In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale.
Continue Reading »
In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked, this hole would have exposed life on Earth to dangerous — and in some regions potentially lethal — levels of radiation, but an international treaty brought us back from the brink of disaster.
That treaty, the Montreal Protocol, is a lesson in human resilience: We can save the world, because we already did it once before.
An epidemic of deadly fridges
The story of the Montreal Protocol starts, bizarrely, with an epidemic of deadly fridges in the 1920s. In those pioneer days of electric home refrigeration, everyone’s favorite new kitchen appliance relied on highly toxic, flammable, or corrosive gases to keep food chilled. A faulty compressor or leaky pipe could wipe out an entire family in their sleep, and in the first half of 1929, gas from fridges killed at least 15 people in Chicago alone.
Danger drove innovation, and in 1928, General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. synthesized ... Continue Reading »
Not long ago, I found myself in line at my local dry cleaner. It’s a modest shop, the kind of place you’ve passed a thousand times without a second thought. But the man behind the counter — let’s call him Howard — is not a modest man. He pays an almost fussy, forensic level of attention to every customer. He remembers names and checks garment tags twice. He asks follow-up questions about a persistent wine stain on a lapel that suggest he genuinely, deeply cares about the outcome of his work.
When it was finally my turn at the counter, I thanked him for the meticulousness he brought to his work and casually asked how business had been. Howard sighed. He smiled a weary smile and paused. “Where to start?” he said. Then he told me about 2020.
When the pandemic struck, dry cleaners were among the hardest-hit businesses in the country. It was a perfect storm of obsolescence. Offices shuttered and weddings were canceled. Between remote work and the sudden “Zoom-casual” dress code, the demand for pressed shirts and dry-cleaned suits ... Continue Reading »
When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumpster, what do we experience? It might well be disgust or dismay, but it’s rarely awe or wonder.
Yet rats may be one of the most awe-worthy animals on the planet. They have survived global apocalypses, far-flung abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap them. We do horrible things to these animals.” And just when we think we’ve won? “They rebound.”
No one wants to find rat droppings next to the Pop-Tarts in the pantry or hear the scritchings and scratchings of rats ... Continue Reading »
I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink.
A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!”
Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... Continue Reading »
For nearly every sport, there are innate attributes that can give an athlete an edge. Basketball has a height advantage. With NFL linemen, a little girth tends to help. Most jockeys are small and lean. The best ballet dancers are light on their feet. A high limb-length ratio offers some runners a natural advantage. With sumo wrestling, it’s … well, you get the point.
In rock climbing, a few such traits include longer fingers, shorter forearms, and scraggly wrists, all of which might help a climber clutch at tiny crimps in the rock with substantially more ease. The addition or subtraction of mere millimeters on the hand could mean the difference between struggling with an intermediate climb at your local bouldering gym and pioneering an untouched route along some precipitous wall in any far-flung corner of the world.
There is, however, another trait worth mentioning, one perhaps even more foundational to the literal and metaphorical heights of professional rock climbing. It’s a quality that cannot be as easily quantified by a tape measure or an MRI or any suite of blood tests. ... Continue Reading »
To live on Mars, humans will need more than rockets and ambition. They will need habitats that can protect them from radiation, brutal temperature swings, and an unbreathable atmosphere. Building such shelters on Earth wouldn’t be a challenge — we could construct an airtight box, pile on radiation shielding, and call it a day. But off-world construction runs into one overwhelming constraint: the upmass problem.
Though reusable rockets are driving down the cost of sending cargo into space, it is still incredibly high. With every extra kilogram of payload adding to mission costs, astronauts are severely limited in what they can bring. “The whole idea of bricks and cinder blocks isn’t going to fly,” says Jim Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who played an integral role in NASA’s Apollo program.
What could fly, though? Fungi.
A resilient resource
If asked to identify the fungi in a forest, most people would likely point to the mushrooms they see popping out from the soil. But the main part of a fungus is actually its mycelium, a tangled, cobweb-like structure that permeates the forest’s leaf ... Continue Reading »
A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived.
