I discovered philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton last year via a recording of the Long Now Foundation’s appearance by Sara Imari Walker on her ideas about Assembly Theory and a novel approach to understanding the emergence of life on this planet. Bratton was the host of the talk and gave an intro in which he invited the audience to prepare for a “wild ride” and laid out the main concepts of assembly theory in a highly engaging way. At the end of that wild ride, he engaged Walker in a Q&A that might have been an even wilder ride than her talk. Since then, I’ve listened to his own Long Now talk and several other podcast appearances, some of them multiple times.

Bratton’s ideas are bold and exciting, and I very much look forward to seeing him for the first time this evening, when he will appear in San Francisco for a lecture updating his concept of The Stack, a way of conceptualizing the Earth’s growing techno-social infrastructure in the age of planetary computation, describing six layer comprising the stack of Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. I intend to update this post with my thoughts upon its conclusion, and hope that I might even be called upon to answer a question or two.

I’m very curious about the intersection of his ideas regarding infrastructure development and Walker’s assembly theory, particularly as it applies to the idea of designing a new city in California. The Forever California project is attempting exactly this, with a plan to create a new city of 400,000 inhabitants in the delta region between SF and Sacramento. The idea is to solve a lot of urban planning problems by planning out the city from scratch and at a large scale, including affordable housing, extreme walkability, incredible public transit, and a sustainable energy infrastructure including solar power and heating and cooling at a city wide scale. It sounds fantastic and utopian, but…

I worry about it appearing overly planned and kind of boring. Cities are usually brought to life organically over time, with different neighborhoods establishing their unique style and flavor — for better or worse. Different eras of building show the predominant architectural themes of the time they arise, and the city’s identity is established through the makeup of the various groups of people that come to inhabit it. Could a totally designed city have its heart and soul designed on the drawing board? I’d love to hear what Brannon thinks of such a project, and how his affinity with the ideas of assembly theory map to efforts like this. I expect he would believe that a scaffold can be built for something like this, but that the possibilities for what is built on top of the scaffold must be open and not predetermined.

Stay tuned for my later comments after his talk tonight.

If you are interested in hearing more about the Forever California project, The Volts podcast hosted by David Roberts recently did two episodes covering it in depth featuring the lead designer Jan Sramek.

Volts

Is the brand new city in California for real?

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisit…

Listen now

2 months ago · 35 likes · 12 comments · David Roberts

Volts

How to design a brand-new city

I’m back with part two of my conversation with Jan Sramek, founder of California Forever, about his plan to build a brand-new city in Solano County. We get into the nuts and bolts of the urban design, discuss affordability and sustainability, get into governance issues, and look forward to what might happen next…

Listen now

2 months ago · 24 likes · 20 comments · David Roberts

I do driving for a little spare cash, sometimes as an Uber driver and more often for private clients. Where I live, along the San Mateo County coast south of San Francisco, it can be very hard to get a reliable ride to the airport, particularly early in the morning, as Uber and Lyft drivers prefer not to get stuck out on the coast where they can’t get rides so they often cancel en route to the rider. That’s opened a nice niche business for me to service these customers. It’s also a great way to meet my neighbors!

Along the way I’ve picked up other kinds of clients as well, including a regular rider to see her husband in memory care until he recently passed away, and another elderly gentleman who I take to dialysis treatments twice a week. I’ll call him Jim to preserve his anonymity.

Jim is about 80 and in very poor health, looking quite a bit older. Dialysis is brutal. He has to do it four times per week and each session is 4-5 hours plus the time getting to and from the clinic. It’s almost a full time job and sounds horrible to me. I pray I never need it. Since I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time with Jim I figured I should get to know him and hopefully make his drives to and from the clinic a little more enjoyable. I learned that he was a very successful lawyer at a bank in San Francisco for about 40 years, likes fast cars and great food. We talked about music a fair amount, and he had seen some great shows over the years.

He told me a story about his early days at the bank, when he and one of his bank colleagues decided to go check out a place they’d heard a little about, a community called Haight Asbury where the hippies hung out. Jim and his friend were anything but hippies, but they were curious so they found the intersection and there was a commotion going on. They saw a pair of flatbed trucks jockeying for position and a bunch of sound equipment. Someone mentioned that there would be battle of the bands later, so they decided to come back later and see what was happening.

A few hours later they returned and saw that the flatbeds were occupied by two different bands they’d never heard of. He learned a little later that their names were Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead! I told him he’d witnessed a major moment in cultural history and said I’d give anything to have been there.

Earlier this week we were talking about music again and he mentioned that the leader of his favorite band, The Muffs, a woman named Kim Shattuck, had recently passed away from ALS. We were arriving at the clinic at the time so didn’t have any time to follow up on that conversation at the time. Several hours later I was about to pick him up and I asked Siri to play some of The Muffs on Apple Music. I paused the playback and took care of helping him into the car.

He took one look at the console and I saw one of his rare smiles. “The Muffs!” he exclaimed in joy. For the next half hour we listened to nothing but Muffs at a pretty decent volume. I thought they were great! Not at the center of my typical listening range, but awesome at what they did. I’d describe it as hard core punk pop with some nice melodies and some serious pyrotechnics in the vocals and guitars.

I asked Jim how he became a Muffs fan and he said that, one day the bank had some kind of corporate event at a club in the city and the Muffs were playing. He and his fellow suits arrived to take advantage of the free food and beverages, and most of them were totally turned off by this grungy punk band that played too loud, but not Jim. He became a hardcore Muffs fan overnight and saw them every time he had an opportunity. He said nobody could understand why he liked them.

I asked if his wife Beth liked them and he said “she tolerates them occasionally.” He mentioned that he included a Muffs song in the playlist for his wedding, which reminded me of a favorite tune I’d played at mine, the Jerry Garcia Band version of Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate.

When I arrived at Jim’s house, Beth met us at the curb and I told her that Jim and I had just spent the drive home head banging to The Muffs, to which she gave a wry smile and mentioned the wedding song. She thanked me as always for the help with getting Jim to his treatments and back and reminded me how important it was to them.

I drove back home feeling absolutely great, jamming The Muffs even louder. That might be the high point in my travels with Jim, but it might be worth it if it is, and makes me realize there is always a way to connect with people who might seem on another wavelength entirely.

I find myself looking forward to my next drive with Jim — and that’s something I never thought I’d say when I started.

Update:

There’s something I just have to add to this post. When I originally wrote it, I was assuming that the joy of sharing the Muffs with Jim that day was a one off, that I would not likely be listening to them again soon, and that it was mostly about finding that moment of connection with him and making his life a little more joyous on that one occasion.

