of the most volatile periods in a company’s life.

But eventually, the fanfare dies down, the noise fades and the weighing machine turns on. The weighing machine doesn’t care about vision statements or launch videos. It only cares about cash flow. Every IPO is marketed around a compelling growth story. They are engineered to sell a speculative dream at the absolute peak of public interest. Over time, the weighing machine asks a different question, how much is this business actually worth?

Every IPO sells a dream. That’s not criticism. It’s simply the nature of a company going public. Investors are buying into a future that management believes it can create. That doesn’t mean the story is false. It does mean that the future is uncertain.

Elon Musk is a visionary mind, but he is also a master showman. He understands intuitively that modern valuation relies heavily on narrative equity. He operates on the classic promotional principle that attention is currency and that public enthusiasm can fund grand engineering ambitions long before the fundamentals justify the price tag. Is he selling a dream? Absolutely.

I’ve written before that many emerging technologies eventually become commodities. Railroads did. Automobiles did. Internet service did. AI is beginning to follow the same path.

Space launch may not be any different. SpaceX is competing with United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Boeing, Virgin Galactic and increasingly with state backed space programs around the world. Likewise, SpaceX’s AI ambitions face brutal competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Mistral, Perplexity and many others. As markets mature, competition tends to compress margins and reduce the extraordinary profits that early investors often imagine. The weaker companies can not withstand margin compression and either sell out or simply fail.

SpaceX isn’t a unicorn in this industry. It is going up against some major heavy hitters. History suggests that not every company competing in a rapidly expanding industry survives. As competition increases, weaker business models tend to disappear through bankruptcy, acquisition or consolidation.

I used the analogy before of selling picks and shovels during a gold rush. If you’re the only supplier, you can charge almost anything. If six companies are selling nearly identical picks and shovels on the same block, price competition becomes unavoidable. That’s why four gas stations on the same intersection rarely become four wildly profitable businesses.

So should my coworker be angry at Elon Musk?

Personally, I don’t think so. Whether you admire Musk or dislike him, one thing is undeniable. He’s one of the most effective promoters of ambitious technological visions of our time. That’s part of what has made him extraordinarily successful.

But investors also have personal responsibilities. Before every IPO, companies file an S-1 with the SEC. It is a long, dry, legally binding document designed specifically to outline how the business operates and every single reason you might lose your money. That truth is required by law, to describe the business, its financial condition and, perhaps most importantly, the risks. Those risks aren’t hidden in fine print. They’re disclosed so investors can make informed decisions.

SpaceX’s S-1 laid out the capital burn, the operational dangers and the heavy competition. SpaceX is not operating in a vacuum, literally or economically.

Buying an IPO is, by definition, buying uncertainty. It’s buying a pitch. Imagine reading the first chapter of a novel and using that to decide what the rest of the book is like. I’ve had many disappointing days thinking that what I was reading is gold. The polished first chapter was. Until it wasn’t.

In the hype of the market, history suggests caution. Historically, many IPOs fail outright and an even larger percentage underperform the broader market over the following three to five years. Most IPOs underperform. Keep that fact on a notecard on top of your checkbook.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett famously observed that a “know-nothing investor” can routinely outperform most financial professionals simply by holding a low cost S&P 500 index fund. His late partner, Charlie Munger, expressed a similar philosophy in his own memorable way: find a collection of great, proven businesses and “just sit on your ass”.

Could SpaceX ultimately justify its valuation? Absolutely.
Could it disappoint investors? Just as easily.

I have no special insight into which outcome is more likely, but the options are limited. SpaceX may very well conquer the aerospace industry, colonize space and eventually justify a multi trillion dollar market cap. Or it may remain a capital intensive utility operating in a crowded marketplace, burning cash until the funding runs out.

Markets are remarkably good at separating stories from businesses, but not immediately. IPO investors often discover they’re buying the story first and the business later.

No one knows the future of SpaceX or any other IPO company, but we do know the historical behavior of initial public offerings. IPOs have always been speculative investments. The excitement surrounding a new public company doesn’t eliminate the risks. It simply makes them easier to be overlooked.

That’s why you’ll never catch me buying an IPO. Not on day 1. Not on year 1. Show me how you do long term business under SEC’s public disclosure rules and I’ll show you the money. Or not.

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Posted in Economy, Investing, Money | Tagged Benjamin Graham, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, hype, Initial Public Offering, investing, IPO, marketing, S-1, SEC, SpaceX, speculation, speculative investment, stock market, voting machine, Warren Buffett, weighing machine | Leave a comment

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