I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, causing it to flop around like a broken limb. I had already made the trek from the village where I was staying to the nearest repair shop once before, but the repairman’s first fix (epoxy that reinforced the hinge) only lasted a few days. I dropped it off again, but there was a catch for the pickup this time — Spain being Spain, the shop had closed early for the weekend, so the repairman offered to meet me at his house.
That’s how I found myself idling on a random side street, half-expecting the repairman to emerge from the shadows with my laptop tucked under his trench coat. The reality was far less noir: He showed up, handed over my computer, and wished me luck. The fix, he told ... Continue Reading »
To Mallerie Shirley and Christopher Pleasants, nothing felt “revolutionary” about the way they were raising their two kids. Then a stranger called child protective services.
It started last November in Atlanta. With school closed on Election Day, the couple’s 6-year-old son, Jake (not his real name), wanted to ride his scooter by himself to a nearby playground while Mallerie and Christopher worked their tech jobs from home. They had recently begun allowing Jake to play outside alone, and other kids and a group of parents working a charity drive would be waiting for him at the park.
Permission granted. Jake strapped on his helmet, got on his scooter, and rode one-third of a mile on a paved recreational path to the playground. On his way back, a woman stopped him. She asked for his name, age, and where he lived. “He felt like the woman was just demanding answers,” Mallerie says. “And then when she started following him, it scared him.”
Two days later, a caseworker from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) rang their doorbell. The caseworker said Jake was ... Continue Reading »
AI tools like RFdiffusion have made protein design dramatically easier, cheaper, and faster. This is accelerating vaccine development, opening new paths for treating genetic diseases, and making science more accessible — labs that couldn’t afford to work on certain problems before now can. Those are real gains. They’re also new kinds of exposure. The same tools that speed up vaccine development can be used to accelerate pathogen development. The same accessibility that lets a small lab design a cure lets a different small lab, or a single determined individual, design a threat.
We’ve encountered this paradox before, with CRISPR gene editing, gain-of-function research, and other technologies. Each follows the same pattern: A powerful new capability emerges, the benefits are real, the failure modes are real, and the two scale together. So far, on balance, we’ve come out ahead. The cures have outpaced the harms. The systems have held. But surviving a stress test is different from being designed to absorb shocks and recover.
The prize of technological innovation is a world where major problems get solved faster. But when a powerful capability ... Continue Reading »
In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale.
In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked, this hole would have exposed life on Earth to dangerous — and in some regions potentially lethal — levels of radiation, but an international treaty brought us back from the brink of disaster.
That treaty, the Montreal Protocol, is a lesson in human resilience: We can save the world, because we already did it once before.
An epidemic of deadly fridges
The story of the Montreal Protocol starts, bizarrely, with an epidemic of deadly fridges in the 1920s. In those pioneer days of electric home refrigeration, everyone’s favorite new kitchen appliance relied on highly toxic, flammable, or corrosive gases to keep food chilled. A faulty compressor or leaky pipe could wipe out an entire family in their sleep, and in the first half of 1929, gas from fridges killed at least 15 people in Chicago alone.
Danger drove innovation, and in 1928, General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. synthesized ... 
Not long ago, I found myself in line at my local dry cleaner. It’s a modest shop, the kind of place you’ve passed a thousand times without a second thought. But the man behind the counter — let’s call him Howard — is not a modest man. He pays an almost fussy, forensic level of attention to every customer. He remembers names and checks garment tags twice. He asks follow-up questions about a persistent wine stain on a lapel that suggest he genuinely, deeply cares about the outcome of his work.
When it was finally my turn at the counter, I thanked him for the meticulousness he brought to his work and casually asked how business had been. Howard sighed. He smiled a weary smile and paused. “Where to start?” he said. Then he told me about 2020.
When the pandemic struck, dry cleaners were among the hardest-hit businesses in the country. It was a perfect storm of obsolescence. Offices shuttered and weddings were canceled. Between remote work and the sudden “Zoom-casual” dress code, the demand for pressed shirts and dry-cleaned suits ... 
When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumpster, what do we experience? It might well be disgust or dismay, but it’s rarely awe or wonder.
Yet rats may be one of the most awe-worthy animals on the planet. They have survived global apocalypses, far-flung abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap them. We do horrible things to these animals.” And just when we think we’ve won? “They rebound.”
