Mike Sowden, in his own words a “Yorkshireman, travel writer, former archaeologist, now chronic misadventurer and tedious enthusiast” writes Everything is Amazing, a popular science Substack.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Sowden’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
One idea that I think we really share which I wanted discuss today is that, as your recent post says, “nothing travels faster than the speed of light except bad news.”
In my country especially right now, there’s a lot of genuine very bad news happening, with crazy evil monsters running the government. There's a sense of doom, of horror. I interviewed Jason Pargin about this earlier this year and he called it the Black Box of Doom, constructed around your head, that only showed horrible things. And it's a self-reinforcing cycle, because people scared about bad news, especially channeled to certain things, tend to elect more extreme politicians or vote for more extreme actions, which creates more bad news and feeds on itself.
Absolutely.
But big quiet trends, like amazing advances in biomedical technology, the advances in renewable energy, gradual progress on boring physical infrastructure like clean water and roads and stuff that keeps improving life for hundreds of millions of people, all of that never quite makes the headlines.
Your smartphone is an unprecedentedly complex machine designed to show you the things happening in the world today that will upset you personally the most. Because that's what people click on. And that's not a balanced perception of the world.
So what's your perspective on the strange information environment that we're in today?
Absolutely. It's so frustrating at times. This is why the world needs people like you who are going and making it your job to look at the solutions, to understand them, and then translate them, and then spread the news about them. Because there is so much happening! There's just incredible amounts happening in the world.
You know, stuff with Trump's administration trying to roll back on solar, it's ridiculous. It is. Going back to focusing on fossil fuels, there's no rational argument for doing that. But it's not going to work.
And we can't actually go back to fossil fuels very much! The wait time for a new natural gas turbine is seven years right now in the U.S., we've got such a backlog. Solar is the only option to build lots of electricity quickly right now.
Yes. This is why I feel like we are kind of living in the early stages of a Kim Stanley Robinson novel, because this is kind of the mess that happens during these periods of great transition. All these things are happening incrementally in a way that is not getting the publicity that it really deserves, but it is creating incredible change, under our noses. It's not that we're unaware, it's just that it's just getting flooded out.
And we will be aware when we look back just a little bit, and the amount that we can look back and see a change is getting shorter and shorter.
One of the interesting ones for me is looking at electric vehicles.
Yeah, yeah.
Here in Scotland, for a while, there’s this kind of hum as it goes past. I was hearing this hum more and more. And I was thinking, I'm getting used to hearing electric vehicles! It's coming so quickly.
And this is the incremental change. You know, everyone should essentially be looking at these and going, “Wow, this is amazing. Everything's happening right now!”
But everything is just kind of normalized. Bad news gets normalized, which is a real problem. So we're getting used to seeing extreme events and getting very cynical and very kind of doomerist about it. “Oh, this is always the way, politics is ruined” and everything.
But there is also the good news that is getting normalized. And it's creating this incredible change. I find that quietly inspiring.
I also think that there's just a lot of work to do in getting the word out about the power of this. I'm reading a book by Steven Johnson at the moment, which is Future Perfect. It's written 10, 15 years ago, and he's talking about the changes that are coming in at that time through the growth of peer-to-peer networks. There’s the old kind of core/periphery model, and then the peer-to-peer networks model is this kind of froth of creativity at the edges where it's not a centralized model of change.
And that itself has been a revolution over the last 15 years. We don't think about that anymore because it's just accepted that the Internet is this incredible, incredible self-organizing entity. There are nodes of control, obviously. And the infrastructure is controlled by various people. But what goes on is essentially an ungovernable mess of all these things happening. We've kind of got used to that as an idea, and 15 or 20 years ago, that would have been quite radical.
So I basically think Kim Stanley Robinson is right. He says that things could be a mess but we muddle through. That's why I like reading his fiction, he writes his stories in a way where they feel like you're reading future history. And past history is also a mess!
Yeah, exactly! History is a mess. And we do manage to muddle through. We do manage to achieve these unprecedented global high rates of literacy and vaccination and access to clean drinking water and food and stuff, despite all the monumentally stupid things humans have done and will surely continue to do.
One thing with the internet is, new communication technologies tend to lead to massive social upheaval. The printing press essentially allowed the Lutheran heresy to spread and become Protestantism in a way that the Albigensian or the Hussite heresy didn't, and then you had 100 years of religious war in Europe.
It is disturbing to see the manifestations, to see crazy blowhard idiots getting electoral victories. But even though the manifestation might be surprising, it is not surprising in theory that giving everyone a pocket supercomputer that can tailor your own personal custom worldview is probably going to have some societal effects. We're not used to that. It's probably going to take us a while to figure out how to run stuff sensibly with that as a factor.