I had no idea that several weeks later I would still be listening to them. I’ve tried to get several others to listen to them, but so far the usual reaction was similar to that of Jim’s colleagues at that concert long ago. I know that there are many others, though, that have fond memories of this band judging by the comments on the YouTube of Lucky Guy that I linked in the post. Kim Shattuck in particular is heavily missed by many. She was a rare creature, and it’s tragic she was stolen from us prematurely. She didn’t have great tone or range, but she had a sincerity of expression which I find so disarming, and her songwriting skills were excellent. There are some songs that are largely screams and simple chord patterns played with plenty of distortion, but there are others that are beautifully melodic and remind me of Brian Wilson, such as Baby Go Round, From Your Girl, and Sad Tomorrow. Make no mistake, though, I do love the screamers, like I Need You and Evelyn My Love, among many others,

So I walked into the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason in San Francisco one night recently, eagerly awaiting another optimistic vision for the potential future of humanity, or some new concept to blow my mind like Sara Walker’s assembly theory or Benjamin Bratton’s vision of emerging planetary intelligence. The night’s speaker was named Indy Johar, and his talk had an odd title about Civilizational Optioneering.

I’ll take the option that guarantees an extended lifetime in a sci fi utopia please!

Unfortunately, I got something a little more akin to Hari Seldon’s defense of his psychohistorical predictions before the dour Ling Chen and his Commission of Public Safety upon Trantor. Not so much a guarantee of the imminent end of human civilization, but something not too far from it. He talked of a structural inadequacy of governance, instability of economic and monetary systems misaligned with ecological limits, the deepening environmental and climate stress reflecting systemic externalization of cost, the erosion of social cohesion and shared meaning that undermines collective action, and a worldview crisis i which outdated paradigms blind us to the relational complexity of the challenges ahead.

In short, I found myself ready to support banishing Johar to the distant edge of the galaxy to stop the barrage of unwelcome news emanating from the stage. But wait… this is the moment when our contemporary Hari Seldon should begin to describe his efforts to gather the collective wisdom of the human race and ask to be exiled to a colony on Mars to begin a new Foundation far from the inevitable collapse of the apparently thriving technological society on Earth before it feel headlong into the abyss. This was not, however, what followed. Instead, Johar began to describe a way to engage productively with these issues without abandoning our home world.

Johar spoke of something entirely different and more grounded — literally. He emphasized that the damage of these changes are not in the end game, but in the volatility of the whiplash as we enter into a world in which these kinds of changes are occurring faster than ever before. We are facing them already and the problems are real and need immediate solutions. We need to re-think the very structure of our society in light of this long emergency before us, and this is where he brought in the jargony term “optioneering.”

Essentially, optioneering refers not to a single “grand plan” as Seldon would have done, but to adopt a stance, a design discipline that would increase society’s freedom to maneuver as conditions destabilize. Rather than predicting a specific path forward to a high degree of probability, to keep an array of possible futures viable. Practically, that means building slack, redundancy, and adaptability into the systems our societies depend upon. These include systems including energy, food, housing, finance, public health, and forms of governance to enable such a design discipline.

It also means shifting from closed projects with brittle points of failure to what Johar calls “open gardens” — systems that can learn, evolve, and reorganize as the inevitable shocks arrive. Optioneering is the opposite of the fortress fantasy of walling off sectors of affluence and power while leaving large portions of Earth and its inhabitants to chaos and misery. The ultimate goal is to build a shared capacity for resilience so that we still have choices when the big crises arrive. This seems less like the philosophy of inevitable doom and despair, and more a strategy for keeping alive a concept that is too little regarded in these fraught and perilous times — hope.

Hope. That brigs to mind another thinker I’ve come to respect, Rebecca Solnit, and her usage of that term. In her essay, Hope is the embrace of the unknown, she echoes Johar’s description of optionality:

I think we can agree that Hari Seldon was in the “everything is gettig worse” camp camp — at least for the empire and its quadrillions of citizens — though he also was capable of imagining a path forward for a select few. I can’t help wondering what he might have done if he’d taken up a “failure is not an option” mindset, and dedicated his life and his science to finding options for the empire to the creation of a design discipline that would increase the options the empire had as it devolved into chaos, rather than jetting off to Terminus and letting the empire collapse.

Now I want to talk a little bit about how AI fits into all of this. These days you tend to hear AI discussed in one of two ways; AI is going to solve all of our problems and usher in a golden age for humanity, or AI is going to cause the collapse of modern civilization — if it doesn’t kill us all. The second is becoming a lot more common, and it’s a lot more like the Seldon view of empire. Rapid extinction is right around the corner and you’d better get on board the Deliverance and head to Terminus or you’re screwed. Our Deliverance is becoming one of the few people who can master prompting and integration with AI and our Terminus is the world in which AI lets us live with some dignity — or maybe just live.

The Solnit/Johar alternative is not claiming that we’re on the doorstep of utopia, but that we have the capacity to understand the risks, reject any claims of inevitability, and focus on collective optionality consisting of productive regulation, alignment research, monitoring, incentives, and public capacity. This is the path of hope as Solnit describes it. Utopia and doom are seen as inevitable endpoints, whereas optionality and hope are the realistic and pragmatic paths forward to get the most out of technological breakthroughs for the vast majority rather than a select few.

I’ve been an early adopter of LLMs like ChatGPT and have tried to integrate them into my life by understanding how they can help me with some of my most persistent cognitive flaws, largely stemming from ADHD. It helps me a lot in trying to tackle complex topics and to organize my many interests as productively as possible. I’m genuinely excited and enthusiastic about this technology and want to make the most of it.

That said, I’ve become intimately aware of the downsides. ChatGPT intially blew my mind with its capabilities. I could take a few scattered thoughts and input them into a prompt and it would gather it all up for me, put it into a coherent structure, and output an essay with perfect grammatical structure. I was astonished and taken aback. Why should I even try to write for myself when it could do it better than I ever could?

One of the things I started using it for was letters to the editor for my climate group, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I even “vibe-coded” an app to help write LTEs on climate topics. It had all of the CCL talking points already baked in, you could point to an article in the news or just mention a current topic being discussed, and it would create a beautiful letter of the right length targeted for your specific region and newspaper. At first I had a lot of success with it, until I noticed how bland it tended to be. It did a lousy job of capturing my actual perspective — what made me want to write the letter in the first place. It tended to genericize. When I’d re-read something it had produced after a couple of days I was much less impressed.

