Rob Walker, Yahoo News 17 hours ago
If you’ve ever worried, or even wondered, about the ultimate fate of humanity itself, then here is the book for you: In Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Analee Newitz takes on the enormous topic of “how humans will survive a mass extinction.â€
As that phrase (the book’s subtitle) indicates, Newitz proves to be an optimist about the science and potential technologies of long-term survival — but she didn’t start out that way. And while she makes her case in conversational tones, her argument reflects sweeping research: Methodically but entertainingly walking the reader through evolutionary history starting with mass-extinction events from billions of years ago, she works her way into the laboratories of contemporary researchers devising hard-to-believe innovations to save humanity from every future calamity you can imagine. Along the way the reader meets techno-thinkers and scientists grappling with pandemics and other threats, devising wild-sounding bio-energy alternatives, "converting urban spaces into biological organisms," preparing for the possibility of a planet-threatening asteroid, storing the sum of human knowledge in a discreet set of computer files and figuring out various methods of traveling to other planets — including a “space elevator.â€
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