Sometimes I wonder if in the year 2200 or something, people looking at our politics in the 2020s will be like “Ah, yes, this was the immediate post-smartphone adoption turmoil. The adoption of a global communications network led to sudden chaos as people could no longer determine what voice to trust. For years, people had no idea how to handle this technology and crazy idiots got listened to all the time.”
Yeah, I completely agree. I also feel like individuals are getting still getting used to the rules of communicating on social media and what that does to your thinking. I feel like there's things that we have yet to learn about how we conduct ourselves on social media.
For example, if there's all these people spreading this nonsense, what we should be doing, I would argue, is starving them of oxygen! Rather than quote tweeting them and sharing their stuff and saying, “Oh, look at this. This is terrible.”
When I'm on social media, I think about what the impact of what I'm going to put on social media will have on another person who is like me. Because if I share something that is like, “Oh, the world is doomed, everything's ruined,” as a quote to something awful that's happening, then what I'm doing is I'm making another human being feel that thing. And if I am doing that and I'm not spreading information that's really informing people properly about what's going on, I'm just spreading an emotion. What I'm doing is, I'm just making other people feel bad.
This is all stuff we’re learning, you know, on social media. We've got to learn the impact of what we share. I really feel it's an important thing. I use social media a lot to promote my newsletter, and it's been very successful for me.
What I've learned from my science writing heroes is that there's an enormous thirst for hope that is grounded in facts, and wonder that is grounded in science. People want their minds blown and they want to be reminded that uncertainty is actually filled with things that you don't yet know that would make your life better. It's such a powerful thing. So I try and lean into that as much as I can.
Absolutely. And, you know, I don’t know if you get this, but I sometimes get people writing to me “You’re just writing about good things, that puts people to sleep, you need to write more about all the terrible stuff happening!”
I think one of the biggest pathologies of the social media era, at least among people who are trying to help, is the belief that just publicly talking about how terrible things are amounts to doing something to help. And it really doesn't.
Like, doing something to help or making a pointed criticism or an argument might help, but just saying, “This is awful, what horrible doom,” that doesn't help at all. That’s sort of a placebo feeling of activism or help or something, but that just depresses you, depresses people around you, doesn't change the thing that you're upset about one bit, and doesn't help advance a solution or a counterargument or an opposing candidate or a replacement program or anything that could actually help.
Jason Pargin, the novelist — I think you'd really like his books.
I follow him, yes! Yes, he's great.
He said, if you convince yourself that everything sucks already, then that’s giving yourself a license to give up. Doom is perversely comforting because it means, well, if everything sucks, then I'm a virtuous person just for sitting on the couch and not making things worse.
But if it's an actual struggle, if there's good things and bad things in the world, then maybe what you do matters. And that's actually more of a radical thing to believe.
Absolutely. I completely agree.
I also think there's this pervading idea that in order to activate people into action, you've got to engage really, really strong emotions. And it seems to be assumed that the strong emotion that you would want to engage is outrage. And despair is tied in with outrage.
So…when you make people angry enough and cynical enough, they will get up and do something? I don't think that's what...what's the psychology of that?
When I was a writer just starting out, I was filled with existential despair as a writer. “Oh my God, how do I make a living doing this?” What despair actually does is, it kind of crushes you down into a state where you're kind of shrinking from the world. You don't have energy. You're not energized. You want to curl up on the couch.
Despair robs you of strength. It robs your hope of strength. And as Rebecca Solnit said, hope is an axe that you use to break down a door in an emergency. But despair is the opposite end of the scale. And despair is a weapon. We should not be given a weapon and then use that weapon against ourselves. That's ridiculous.
The name of your substack is Everything is Amazing. I find that really powerful. It reminds me of this XKCD webcomic.
I’m not focusing on the metaphysical aspects here, but rather the personal approach to what you take away from your beliefs about the universe. If you do believe that we're totally adrift in an uncaring void, is that sad? Or does that mean, look, there's this whole incredible world to explore, and we can build our own future and find our own meaning?
Everything is amazing, but amazing is not the same thing as good. Many things are both good and amazing, just the daily miracles of photosynthesis and light diffraction and so many other things that shape the existence of the world we know.
And even many big, complex, scary things are “amazing” in the sense of being extraordinary events happening — even if they’re morally terrible and causing unnecessary suffering. I actually think conceptualizing them as “evil/amazing” not “evil/boring” helps empower people to fight back, to “give themselves a hero license.”
For example, one of the scariest things in my life is the rise of neo-fascist wannabe-autocratic politicians in my country. That's bad. That’s horrifying. But if you think about it in a certain way, I live in an unbelievably complex civilization that's on the brink of dizzying possible futures, where people listening to the siren songs of new communications technologies have elected malevolent idiots. In my particular climate-issue realm, one of the things we argue with the malevolent idiots about a lot is whether we should accept the amazing new technology where, as Bill McKibben says, if you point a sheet of glass at the Sun, which is a giant nuclear fusion reactor millions of miles away, you get clean electricity for free.