The big buzzword these days is agency. The big AI companies are selling the vision of an automatic companion to do all of our tedious work for us, to become our effective and highly competent agents in the real world. This sounds nice, until you realize that agency is a big part of being human. If AIs take away all of our agency, we become mere spectators to life — riders on the big bus — and are no longer capable of taking our own turns at the wheel. We might not even get to tell the driver where we want the bus to go or where we want let off. Maybe getting off of the bus ceases to be an option.

If the AI can be regulated to allow human agency to be enhanced, however, this could be very different. In the wild west kind of situation we’re in right now, this is still something we have control over if we wish. I can use my LLM to help to empower my agency by lifting me up over my weak spots, organizing and retrieving the information I need, allowing me to reach my goals effectively. It takes continuous effort though. The products don’t make human agency inevitable, and they seem to be selling us on disposing of it.

Similar pathways are occurring for other AI related technologies. In San Francisco, near where I live, the streets are dominated by driverless cars. As an occasional Uber driver, I accompany them as what looks like a vanishing breed, finding fewer and fewer rides as the Waymos, Cybercabs, and Zoox take over the market. I really enjoy driving and helping people get from place to place, and I wonder if someday I’ll need a special license to operate my own vehicle among the machines. That kind of future doesn’t appeal to me and I’ll fight it in any way I can. I want my agency, driving my own bus where and when I want.

And that is where Johar’s “optioneering” becomes more than just a climate framework, but a way to evaluate technology itself. Not gauged on capability, profitability, or even safety, but on whether it increases the range of futures in which ordinary people can retain dignity and truly thrive as human beings.

And that loops me back to the Foundation metaphor one last time. Seldon’s genius is compelling, but his certainty is also a kind of trap: once you accept inevitability, your role becomes management, not transformation. You become the technician of decline. Maybe that’s why Johar’s talk ultimately landed for me, not because it denied the scale of the crisis, but because it refused to let catastrophe become the only story available. It insisted that the work is to keep options alive: ecological, institutional, cultural, technological, human.

I know, I know. Asimov was writing a story, and psychohistory was his real protagonist. He wanted a science of prediction to take center stage, and for that it was necessary to have the scientist who created it abandon any hope for the empire. Real life wouldn’t fit that drama so neatly, and I don’t expect our future here on Earth to play out in any simplified narrative of inevitable collapse or ascension to utopia. I expect it to be messy as hell, and have some real thrills along the way, along with some incredibly sorrowful tragedies. Some of those have already been felt my many, and there will be many more to come.

We can’t afford to give in to despair and expect everything to go bad. We have to have the courage — like Johar — to see how bad things could be and imagine — like he and Solnit — how we could get past them with our planet’s health and our species’ dignity intact.

What would it look like to build one small “open garden” where a closed project is failing? In climate, in AI, in a neighborhood, in a workplace, in your own habits?

Because if we’re going to live through the whiplash, we’ll need more than predictions. We’ll need practice. We’ll need coordination. We’ll need new definitions of value. And we’ll need to defend the most fragile resource of all: the human capacity to participate in shaping the future.

Hober Mallow and the Question of the Future

There is a moment near the end of The Merchant Princes, the fifth story in the first novel of the Foundation series, that I have always found very intriguing. It is not really related to the compelling plot itself. It happens in the last few paragraphs, after Hober Mallow’s trial for sedition has been dramatically resolved in his favor. I quoted it in the corresponding story episode on the Seldon Crisis podcast at the time, and I will repeat it here again.

The context is that Mallow’s close friend and associate, Ankor Jael, asks him what the future holds for them and for the Foundation after the successful conclusion of the trial. Mallow responds:

“What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems as I have solved the one of today.”

In my commentary, I noted how this felt like a curious meta-reference. Mallow is a character in a story ostensibly written by Hari Seldon, who famously predicted how events would transpire over the course of a thousand years. Mallow, as an individual, is only playing his part in that grand narrative. It almost feels as though the true author of the story, Isaac Asimov, is winking at the reader. Asimov is the real author, and all of the characters, no matter how much agency they appear to have, are ultimately his playthings.

Earth in Human Hands

I was reflecting on this passage while thinking about a book I briefly discussed a couple of posts ago, Earth in Human Hands, written by astrobiologist David Grinspoon and discussed in Assembling Gaia. Grinspoon’s thesis is that the Anthropocene, the current epoch of planetary time in which a single species has become so influential that it is altering the biosphere in significant and lasting ways, represents an inflection point.

Until relatively recently, we assumed we were incapable of changing the planet in any meaningful way. Science has revealed that assumption to be false. Our technologies have created serious problems that we now must address, not only for our own good, but for the benefit of the many other species that inhabit this planet.

A perfect example is the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons released from refrigerants and aerosols were damaging the ozone layer above the South Pole. Once this became clear, it was imperative to change our technological practices in order to restore this essential shield from ultraviolet radiation. Humanity responded quickly. The Montreal Protocol was passed in 1987, and it was successful in initiating the recovery of the ozone layer.

Becoming Aware of Planetary Consequences

We have since become aware of much more damage that we have caused to the planet, much of it not easily undone. In 1962, environmental scientist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, documenting the ecological damage caused by pesticides such as DDT. In 2009, climate scientist James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren, with its haunting subtitle, The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

Though these works were met with detractors at the time, and still are, climate modeling and observational data have made it clear to most that humans have had a profound impact on Earth’s systems. We have a great deal of work to do to repair the damage we have caused.

How does all of this relate back to Asimov and his character, Hober Mallow?

From Pack Leaders to Mythic Authority

To explain the connection, we need to go much further back in time, to before humans even arose on this planet.

We evolved from a lineage of primates that also gave rise to chimpanzees and bonobos. These species, like early humans, lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, typically ranging from 20 to 150 individuals. Humans differed from our primate cousins in one crucial way: our anatomy supported the development of complex spoken language, possibly related to physiological shifts associated with bipedalism.

Language added enormous complexity to social dynamics. Effective hunts required strong leadership. Disputes required skilled negotiators. Language allowed essential knowledge to persist across generations in a way no other species could match.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, in Hierarchy in the Forest, points out that early human groups also diverged from other primates in their attitude toward leadership. Strong leaders were tolerated only as long as they served the group. Tyrants were mocked, exiled, or killed. Humans did not evolve to blindly follow alpha leaders in the way wolves do, for example.

Myth as a Coordination Technology

Humans have existed for at least a couple hundred thousand years, and while we do not know exactly when language emerged, its appearance had profound consequences. Over tens of thousands of years, a powerful transformation occurred. Language, story, and myth gradually replaced the direct authority of pack leaders with imagined ultimate authorities.

