gm-reflection

At Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Bezos said, “In the next couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space… I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now.” Of course. Let’s sell people paradise dream-share condos,  offer them a glossy brochure for the sky, and while they’re looking up, let the ground burn quietly beneath their feet. This new propaganda reminds me of a bumper sticker I used to see a lot in the early 2000s: Earth First , We’ll Strip Mine the Other Planets Later. I don’t know what was on Bezos’s mind when he said what he said, but the numbers are staggeringly against him, even for a sci-fi-crazed nut like me. The arithmetic is brutal. A million human bodies weigh about seventy thousand tons. Lifting them into orbit would take thousands of rockets and millions of tons of fuel, about ten days of all the jet fuel the United States burns. And once they’re up there, you’d need millions more tons of food, air, and water ...

Solar Panels Don’t Erase Shopping Carts (This post follows Blog 4: Why We Keep Consuming — Even When the Planet Can’t, where I explored how overconsumption isn’t just systemic — it’s personal. This time, I’m asking: what if the solutions we trust aren’t really solutions at all?) I’ve always wanted to believe in tech as a way out. Electric cars, solar panels, AI-assisted recycling — it all sounds promising. In a world that feels increasingly fragile, these things offer relief. A sense that someone, somewhere, is solving it. But the older I get, the more I feel uneasy. Let’s say we replaced every gas-powered car on the planet with electric ones. That’s 1.45 billion vehicles, overnight. Would we have solved the problem? Or just swapped engines and kept the machine running? In Chile’s Atacama Desert, 65% of available water now goes toward lithium mining. That’s what it takes to power those “clean” cars. One of the driest places on Earth, and we’re draining it to keep driving. That’s ...