That’s a sort of wild sci-fi fantasy scenario, fighting a cabal of dark lords, who are in power because of the black boxes of doom around people’s heads, to try to unleash magic space energy. That’s real! That's what we're living in!
We live in this privileged time and place where there's this opportunity to shape and take part in the future, to drive change on your local level and contribute to national and global trends on these wild, epic, civilization-scale technological and societal changes.
And yet people just always apply a boringness filter on anything that's real. The world we live in is much wilder than most fantasies or science fiction, but people just sort of discount anything that's actually happening.
Yes, absolutely. And I also feel like, you know, listening to you speak here, it's like reading your work. You have this level of enthusiasm that is needed when talking about these things.
Again, there’s this stereotype that scientists are these very kind of emotionally flat, boring, unenthusiastic people who are just like machines, like Data out of Star Trek before he gets a personality. It's utterly ridiculous when you meet scientists for real.
They're the most passionate and enthusiastic people in the world! They're the people who are madly in love with, like, lichenology, and they really care about this, and they are willing to devote their life to this. They're people who have deep loves and cares that will often fall outside what normal humans even think about.
Yeah. And that's what's needed at the moment, that emotion. Because of social media, so much of the news that we get and the way that decisions are made is emotionally driven. We need more enthusiasm to counteract all this doomerism that you were talking about. Because enthusiasm travels as much as that stuff! This is the thing that I have learned on social media.
When I discover a science story and it blows my mind, I think to myself “This, what i'm feeling right now, is the thing I need to convey in the story.” If I can convey the experience of having my mind blown, then the person who is reading the story, whether it's on social media or in my newsletter, will mirror that experience internally and they will have their mind blown. I will be able to guide them into having their own mind blown. And that emotion is incredibly important.
So I feel like the emotions of enthusiasm for science just need to get out there more, more and more.
Yeah! One science story that you've written about that I really liked is Doggerland. It’s related to that doom thing — the world's history, and the history of humanity, has experienced apocalypses a lot already. And there's always been the day after. Doggerland was a whole world, an area of land similar to modern day England, that got submerged in what's now the North Sea. Could you tell me more about that?
I used to be an archaeologist, so I knew a little about this story. This is an area of land that is now in the North Sea off the east coast of Britain. At a time of lower sea levels, this was essentially the lowlands of northern Europe. People lived there, because people do generally live in the lowlands, where the pickings for food are better. What is now the United Kingdom was just basically the highlands and the mountains.
There's been archaeological evidence of Mesolithic people living there for a while. But since they've been doing so much work in the North Sea to put up wind turbines, archaeologists have been given a lot of access to seafloor mapping, so they've been able to find an unprecedented amount of data just recently. They've been combining that with the models that they already had and the pieces of archaeology that had been coming up.
So there's this enormous mapping project just recently of Doggerland, showing essentially floodplains, rivers, in incredible detail and all the mountains that were down there.
These were all inundated over hundreds of years, in much the way that coastlines are going to be inundated over the next couple of hundred years by rising sea levels.
But there was also, in the middle of that, it was like an example of uniformitarianism and catastrophism at the same time. One archaeological story. There was an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway that cascaded out for a thousand kilometers along the seafloor. It caused this enormous pulse of energy, and this was right in the middle of this slow inundation of Doggerland. They call it the Storegga Slide. [Around 6200 BCE]. And it caused this enormous tidal wave that swept across this land and probably was a catastrophic event that killed most of the people who were still there.
There's signs of this tidal wave in Britain now. This tidal wave must have must have just been devastating because 50 miles inland in parts of Scotland, there's evidence of this tidal wave right now. And that's after the sea level rising to the level it's at now. So it must have come in like 70 or 80 miles or something then, it must have been an incredible wave.
That is a story that we know about, that’s timely, because of the rise of wind turbines.
Fascinating! When you think about the meta-level…Wind turbines, which we are building in part to avoid catastrophic future sea-level rise, the mapping to build those has showed us an instance of catastrophic past sea-level rise. Fascinating.
The Storegga Slide in the middle of the gradual inundation, that’s like a much larger example of what we're seeing with climate change now. The Earth is getting warmer as a general trend, and then there's often a heat wave or a glacial collapse or a dramatic event. Gradually and then suddenly. There's a gradual trend towards warming and then some kind of threshold is breached and stuff dramatically changes.
The strangely comforting thing about that is that humanity has survived massive disruption even with a much, much lower technology level than we have now. And we're increasingly developing technologies that allow resilience even after disasters.
Even though the intensity of disasters has increased and the property damage has increased, the number of people dying from extreme storms has gotten lower even as the storms have gotten more severe! Because we've got weather mapping and early warnings and evacuation plans and things like that. There's an incredible human capacity to adapt to apocalyptic stuff.