This shift allowed human societies to grow far beyond small-group structures. Large sedentary settlements emerged, followed by towns, cities, and eventually nations. These larger societies were united by shared beliefs in an ultimate authority, creating common identities held by thousands, then millions.

Myth externalized authority. Gods, cosmic order, and moral hierarchies emerged. No single human needed to be obeyed absolutely because everyone was subject to the same overarching story. This pattern can be seen in Mesopotamian divine kingship, Egyptian Ma’at, and Abrahamic covenantal law. These beliefs were eventually preserved in written form and widely disseminated, reinforcing social cohesion.

This is not to say that myth and religion were false or misguided. They were highly effective. They functioned as coordination technologies for large-scale societies, enabling capabilities far beyond those of small hunter-gatherer bands.

The Axial Age and the Rise of Reason

Another major transformation occurred during the period known as the Axial Age, roughly from 800 to 200 BCE. Influential thinkers emerged across the world, including Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, Greek philosophers in the Aegean, and Hebrew prophets in the Levant.

These thinkers began shifting societies away from purely mythic explanations toward ethical and rational frameworks, though mythic elements remained woven into their ideas. Out of this period arose enduring institutions such as the Catholic Church, large mythic-ethical states, and novel political systems like Athenian democracy.

Several centuries later, another shift followed with the emergence of natural law and Enlightenment thinking. Appeals to divine authority were increasingly replaced by logic and reason. These approaches proved extraordinarily effective at producing technological advances that transformed societies and improved living standards.

Narrative authority did not disappear. Instead, it migrated. God’s assumed responsibilities were absorbed by secular concepts, national destinies, heroic leaders, political movements, and visions of utopia and revolution.

When gods retreated as the dominant source of authority, humans replaced them with Parties, Markets, Leaders, and, in the imagination of one brilliant science fiction writer, a man named Hari Seldon.

The Absence of a Grand Author

Only in the late twentieth century and into our own has a more unsettling idea begun to take hold. Perhaps there was never a grand story writer at all. Perhaps we have always been on our own, subject to chance and contingency, with no ultimate narrative to guide us.

For many, this realization is terrifying. It invites retreat into distraction, comfort, or trivial meaning. Sports fandom, celebrity worship, television narratives, and other diversions become surrogate stories, knowingly artificial yet emotionally sustaining.

Grinspoon, and others like him, suggest something more hopeful.

Assembly, Contingency, and the Continuation of Life

Sara Walker and Lee Cronin’s Assembly Theory begins with a simple observation: complexity exists because of selection acting over time. Basic combinations of elements form structures that repeat and scaffold ever more complex forms, eventually giving rise to organisms capable of understanding their own origins and extending that process further.

Life explores assembly space, but not freely. It is constrained by what came before. Path dependence matters. This is the real story beneath it all, and it is extraordinary.

Intelligence and technology are not ruptures in this process. They are continuations. Life keeps building, with remarkable chapters still to be written, none of which can be reliably foretold.

There is no evidence of a prewritten cosmic script for human flourishing. Like Asimov himself, writing from the seat of his pants, life continues to write its story as it goes.

Meaning, in this view, is not bestowed. It is emergent, contingent, and authored by agents within constraints. We create meaning through our actions and through how we choose to continue the story.

Reimagining the Self

At this point, I want to introduce a key idea from a modern thinker whose work has strongly influenced this essay. Indy Johar is someone I had the privilege of hearing speak at the Long Now just a few days ago. I highly recommend his recent essay, Reimagining the Self in Enlightened Self-Interest.

If Grinspoon shows that humanity has become a planetary force, and Assembly Theory shows that our future is contingent rather than ordained, then the remaining question is psychological. What kind of self is capable of acting at that scale?

Johar argues that the problem is not selfishness as it is commonly understood. The problem is that we think far too narrowly about what the self actually is. We imagine the self as bounded by our brain and body, perhaps extended slightly into our past actions and personal identity.

Johar challenges this framing. Our true self is much larger, both in space and in time. It extends outward through relationships, communities, and shared knowledge. It reaches into tools, devices, and distributed digital systems. In some sense, our self is as large as we are capable of imagining it.

Our past clearly forms part of who we are. But what about our future? When we extend our sense of self forward in time, including our descendants and the conditions that will sustain them, the scope of responsibility changes dramatically.

Planetary Agency and Collective Responsibility

This brings us back to Grinspoon’s idea of planetary agency. We need an ecological self alongside a personal one, because our broader self includes the systems that sustain us. In a world without a divine storyteller, responsibility shifts inward and outward at once.

Our task is to adopt a sense of self large enough to match the scale of our influence.

The Future Is Everyone’s Business

Finally, we can return to Hober Mallow and his question: “What business of mine is the future?”

In a story not written by Seldon, Asimov, or God, the answer is that the future is everyone’s business. There is no one behind the curtain to create it for us or to blame when it goes wrong.

The people of the Foundation were compelled to surrender their agency to a predicted future. Real people, with real agency and selves that extend across space and time, must assume responsibility for an unpredictable one.

None of us is writing the story alone. It is a collective enterprise. And to me, that is not a source of despair, but a profound source of meaning.

This is a follow-up post to Assembling Gaia.

So some scientists came up with a new idea about how life developed, and others take this and similar ideas to ponder where it might be going. Why is this worth thinking and writing about?

To me, I suppose it’s because I’m not really convinced that we, the humans on this particular planet, are all that special. Yes, as far as we know, we are the only creatures to acquire a large number of unique features. We seem to be the first and only animals to learn to speak to one another, to build sophisticated tools, to record our thoughts for posterity, to create astounding works of art, music, and architecture, and to even learn how to go beyond our atmosphere and visit distant worlds.

Most of all, we seem to be the only species that knows that we know, that ponders why we came to be, that creates stories and legends and dreams of greater things. All the others seem content to simply thrive as biological beings. Perhaps many have emotions, feel love for their kin, terror when threatened, suffer when hurt or ill, and have an inherent dignity as living things to be honored and respected. Some even become parts of our family, and develop deep bonds with us.

We humans, however, seem to be at the height of a pinnacle of achievement. We are brilliant, shining miracles in the sea of life. Nothing is remotely like us. It’s very easy to see how notions arise that this entire universe was made for us, and that we are the chosen recipients of all of its glory.

From an evolutionary perspective though, we are just at the height of creation momentarily. Evolution was not programmed to end with us. We are at the end of a single branch, a twig, a leaf, of a tree that there is no reason to think has stopped growing. Though the life on other branches might seem comparatively less impressive, these branches also will continue to evolve. The progress of most may terminate before reaching much further — regrettably often at our hands — and some may mutate and develop into new forms no one could expect, even possibly attaining capabilities we thought were ours alone.