No one wants to find rat droppings next to the Pop-Tarts in the pantry or hear the scritchings and scratchings of rats ... 
I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink.
A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!”
Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... 
For nearly every sport, there are innate attributes that can give an athlete an edge. Basketball has a height advantage. With NFL linemen, a little girth tends to help. Most jockeys are small and lean. The best ballet dancers are light on their feet. A high limb-length ratio offers some runners a natural advantage. With sumo wrestling, it’s … well, you get the point.
In rock climbing, a few such traits include longer fingers, shorter forearms, and scraggly wrists, all of which might help a climber clutch at tiny crimps in the rock with substantially more ease. The addition or subtraction of mere millimeters on the hand could mean the difference between struggling with an intermediate climb at your local bouldering gym and pioneering an untouched route along some precipitous wall in any far-flung corner of the world.
There is, however, another trait worth mentioning, one perhaps even more foundational to the literal and metaphorical heights of professional rock climbing. It’s a quality that cannot be as easily quantified by a tape measure or an MRI or any suite of blood tests. ... 
To live on Mars, humans will need more than rockets and ambition. They will need habitats that can protect them from radiation, brutal temperature swings, and an unbreathable atmosphere. Building such shelters on Earth wouldn’t be a challenge — we could construct an airtight box, pile on radiation shielding, and call it a day. But off-world construction runs into one overwhelming constraint: the upmass problem.
Though reusable rockets are driving down the cost of sending cargo into space, it is still incredibly high. With every extra kilogram of payload adding to mission costs, astronauts are severely limited in what they can bring. “The whole idea of bricks and cinder blocks isn’t going to fly,” says Jim Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who played an integral role in NASA’s Apollo program.
What could fly, though? Fungi.
A resilient resource
If asked to identify the fungi in a forest, most people would likely point to the mushrooms they see popping out from the soil. But the main part of a fungus is actually its mycelium, a tangled, cobweb-like structure that permeates the forest’s leaf ... 
A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived.
I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, causing it to flop around like a broken limb. I had already made the trek from the village where I was staying to the nearest repair shop once before, but the repairman’s first fix (epoxy that reinforced the hinge) only lasted a few days. I dropped it off again, but there was a catch for the pickup this time — Spain being Spain, the shop had closed early for the weekend, so the repairman offered to meet me at his house.
That’s how I found myself idling on a random side street, half-expecting the repairman to emerge from the shadows with my laptop tucked under his trench coat. The reality was far less noir: He showed up, handed over my computer, and wished me luck. The fix, he told ... 
To Mallerie Shirley and Christopher Pleasants, nothing felt “revolutionary” about the way they were raising their two kids. Then a stranger called child protective services.
It started last November in Atlanta. With school closed on Election Day, the couple’s 6-year-old son, Jake (not his real name), wanted to ride his scooter by himself to a nearby playground while Mallerie and Christopher worked their tech jobs from home. They had recently begun allowing Jake to play outside alone, and other kids and a group of parents working a charity drive would be waiting for him at the park.
Permission granted. Jake strapped on his helmet, got on his scooter, and rode one-third of a mile on a paved recreational path to the playground. On his way back, a woman stopped him. She asked for his name, age, and where he lived. “He felt like the woman was just demanding answers,” Mallerie says. “And then when she started following him, it scared him.”
Two days later, a caseworker from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) rang their doorbell. The caseworker said Jake was ... 
AI tools like RFdiffusion have made protein design dramatically easier, cheaper, and faster. This is accelerating vaccine development, opening new paths for treating genetic diseases, and making science more accessible — labs that couldn’t afford to work on certain problems before now can. Those are real gains. They’re also new kinds of exposure. The same tools that speed up vaccine development can be used to accelerate pathogen development. The same accessibility that lets a small lab design a cure lets a different small lab, or a single determined individual, design a threat.
We’ve encountered this paradox before, with CRISPR gene editing, gain-of-function research, and other technologies. Each follows the same pattern: A powerful new capability emerges, the benefits are real, the failure modes are real, and the two scale together. So far, on balance, we’ve come out ahead. The cures have outpaced the harms. The systems have held. But surviving a stress test is different from being designed to absorb shocks and recover.
The prize of technological innovation is a world where major problems get solved faster. But when a powerful capability ...