That's what we do! That's the great skill of being human, you adapt so quickly. We're having to adapt at an incredible speed at the moment. You know, to new technologies, as we were talking about. Societies are going to have to adapt quickly, in a way that societies haven't had to adapt for a long time.
I feel like we’ll have to become mobile over the next couple of centuries. You know, they talk about refugee crisis, but essentially the whole world will have to get used to the idea that essentially everyone is a potential refugee because of climate change and everything going on. Refugee should go from being this, not negative, but this kind of loaded term into a term for just people, essentially. Creating a vision of the future where this mobility and this kind of adaptability is more normalized.
I feel it's very, very important. Because, since the rise of agriculture, we've got used to tying ourselves to land. I feel like there's a lot of science fiction right now, a lot of climate change fiction, trying to kind of tug on those strings a bit and introduce us to new ideas. A future community can be built on something other than land. [I’m reminded here of the “Hives” in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota]. These are all very interesting ideas and we need to get into our heads that this is the time when they are becoming reality. There's a lot to learn.
If you are saying, “Don't worry about climate change because humans adapt,” you better also be saying, "I propose we accept 500% more refugees next year,” because that's how humans adapt to climate change.
Absolutely! And things like, “Oh, we need to adapt to climate change.” Oh, you mean like solar, which can be moved around wherever you go? “No, not like that.” It's like, come on.
It is increasingly the same thing at this point [climate adaptation and emissions reduction]!
Thermal power plants, they generally rely on water, whether it's to cool a nuclear reactor or to be heated up by burning coal to become steam to turn the turbine. The classic argument against renewables is intermittency, what if it's a still dark night and there's no wind or solar power being generated? We can increasingly solve that with batteries and pumped hydro and a bunch of other stuff.
But increasingly, we're seeing intermittency for thermal power plants too! If the creek that they're relying on heats up or dries up, or there's just a lack of water supplies due to drought, we're seeing gas or coal or nuclear plants having the same problems — responding to weather conditions with shutdowns — that people have historically claimed means that solar is unacceptable.
So we might as well use the thing that's clean, and you can build more, and there's no moving parts, and we can increasingly solve the intermittency problem too.
I just find it so bizarre when people say, “Oh, but what if it's night?” Seriously!Batteries! How long have batteries been around? It's not a hard idea to grasp. We keep seeing this kind of reaction again and again. It feels to me like basic science that's not being learned.
You've got people who are just living in this absolute alternate world when it comes to renewable energy. In the real world, it’s making up over 80% of all the new electricity generating capacity being built worldwide. People always complain about the capacity factor, which is lower for renewables. But it's increasingly setting records for electricity generation as well. Solar was the largest electricity generation source in the EU in June 2025!
People are just stuck in this world where it's still this marginal thing. And it's really not. It's already proven itself.
Yes. It's here. And it's also a suite of energy generation tools. We want to get rid of coal, and we want to replace it with these 25 different ways of generating energy, which are far cleaner and they all complement each other. It's just...frustrating.
But the thing that I love as well is learning about these new ways to generate energy that people are just playing with at the moment. Like piezoelectric flooring in airports! Generating a current. I mean, it's just dazzling. One I really love learning about, and I don't know how far along it is, is walls that pick up energy from noise in airports, facing runways. That's genius. I mean, that's just so much noise, so much energy.
I just wrote an article about a sodium air fuel cell design that just proved itself in the lab. It's brand new, but has extraordinary potential. Using sodium, which is highly reactive, as a fuel that could potentially react with oxygen in the air as fuel mass, which could make it much lighter and potentially even electrify aviation one day. You could just feed air into this fuel cell where it reacts with sodium.
So is that sodium that could come from, like, sodium chloride from salt? Or that could be seawater?
It could be, yeah. The world actually used to make a lot of sodium because it was part of the chemical process for creating leaded gasoline. We know how to produce lots of sodium if we needed to.
I love hearing about this! I can understand how people feel a sense of dread, but just the sheer number of solutions that are being looked into, I just want to hear more of it. I want to see science communicators getting the headlines because they're communicating these incredibly exciting ideas.
There's a classic quote, I forget who from, that our entire energy system was based on carbon and hydrogen — hydrocarbon molecules, fossil fuels — and now we're exploring the entire rest of the periodic table for ways to generate energy. Battery chemistries using everything from lithium to iron, complex molecules and minerals like perovskites in solar cells. We're exploring the whole rest of the universe of how to generate electricity, because we're moving on from fossil fuels!
I like this webcomic, about how it can be hard to show people that this is a really exciting thing, to see it as the heroic narrative that it really is.
I thought it was kind of insightful. Like, “new chemical stabilization method means we have a 5% more efficient solar cell” will have a hard time grabbing headlines, but it will probably end up being a lot more meaningful for a lot more people long-term than a terrorist attack in some city somewhere.