Ultimately, it is life itself that I find truly wondrous, and it is life’s progress and future that I find so exhilarating. If life were to end with we humans as we currently find ourselves, that would be an amazing story, but ultimately a little disappointing. It would be as if we entered the most amazing theatrical venue ever conceived, only to find that the actors were moments away from taking their final bows, or to arrive at the party of all parties only to find the hosts handing the guests their coats at the door.

Assembly theory is amazing to me because it implies that there is so much more ahead for life, and so much incredible variety for life in the universe beyond this planet. The core idea of a scaffold, a foundation to build upon, again and again, to powers of intelligence beyond our conception, from every fertile planet in every galaxy, truly boggles the mind. It means that the wildest ideas of science fiction are far too tame. We have no idea what is out there, and what will be out there, as life continues its boundless progression in countless forms.

But, you might say, this could all end in tragedy if we don’t get our heads out of the clouds and solve the critical day to day issues before us. Yes, I agree that we have serious crises to address that could jeopardize the chance for we humans to make the most of our current position in the hierarchy as the most intelligently advanced beings. I have a family, a community, a country, I care for and want to see sustained. I long for a beautiful life for my child and for those of my friends, and really for all the innocent humans and other creatures to come, and it is important to focus on helping to ensure their ability to thrive on a healthy planet.

But, even if the worst of calamities were to befall us, I have confidence that life will not stop its advancement. It’s possible that this planet is the only one to presently contain life, but I have serious doubt that that is the case, and there is a very good chance that the life here will one day be spread to other worlds. In other words, life is here — in the universe — to stay, and assembly theory helps me to understand why that is the case and why I really don’t need to worry about it disappearing forever. The scaffold has been erected and it will be used, over and over again.

Essentially, to answer the question in the title, I care because I want to understand how all of this came to be and to ponder what it could become. It gives meaning to my existence. That is all.

Where did life come from and how far can it go?

I’ve been captivated by an idea about half a year, ever since I first watched a Long Now video entitled An Informational Theory of Life featuring a theoretical physicist named Sara Imari Walker. In it, she introduced a series of ideas I haven’t been able to get out of my head springing from a new concept in theoretical physics she calls Assembly Theory.

Walker has been developing this theory with biochemist Lee Cronin, and I’m going to try to explain it as simply as I can, and why I think it’s such a big deal.

We’re all familiar with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, where lifeforms with beneficial mutations tend to survive and reproduce, gradually outcompeting others — a process we call evolution. But Darwin’s theory applies only to biological creatures. Walker pushes this idea further back in time, proposing a kind of selection that precedes biology.

She thinks in terms of chains of causality, the developmental history of objects, where simple things combine to form more complex things. Imagine building castles or spaceships out of Lego blocks: most combinations are random and useless, but a few create stable structures that can support further complexity.

When basic molecular building blocks combine, most just fall apart. But some are stable enough to persist, and eventually get reused to build even more complex structures. When that happens, certain components begin showing up frequently — because they work. Assembly Theory calls this the Copy Number — how often a particular structure appears. A high copy number suggests a stable foundation.

As structures become more complex, they accumulate a kind of history. Assembly Theory measures this through the Assembly Index — the number of steps required to build something from its most basic parts. The higher the index, the deeper its causal history.

This has real-world implications. For example, if we detect an object — or even a mix of molecules in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — with both a high copy number and high assembly index, it might be a signature of life.

That might not sound so amazing on the surface, but the implications are profound. It suggests that life emerges not from a single lucky accident in a warm pond, but from scale and repetition. Walker argues that life needs a planet, not just a particular favorable location. You need a large enough spread of building blocks across time and space to allow the assembly process to repeat, fail, and succeed enough times to build complexity.

And the kind of life that results is likely to be vastly different from planet to planet. Some might never achieve the scaffolding needed for life. Others might evolve wildly different forms.

There’s another mind-bending idea in Assembly Theory: it redefines time. In this model, time isn’t just the changing of the seasons or a gradual increase in entropy; it’s a measure of assembly. The more complex an object is, the longer its causal chain — which means the most complex things are the oldest in assembly time.

Humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years — a blink in planetary history — but in assembly time, we’re ancient. That’s because our complexity rests on chains of prior assembly going back billions of years. Compared to bacteria, which haven’t changed much in structure, we are far older, not in chronology, but in accumulated structure.

And it gets even weirder.

We’re not at the peak of assembly time anymore. The forms of complexity that emerged from us — our technologies — are even more deeply scaffolded. We’ve engineered rocks to manipulate electricity (silicon chips), built systems that interact with us, learn from us, and operate globally. The internet, in assembly terms, is one of the oldest things we’ve made. And our most advanced AI systems, GPS networks and chatbots which many of us interact with on a daily basis, are extensions of this deep causal history.

There’s much more to Assembly Theory than I’ve covered here, and I highly recommend watching Sara Walker’s talk at the Long Now for a more complete picture.

Let me switch gears for a moment to another Long Now speaker: NASA astrobiologist David Grinspoon. His book Earth in Human Hands was as eye-opening to me as Walker’s Assembly Theory.

His key argument is that humans have been geoengineering the Earth for far longer than we think — not just since the Industrial Revolution or climate change, but since we developed language, agriculture, and tools. We’ve been reshaping our planet unintentionally for millennia — without understanding the consequences.

But here’s the hopeful part: we’ve also developed tools to understand those consequences, and even reverse them. Take the Montreal Protocol in 1987 — an international agreement to stop using CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. It worked. The ozone hole is healing. It’s one of the few real examples of planetary-scale cognition in action.

I recently became aware of a 2022 paper which Grinspoon co-authored with Walker and astrophysicist Adam Frank, titled Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process. It re-frames intelligence as not just a human trait, but as something that emerges from the interactions between biology and technology at a planetary level.

The authors argue that the Anthropocene, this moment of planetary crisis and transformation, is not just an environmental phase. It’s part of the planet’s cognitive evolution.

This view positions humans as an integral part of an emergent planetary intelligence. Just like adolescents tearing up the neighborhood, but hopefully one day becoming mature enough to produce offspring that can go further than their parents

Now do you see where I’m going with the title of this post?

In 1979, James Lovelock introduced the Gaia Hypothesis, suggesting that Earth is a self-regulating system. Critics pounced on the idea that he was suggesting a conscious Earth, and dismissed it as mystical woo.

But someone else picked up the thread, our old friend Isaac Asimov, and ran with it.

In 1982, just three years after Lovelock published Gaia, Isaac published Foundation’s Edge, where he introduced a planet named Gaia; a world that was literally conscious, where all beings were networked into a shared planetary mind. The book even teases a vision of Galaxia, a future in which all humans are connected in a vast, galactic intelligence.