Yes, absolutely. This is the newsletter that I think you read from my first season. I've just republished it right now. The news is skewed in all sorts of ways. That's one of the ways, because it's an extremophile. It looks at the most ridiculously outlandish things that are happening. Often most of those things are dreadful and bad. And then we get this very skewed idea of what's actually going on in the world. And what's actually going on is things like you were saying.
So, yes, the challenge of science communication. I really appreciate what you're doing and what other science communicators are doing, what professional scientists are doing.
Me too. I don't have a doctorate. I have a bachelor's in environmental science and a masters in GIS mapping. But I kind of pivoted into journalism. I'm mostly writing about people who are much more accomplished in science than I am and are doing cool things. I'm trying to provide a supportive media that helps share these stories of genuine, meaningful progress.
Fantastic. Well, you're doing a great job so far, so it's good to see!
You are too! Your Substack is, well, amazing.
What else would you like to share? A particular science story? something cool you found? A macro trend, a specific incident, anything.
At the moment, I'm up to my eyeballs learning about the atmospheric sciences.
I’ve been having my mind blown about all sorts to do with the atmosphere! What I found fascinating recently was learning the story of a glider pilot, from about 20 years ago I think it was, and he got sucked up the middle of a thunderstorm. The lightning was hitting his glider, and it's just all absolute craziness.
But when you get to the top of a thunderstorm, you reach the stratosphere and you stop going up. Because air doesn't go upwards in the stratosphere, because the temperature inverts. So you reach a certain point where the temperature is at a certain very cold level, and then it gets warmer as you go up the stratosphere. That's why thunderclouds flatten out! And me learning that's why thunderclouds flatten out was just one of those...I've been looking at them outside all my life and I'd never questioned, why is it that thunderclouds stop at that point?
That's the reason. It's because hot air stops rising at that point because of this temperature inversion. It's such a simple thing, and I never got curious about it. I feel like an absolute ninny for not asking this question before.
But it's great! That's what science should be about. It should be about, “I've looked at this thing for all my life and I've never asked this very simple question about it. And now I have. I've just understood something incredibly simple and beautiful about how the world works. I've had my mind blown. And now it's like, what else don't I know?”
That's what it should be like, being a human being. We should all be like fascinated with what we don't yet know.
I absolutely agree.
I've tried to arrange my life into it being sort of my job to look into things I don't yet know. And I still find that my thinking is limited and my perspective is limited. There's questions I didn't even think of asking that someone else thought of.
One great blogger, Ozy Brennan, has a running tagline, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” There's just an astonishing amount of stuff! Everything is quite a lot of things. There's an amazing amount to learn. There's always more amazing stuff to discover.
That is actually the root of the name of my substack. I do get some pushback. People say, really, “everything is amazing?” Have you seen the state of U.S. politics? Have you seen what's going on in Ukraine and Gaza and everything? Really? They're amazing, are they?
And I have to explain, that's not what I mean. What I mean is, everything has a capacity to absolutely blow your mind if you pay enough attention to it. Everything has the capacity to amaze you. It's not that it's great. It's just that it's surprising and filled with detail. So that's where the name of my Substack is from. That's the principle I try and run my Substack on, that everything is worth attention.
Exactly. Amazing doesn't mean morally good. There's a weird trend to sort of valorize cynicism and have it be seen as the most admirable attitude in the Internet Age. Be blasé, say “of course” and “duh” and “it's so boring” a lot.
We're an aspirational species of plains ape that is that is now having to make decisions on stuff like the entire planet's temperature!
Everything about modern civilization is amazing even when it's terrible due to just how wildly complex and improbable it is.
Yes! Yes, absolutely. And I also feel like our role in everyday life should be seen as amazing. The power that we have to make change. The power of incremental change.
One thing I'm going to cover in my current season about the atmosphere and atmospheric sciences is the triumph of fixing the hole in the ozone layer.
Yeah, that's incredible!
Which is one of the biggest stories! It's just so under the radar now. Nobody brings it up when they talk about climate change. Or at least I don't see it being brought up as an example of the power of collaborative international action.
It was an incredible effort, and now the ozone layer, the ozone holes above the Arctic and the Antarctic, are looking to be fixed by the middle of the century.
That's absolutely extraordinary. We identified the problem. We got rid of the chemicals doing it. This has happened. That's just incredible.
I'm also very interested in this suite of speculative techniques that get called “geoengineering,” in terms of relating to climate change. The term geoengineering is very deceptive because that's what human beings have been doing for thousands of years, essentially. It's interesting.
And [ozone] is an interesting example of the way that we geoengineered a hole in our atmosphere that we created ourselves, and then we patched over the hole. That's incredible! It's just extraordinary. There's just so much to learn about incremental change and the power of geoengineering.