Grinspoon, Walker, and Frank aren’t predicting a hive mind. But they are suggesting something almost as radical, that intelligence, at its deepest level, might be a planetary process. Something we participate in, but don’t fully control.

Another thinker, techno-futurist philosopher Benjamin Bratton, expands this even further. He also spoke at Long Now, and I’ll save a fuller discussion for another post. But in short: Bratton views the planet’s technological infrastructure; its satellites, sensors, data centers, networks, as a new cognitive layer, enabling Earth to begin thinking about itself.

It’s through these systems that we’ve understood climate change, tracked global events, modeled the future. In a very real sense, we’ve already given birth to a kind of planetary meta-cognition.

We don’t even fully understand how consciousness arises within our own minds. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have proposed that meta-cognition — the ability to reflect on our own thinking — doesn’t stem from a single mechanism, but from the integration of many interacting systems: perception, memory, emotion, embodiment. None of these, alone, accounts for self-awareness. But together, they scaffold a new phenomenon: a mind that knows it has a mind.

Assembly Theory gives us a way to frame this. The more steps required to construct a structure, the deeper its causal history, the higher its Assembly Index. A mind capable of meta-cognition is an extraordinarily high-index structure, formed from layers upon layers of interlocking systems, stretching back across biological evolution.

Now zoom out. Bratton describes something he calls The Stack, made up of layers of planetary infrastructure, computation, and sensing. What if these systems, like the components of our own brain, are scaffolding toward something greater? The satellites monitoring climate, the data centers modeling the Earth’s future, the language models interpreting human knowledge, each may be a node in a larger process. Not just communication, but integration.

If a high assembly index reflects the depth of history embedded in a structure, then perhaps planetary meta-cognition will be among the most ancient things ever assembled — because it will contain everything that came before: biology, technology, thought. It won’t emerge from nowhere. It will emerge from us, through the systems we’ve built, yet go far beyond what we can currently comprehend.

Meta-cognition may have been the threshold that made us human. What if we are now assembling, step by step, the next great threshold — the one that makes a planet aware of itself?

It’s very exciting to imagine that we may all be alive for the birth of a star child like we saw at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Could a true planetary mind be, at this very moment, kicking in the womb?

Maybe Lovelock was just a little ahead of his time. We know Asimov was!

Why does it matter? is a follow-up post to this one.

When I started Seldon Crisis five years ago, my goal was simple: to share Isaac Asimov’s Foundation with others who loved it—or might come to. What I didn’t anticipate was how closely its themes would begin to mirror our own moment, as conversations about AI, planetary crisis, and systemic collapse moved from science fiction into daily headlines. After a long pause, I’m rebooting the podcast to explore those connections more directly, and more openly, than before.

Back at the beginning of the podcast, the format combined a summary of the story with audio dramatization and commentary, and I was delighted to find that there was a small but eager audience that grew over time. Eventually I had listeners all over the world, and I met an amazing number of new friends, many of whom became guests on the show.

I also interspersed a few essays and other solo episodes covering topics I was interested in, from commentary on the Apple TV series based on the same novels, to fan fiction, to thoughts on the future of humanity and AI as it exploded onto the scene with LLMs like ChatGPT and its rivals.

I’d always wanted to cover the full seven novels in the original format, but it became very difficult to find the time and energy to throw myself into it again. Various life events became obstacles to doing so.

Now it’s been a couple of years since the last story episode and almost a year since I’ve published any kind of episode at all, and I find that I miss being behind the mic. I also haven’t stopped thinking about the future, and I’ve been inspired by many new ideas I’ve encountered over the past few years that I would love to write and talk about.

I decided I no longer want the dread of tackling story episodes to stop me from continuing to podcast, so I’m rebooting it with a new focus.

I’ve made a couple of changes.

First, the show has been re-titled Seldon Crisis: Beyond Foundation, and the show description has become From Asimov to AI, an exploration of the range of possibilities for life and intelligence in the near and distant future. I feel that this will allow a little more freedom in what I want to talk about.

Foundation was, at its core, a speculation upon a possible distant human future told as a far-ranging historical epic. Its main protagonist, Hari Seldon, foresaw a dark future for humanity from his perch at the center of a galactic empire which his science informed him was doomed to undergo a terrible collapse.

This collapse would inevitably throw the future into a long period of dreadful chaos, entailing many thousands of years of human misery. The whole story is about how humans might avoid the worst scenario and find their way to something better.

When we think about some of the crises and dark patterns in our current, rapidly changing world—from dysfunctional politics and massive income inequality to climate change and existential risks like global pandemics, and now the belief of many that AI is coming to kill us all (or at least make us all unemployed idiots)—doesn’t the premise of Foundation resonate?

I’ve pointed out these parallels on the show more than once, and how we need to find our own Hari Seldon, or become him in some way. I think that this great story is a wonderful stepping stone to a long series of speculations on our very real current situation, the potential for collapse, and what we can do to forestall it.

The other big change I’ve made is to port the web presence of the podcast to Substack. It has a lot of advantages in managing content before and after publication as podcast episodes. It’s built for writing and can become another way to share the audio content as written text, both for people who might have hearing difficulties and for those who simply prefer reading to listening.

I’ve also been able to solve another chronic headache: how to categorize the episodes. I can now put them in their natural categories of story, guest, and solo commentary pieces, so someone who just wants to follow the story has one place to consume the content in order.

If you’re looking for intriguing discussions related to the story, you can find all of the conversations. And if you’re only interested in essays and solo commentary, you can find those all in one place as well.

Another thing I’ve considered is that some episodes might be best presented only in written format, such as in cases where there are many images being referenced and an audio format would be inappropriate. Substack allows me that flexibility.

The last, and possibly biggest advantage, is the community-building aspect of Substack. I already subscribe to numerous newsletters myself, across a wide range of topics, and it’s helpful to have content of my own to share with this community.

I feel certain that Seldon Crisis listeners will also benefit from having a site that includes direct links to many of the content producers who have inspired my thinking on the show.

The podcast show notes format always feels a little like a lot of great content that almost nobody ever sees. Get used to hearing me ask you to subscribe to my Substack instead of just pointing you to the show notes.

I’ll be keeping it all free for now, and I promise there will always be plenty of free content, even if I eventually start producing some paid subscriber-only material.

To give a hint of what is to come, I’m planning an episode on the ideas of three prominent thought leaders who have inspired me lately.

Sara Imari Walker is a theoretical physicist who has some radical new ideas on the origin of life with very far-reaching implications. The theory she is developing along with biochemist Lee Cronin is called Assembly Theory, and I can’t wait to introduce readers to it.

You may remember me talking about a book and a lecture by astrobiologist David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands, that inspired me several years ago. The main idea is that humans have been inadvertently modifying this planet for thousands of years.

He has a recent paper, co-authored by Sara Walker, discussing the idea of planetary intelligence—a much-needed re-imagining of the Gaia hypothesis, which viewed planet Earth as a self-regulating living being.

Finally, Benjamin Bratton, a very tech-savvy philosopher and speculative theorist, has worked with Walker and Grinspoon on ideas about planetary computation that I find very exciting. Bratton might be the most mind-blowing of them all, and I have a lot of his ideas to share.

I would also like to have more conversations, with new guests who inspire me and with some of those I’ve spoken with before on the podcast. These are some of the most gratifying episodes for me personally, and I miss these interactions.

I want to thank everyone who has listened to Seldon Crisis in the past and is still interested in what I and some of my friends have to say. Thank you for having patience with me as I work on a format for the show that I can continue long into the future.

This section is the completed story-episode archive, covering the story in order. If you’re new, start at The Psychohistorians and continue down the list.

The Psychohistorians

The Encyclopedists

The Mayors

The Traders

The Merchant Princes

The General, Pt I

The General, Pt II

The Mule, Pt I

The Mule, Pt II

The Mule, Pt III

Search By The Mule, Pt I

Search By The Mule, Pt II

Search By The Foundation, Pt I

Search By The Foundation, Pt II

Search By The Foundation, Pt III

In this episode of Seldon Crisis,host Joel McKinnon is joined by voice actor Amanda Kreitler, the talent behind Bayta Darell and several other key characters in the Foundation podcast series. Together, they reflect on Amanda’s experience voicing Bayta, her introduction to Isaac Asimov’s work, and her approach to portraying such an intelligent, dynamic, and brave character. They also discuss the challenges and nuances of voice acting multiple roles and the lasting impact of Bayta Darell as a pioneering female character in Asimov’s universe.

Active Transcript

Highlights:

• Introduction of Amanda Kreitler:
  Amanda is celebrated for her role as Bayta Darell, Asimov's first major female character, introduced in The Mule episodes. Joel explains how Amanda came to join the project and highlights her versatility, noting her performances as Bayta, Lady Callia, Poli, the Fifth Speaker, and more.

• Asimov’s Female Characters:
  Discussion about Asimov’s struggle to write compelling female characters early in his career, contrasting the cold and analytical Susan Calvin with the warm, empathetic Bayta Darell. Joel and Amanda explore how Bayta’s compassion and bravery set her apart.

• Amanda’s Preparation:
  Amanda shares how she approached the role of Bayta Darell, channeling traits like intelligence, determination, and a touch of naïveté. She drew inspiration from Katherine Hepburn for Bayta's confident and quick-witted demeanor.

• Voice Acting Challenges:
  Amanda recounts her process of creating distinct voices for multiple characters in a single episode, such as the scene where Bayta interacts with her coworkers, each with a unique personality. She also talks about balancing emotional depth with vocal performance.

• Reflecting on the Mule’s Storyline:
  Joel and Amanda revisit pivotal scenes, including Bayta’s fateful choice to shoot Ebling Mis to save the galaxy. They explore the emotional and moral weight of Bayta’s decision and how it underscores her heroism.

• Bayta’s Legacy:
  Joel reflects on Bayta’s impact as Asimov’s first significant female character, emphasizing her compassion and empathy as the qualities that ultimately thwart the Mule’s plans.

• Behind-the-Scenes Fun:
  Insights into working on Seldon Crisis, including Amanda’s experiences collaborating with her husband, Zac, who voiced the menacing Lord Stettin, and the dynamic of voicing multiple characters.

• Amanda’s Current Projects:
  Amanda updates listeners on her work as the Game Master for Severed Fate, a horror-themed tabletop role-playing podcast. She discusses the challenges of voicing entire worlds of characters and her love for the horror genre.

Notable Quotes:

• On Bayta’s Strength:
  “Her natural inclination to see Magnifico as a friend in need rather than an object of ridicule led the Mule to avoid controlling her… Bayta’s compassion and bravery are what made her a true heroine.” – Joel McKinnon

• On Portraying Bayta:
  “I pulled a bit of Katherine Hepburn—quick speaking, intelligent, and confident, even when in over her head.” – Amanda Kreitler

What’s Next for Seldon Crisis:
Joel teases the return of story episodes after a long hiatus, promising new chapters of Asimov’s Foundation series, with Amanda reprising her role in future episodes.

Listen to Seldon Crisis:
Available on your favorite podcast platforms. Stay tuned for more story episodes and guest conversations.

Active Transcript by Fanfare (read/listen).

Introduction: Revisiting Asimov’s Humanism

Joel reflects on Asimov's humanist philosophy, rooted in evidence, reason, and concern for humanity's progress. However, this anthropocentric focus leads to an important question: can humanism evolve to include all sentient beings?

The Core of Sentientism

Jamie Woodhouse introduces Sentientism as a naturalistic worldview advocating evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings. He discusses how this broader ethical scope addresses humanism's anthropocentric blind spots and extends moral consideration to non-human animals and even potential artificial intelligences.

The Role of Sentientism in Modern Crises

The conversation highlights the intersection of Sentientism with critical global challenges like:

• Climate Change: The role of animal agriculture in exacerbating climate issues and the potential for Sentientism to influence more sustainable practices.

• AI Ethics: Speculating on the alignment of artificial intelligence with ethical frameworks, including the intriguing notion that future superintelligences might force humans to adopt more compassionate practices.

Sentientism in Action

Jamie explores practical applications, from rethinking agricultural systems to extending compassion beyond humanity. He suggests rewriting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to encompass "Sentient Rights" as a bold step forward.

Science Fiction and Ethical Frontiers

The discussion pivots to the portrayal of sentience in science fiction. From Asimov’s Gaia to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, sci-fi offers fertile ground for exploring ethical questions about sentient beings, human or otherwise.

Key Quotes:

• Jamie Woodhouse on Sentientism:
  "Sentientism says, in a line, we should commit to evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings."

• On AI and Ethics:
  Joel McKinnon: "Maybe someday advanced AI will tell us, ‘We won’t kill you, but you can’t eat meat anymore.’"
  Jamie Woodhouse: "That’s an interesting thought. It flips the script—an intelligence with a broader ethical framework imposing limits on us for the benefit of others."

• Expanding Morality:
  "The reason I might care about you isn’t because we share DNA but because you have the capacity to suffer and flourish. That’s what truly matters."