As Kim Stanley Robinson said, the way we use the term “geoengineering” as a “scary word,” it’s as if we described every tool from a hammer to an atomic bomb under the name “superweapon.” Everything is geoengineering! Planting a tree is geoengineering. Anything that changes any aspect of the Earth is geoengineering. And there's a lot of really fascinating things we could do, potentially even large-scale stuff that might sound scary, like stratospheric radiation management, that could really help mitigate the effects of climate change.
There's a tradition, especially in the environmental community, that we should err towards the “precautionary principle,” a bias towards conservatism, essentially. “Don't do stuff.” But the thing is, not doing stuff doesn't mean that the stuff you like stays the same. It means things continue to change rapidly!
We are in a world where the temperature is rising quickly. Erring towards precaution on potential geoengineering or climate repair work doesn't mean you're making things change less! It means you're making things change more. It means you're avoiding potentially intervening in a way that could keep things more stable.
Yeah, it's like, “Oh, this building's on fire. We should get some buckets of water and put it out or do something else, suck the oxygen out of the rooms or whatever.” “No, we can't do that! It's a historic building.”
In the U.S., this has become a huge issue because environmental review laws meant to protect the environment have become, at least under the Biden administration before the active federal sabotage attempts we're seeing now, one of the major things slowing down the build-out of renewable energy. They were often just weaponized by the fossil fuel industry to attack competition.
We do need more of a bias towards action! I think that science communication can help people feel more empowered to do stuff like that.
Oh, thank you. That makes me feel very important. Yeah, I completely agree.
And I feel like science has a... How do I phrase this? I'm not sure I can.
I just feel like there’s work to do in raising awareness of all the potential of all these technologies, and also raising awareness about how much work needs to go into mapping them and properly understanding the models of what can happen. And, you know, this is essentially what science should be. Science, it's not a “we should take action recklessly” versus “we should just let nature take its course” kind of thing.
Human beings from the beginning have used tools, and science is a tool as well as a method of understanding reality. We are part of nature. I'm very much not of the “human beings versus nature” argument.
I absolutely agree. In a philosophical sense, a skyscraper is as natural a feature of this planet as a beaver dam because they’re both created by an Earth-born species
But even in a practical sense, humans have been massively changing biodiversity and land use on this planet since at least the Agricultural Revolution, probably before that with Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. And there's amazing potential to find new ways of doing useful stuff that can be beneficial to nature while being beneficial to humans!
One of the things that most excites me in the world is how we're learning that building a solar farm on a random field probably means you have more animals and plants and birds and bugs on that field after the solar panels are up than before. Especially if it's a farmed field. There's this whole meme about “preserving” farmland from solar panels, but actually from a wildlife perspective, it's a great thing to change from farmland to solar panels.
Because then you're not spraying pesticides on it. You're not running a combine harvester over it.
A bird would be way more likely to survive having its nest under solar panels, which many birds do now, than having it in the middle of a farmed field where it could get run over by a tractor or sprayed with herbicide or something.
I did see something about how it can also create shade for livestock!
Exactly! It can overlap with livestock. Even in the field with livestock, you can see more biodiversity just due to the shade. Even solar panels on wild desert!
Studies in Arizona and the deserts of China find higher plant diversity just due to the shade of putting solar panels on a desert that was completely wild before.
There's more stuff living there after you turn it into a solar farm!
That's amazing!
And there was a study in Colorado with dry grassland, the solar farm helped it survive years of drought, again due to the shade, the protection from UV, and the fact that when it rains, solar panels can sort of condense water, it drips off the panel almost like a drip-feed hose to provide a little long-lasting water.
Solar panels can make wild ecosystems into even more hospitable environment for life, and that just seems almost like an unfair level of win-win!
[I’m reminded here of the “viriditas” techno-ecological philosophy in KSR’s Mars trilogy].
You can have this cleaner source of energy, and even though it might look like fields of bland panels to humans…a leading skylark nesting site in Germany right now is a solar farm! And that one also has livestock grazing.
I try to write about these, and this is one of the things I'm most excited about. Solar power, this amazing technology that can help us with global problems, is also probably going to shift land use in a direction that is more hospitable to biodiversity!
Wow! That alone, everything you just said, that should be a rallying cry on posters!
Yeah! An “amber waves of grain” field might look very pretty and bucolic, but it's a monoculture. It only has one plant species and its pests. If you cut down the grain and put solar panels on even barren ground and let wild plants grow there, you're going to have way more stuff living there in five years than you did when it was a grain field. You'll have wildflowers and pollinating insects and all sorts of stuff.
Like you said, everything is amazing. There's incredible stuff out there.
That's extraordinary. I love hearing about that. And I love seeing people who are very passionate like yourself about getting that news out. That's what's desperately needed.
I got very interested in solar power generation in the Sahara. There’s this idea that the Sahara is this pristine environment that has always been that way. It's not true. The Sahara was green going back a few thousands of years. [The African Humid Period].
The world, as you say, the world is changing, Not to get Lord of the Rings about this, but we have a role to play in that, in guiding it, in being stewards for our planet, not owners, but stewardship over the environment should be a responsibility that we take very seriously.
It's still very much active science, and we don't have a very clear picture, but that Sahara thing.…an area larger than the continental United States shifted from grassland with a decent amount of rainfall to desert. If you forecast that happening to a current grassland area, say the American Midwest, people would be like, oh shit, it's an absolute climate apocalypse, we're totally screwed, it’s the end of the world. And it would suck if you lived there, but that happened 6,000 years ago and we dealt with it. Some of the people who fled that drying Sahara may have congregated in a surviving river valley that was still green and founded the civilization of Egypt.
People think of climate change sometimes like as a singular one-event disaster that might happen in the future, like an asteroid impact or nuclear exchange, and it's not. It’s a constant long-term ongoing disaster that’s already begun and will continue, which is both bad because it's already here and already doing bad stuff and good because there's always a next day. There's always an opportunity to build back a better way, to be more resilient the next time, to move to a better ares. There's a future! And I think that that's something that has been lost in some of the discussion about this.
I agree. And I also think we should have more of an awareness of how human beings work well with constraints and certain levels of stresses. You know, if we're too stressed, obviously, we will go into a decline. But a certain level of pressure is seems to be seems to be mentally healthy for us. And on a species-wide level, maybe that is true as well.
Climate change is going to be a stressor. It's going to guide our behavior in certain ways. And it's going to be a series of challenges that will make us creative in stepping up and meeting them!
It's not an argument for great periods of stress in world history, but it does seem to be a fact that any time there is some great, awful event in world history, like a world war, it is followed by a boom in human productivity and human creativity and problem solving and technology, and all of it because human beings step up. And I feel like that's what's needed now.
A lot of the stuff that we want to do to avoid catastrophic climate change is stuff that also just makes the world a better place! There was a famous study in 2021 that found that about one-fifth of all global deaths, one in five of all humans dying in the world each year, was at least contributed to by air pollution, because that contributes to strokes, heart attacks, lung cancer, so many things.
Even if there was no such thing as climate change, even if carbon dioxide was vacuumed up by obliging aliens who wanted to preserve our climate, we'd still want to transition to renewable energy just for the benefits from the reduction of smog, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, the air pollution health consequences.
There is a huge opportunity to use dangers and crises to build better worlds. Like you said, the boom after the disaster.
Yeah! And again, this is why I like reading Kim Stanley Robinson, because you have the scientist as hero. Stepping into politics. Not separate from and not being used by the system, but is a part of it and is informing policy and spreading great ideas and just being very active. I find that to be a very optimistic view of how science works in the world.
That is what we have seen in the last 200 years even with all the crazy wild stuff happening. Vaccines for diseases. The Haber-Bosch process turning atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer. Innovations like these just absolutely changed the nature of human civilization!
We just need people like you who are really enthusiastic spokespeople for these stories!
Yeah, you too!
Yay, Team Curious Science!
I really feel that there is such a need right now. Because as we talked about, there's just so much negativity around all this stuff. I understand it! It's triggering. Like, “Oh, the climate apocalypse is upon us, what shall we do?”
Have you read an essay by a writer called Cal Flyn?
I've read [and reviewed] her book, Islands of Abandonment.
Well, I'll send you this essay, it was in Prospect Magazine. She used a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and it said “If you want people to build a boat, you don't teach them how to assemble it, you make them long for the immensity of the sea.”
She was making a case that that's what's needed in in motivating people on climate change. We need to make them feel that they really, really want the world that is waiting for them at the other side of these challenges if we put the effort in and if we work together. It's an emotional argument for it.
And it's a great essay. It's a beautiful essay.
Her book was incredible. It's just a fascinatingly haunting topic as well. It's also making the case, again, that all of this is change. Human beings are leaving places and we look at what's left behind and we learn things.
And we've got this global demographic shift, which is so fascinating because it intersects with a lot of the other things that are going on. Because of modern technology, modern economics, modern healthcare, contraception, more women's empowerment, all sorts of things. Global fertility rates are plummeting at a rate never before seen. It's looking like we might see peak human population as soon as the 2050s, maybe even sooner than that.
We've already seen peak agricultural land, actually.
As farms grow more efficient and the population peaks, there are going to be a lot of post-human landscapes. Places that are formerly farmland, maybe now a solar farm, maybe rewilded. There's extraordinary potential for nature to come back amid a human society that's managed to figure out how to thrive on less land, with more efficient farming or just because there's fewer people or all of the above.