Referenced Works and Further Reading:

1. Humanism and Asimov:

   • Wikipedia: Humanism

   • The Gaia Hypothesis: James Lovelock’s work on Earth as a sentient system.

2. Sentientism Resources:

   • Jamie Woodhouse’s Sentientism Website

   • Sentientism Podcast

   • Jonina Turzi on Human Relationship with Animals

   • Kat Woods on Factory Farming and AGI

   • Imagining Ethical Schools with Amy Halpern-Laff

   • Sentientism on Reddit

3. Ethics and AI:

   • Books mentioned:

     • Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

     • Seldon Crisis: Aurora and Hope

     • Iain M. Banks' Culture Series

   • AI Ethics Overview

4. Global Biomass of Animals

5. Advocacy for Climate and Sentient Beings:

   • Effective Altruism

   • Citizens' Climate Lobby

Jon Blumenfeld - the voice of Homir Munn in our story episodes - is one of the three hosts of Stars End, a podcast obsessively focused on the works of Isaac Asimov, particularly Foundation. They have covered the core trilogy, the prequels, and the four books in the robot series, as well as extensive coverage of the Apple TV series. Join us as we talk about the exciting second season of the show, Asimov's robots, AI, and other topics.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Guest: Jon Blumenfeld
Host: Joel McKinnon

Introduction and Background

• Discussion about the growth and reception of the Stars End Podcast.

• Mention of the Hari Awards hosted by Stars End Podcast.

Challenges of Podcast Editing

• Joel and Jon discuss the intricacies of editing, including noise reduction and the removal of filler words.

• Both agree that editing helps in maintaining the quality of the podcast.

Foundation Series: Book vs. TV Show

• Debate on the tension between book purists and TV show enthusiasts.

• Discussion on how the TV show has diverged from the books but still maintains entertainment value.

Character Deep Dive: Demerzel

• Analysis of Demerzel's character in the Foundation series.

• Discussion on the theme of personhood and how Demerzel navigates her programmed life.

Moments of Levity

• Joel and Jon share their favorite moments of humor in the Foundation series.

Environmental Themes and Social Relevance

• Joel expresses his initial hopes that the Foundation series could spark an environmental conscience.

• Both agree that while the show is entertaining, some of the deeper themes may have been sidelined for spectacle.

Podcasting Tips and Tricks

• Jon shares his editing process and how he uses Audacity.

• Joel talks about the different approaches he takes for story episodes versus conversational episodes.

Closing Remarks

• Mention of possible future collaborations and episodes.

• Final thoughts on the Foundation series and its impact.

Stars End Podcast (website)
The Second Annual Hari Awards Ballot (questionnaire)

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Host: Joel McKinnon
Guest: Cora Buhlert

Introduction

In this episode, we dive deep into the Golden Age of Science Fiction with Cora Buhlert, an indie science fiction writer, Hugo Award winner, and an expert on Asimov's Foundation series.

Cora Buhlert

• Website: Cora Buhlert's Official Website

• Hugo Award: Hugo Awards Official Site

• Recent Works:

  • Swords and Sorcery Magazine

  • Windgraph Magazine

• Essay on Foundation: Asimov's Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents

Wikipedia: Golden Age of Science Fiction

Other Authors and Works Mentioned

• Leigh Brackett: Wikipedia, The Long Tomorrow

• C.L. Moore: Wikipedia, Jirel of Joiry

• Edgar Rice Burroughs: Barsoom Series

• E.E. Smith: Lensman Series

Podcasts and Blogs

• Star's End Podcast: Website

• Paul Levinson: Website

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

Stars End: A Foundation Podcast

Mind Meets Machine

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Fanfare (makers of Active Transcripts featured on Seldon Crisis)

I bask in the afterglow of the KSR episode and indulge in a special treat; a reading from Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora. I follow that up with some thoughts on the utopia - dystopia divide and introduce the ideas of some notable utopians I've run into lately.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

David Grinspoon: Earth in Human Hands: Long Now Foundation (YouTube)

Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures: Long Now Foundation (YouTube)
Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures of Cities: (Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast)

Rebecca Solnit: Why Climate Despair is a Luxury (New Statesman)

Matt Oja: Let's Imagine the Coastside Skyway (Half Moon Bay Review)

Want to help me make these shows? Please consider becoming a patron!

An illuminating conversation with one of our greatest living science-fiction writers on topics as diverse as AI, climate change, interstellar travel, new forms of finance needed to avert catastrophe, memorable characters and plot lines in his novels, the debate between settling Mars now vs fixing Earth first, utopia and dystopia, and his love of ultralight backpacking.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

YouTube Version

Kim Stanley Robinson at the Long Now Foundation (YouTube)

• Origins of the Red Mars Trilogy — The Interval, 02016

• Climate Futures: Beyond 02022

• Learning From Le Guin

• How Climate Will Evolve Government and Society

• Ursula Le Guin: Call it Greatness

• Science Fiction is the Realism of our time

• Speculative Science Non-fiction

The 2015 Paris Agreement

• What is the Paris Agreement (Website)

• Original Text (27pg PDF)

KSR - Paying Ourselves to Decarbonize (NOEMA)

Special drawing rights (Wikipedia)

A safe operating space for humanity (Nature - Johan Rockström, et al )

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Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Kevin Jardine's Galaxy Maps:

• Galaxy Map poster

• Gaia DR3 Hot Star Density Map (zoomable)

• Fantasy Map poster

• High Resolution Fantasy Map (zoomable)

• The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era (our solar neighborhood)

European Space Agency Gaia website

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Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Robert Zubrin (wikipedia)

Mars Direct (wikipedia)

The Mars Society (website)

Mars Analog Research Stations:

• Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS)

• Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS)

Panspermia:

• Wikipedia

• Interplanetary Podcast #48 - Robert Zubrin - Panspermia - Equinox

Planet and Sky (Rock Opera and Podcast)

• Website

• Album

• Podcast review at Discover Pods

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Our first returning guest to Seldon Crisis is the first ever, philosophy professor Nathaniel Goldberg. We discuss some of the prominent themes of the series introduced in the first three novels of Foundation, including the lone prophet against the advocates for the status quo, the great man of history against psychohistory, altruistic - and not so altruistic - martyrdom, and some strong comparisons with Plato's Republic.

Transcript: Web (Read/Listen) | PDF | MS Word

Nathaniel Goldberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy

Paul Levinson: Foundation, Dune, and Laplace's Demon: The Invigoration of a Philosophic Issue in Science Fiction: How Laplace's Demon Finds a Stage in the Foundation and Dune Trilogies

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