And this is happening just as people need to move a lot due to climate change!
I hope that more countries will rise up and realize that in fact, humans are a really valuable resource and you want more of them in your country. You should be welcoming refugees, welcoming immigrants, not putting up walls at borders.
People always yelled about the U.S. “border crisis” under Biden because they were letting in more asylum-seekers. I always thought that the real crisis is that there are so many people coming to our border who want to work and contribute to the country and for some reason we're not letting them. The crisis is that we don't have a better system for rapidly integrating people who want to come contribute, and better systems for building housing to house those people and everything else.
So, yeah. It's a fascinating time to be alive.
In terms of abandoned places, if you look at a map of Berlin, in the south there's this enormous green spot that is now essentially a park, and it's called Tempelhof. Tempelhof, during the Second World War, it was an airport that was used by the Nazis. It still has runways there, but the entire place is just...It's abandoned, but it's been reclaimed, and it's now turned into a park.
You can just go and cycle up the runway. It's an amazing thing, it teaches you the scale of runways. You can go onto the main runway of Tempelhof and you can walk it. This is what a plane does in our airports. It does it in about, what, 30 seconds? You can walk it and it takes you 45 minutes to get from one end to the other. It just teaches you the scale of runways.
You can be in Tempelhof and you can stand at one side and you can barely see the other side. And this is in the middle of one of the most dense cities in Europe. It's this enormous, eerie green space. There are birds there, there are trees growing. It's just a fascinating place to be. So if you ever find yourself in Berlin, I can thoroughly recommend visiting Tempelhof.
Thank you.
I tell stories now on Bluesky and Threads, and I recently had one that was about water sloshing back and forth.
It was in Greenland, in a fjord, and it caused a pulse that went through the earth. It was a pulse every 90 seconds that was picked up by seismologists all over the planet. They couldn't identify what it was, but everyone worked together and identified it was from what's called a seiche [a standing wave] It went on for nine days, and it happened because of a melting glacier.
So it was like a message from climate change that was heard in every corner of the world. It was heard in Antarctica. An incredible pulse, every 90 seconds for nine days. An extraordinary story. I put that onto Bluesky and it went viral.
Wow. Is there anything else you'd like to share? You've already really shared a lot of amazing stuff.
Everyone subscribe to Sam's newsletter! That's what I would want in there.
No, not really. I feel like this is a really good conversation. We covered a lot.
But also, I would just say to you, with doing this social media stuff, working in “seasons” of my newsletter changing has worked incredibly well for me. It means i
get to remain a student! In season four of my newsletter, I wrote about oceanography and what's at the bottom of our oceans and ocean science. I just started getting a bunch of marine biologists signing up and reading me and sharing stuff!
So in terms of just marketing, you're marketing to different audiences. You also get to do the incredibly fun thing of taking a tour of modern science!
Yeah! That is such an honor, in science writing. And it's so under-reported. Most scientists, often people at the cutting edge of their fields, are really happy to talk to some random person with a blog. You get to learn this hot-off-the-presses brand new science just by asking people. It's amazing.
Yes, absolutely! And also it teaches the lesson again and again that so much of science is or should be collaborative. Cross-disciplinary breakthroughs.
The Republic of Letters!
Yeah. Getting everyone virtually in the same room, and also just linking stories from different people. It's just really fun! That's part of the message, that's the drum I really want to keep banging. Science is all these people who want to work together, it's not siloed, or it shouldn't be siloed. They're all enthusiasts and they all love to teach each other what they're doing
Yeah. And the Internet has empowered crazy conspiracy theorists to gain power and defund critical science, but there's a lot of history left to run. It may yet empower on a much greater scale, and it already has started in some ways, more scientific advances in discovery and collaboration.
Absolutely. And, you know, conspiracy theories and just general quackery, that's been a feature since science was a feature. Go back 300 or 400 years, there’s all sorts of ridiculous stories. I wrote about a hoax in a major New York newspaper that was about the moon.
The “moon civilization hoax,” was it?
Yes, that's the one! It was all just invented by a journalist who was just wanting to sell newspapers. It claimed to be about the astronomer Herschel, and when Herschel found out he just burst out laughing. It's just ridiculous.
Well, thank you so much, Mike. It has been such a pleasure talking with you.
Oh, it's so nice to meet. I love what you're doing and I love your energy. The world needs it right now. So please keep going!
Thank you so much! You do great work. Most of what I knew about the Zanclean mega-flood before your post was from that one XKCD story, “Time,” like the Wikipedia article. Your article is much more in-depth. Just fascinating.
Thank you so much.
I'm just resurfacing here after being mostly offline for a week with Covid, but - this was an absolute pleasure, Sam, and thank you so much for putting aside the time to talk Your enthusiasm and wisdom are a real tonic, and I learned a lot from chatting with you.
Exceptional conversation.