Jan 28, 2026 | Jason Crawford
Lessons about how to create safety from the history of fire Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity, we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but...
Sep 29, 2025 | Jason Crawford
A Paper by Jason Crawford As our ambitions grow, they might reach planetary scale. We’ve already mentioned mastering the climate by creating a system of climate control (Chapter 5). Even beyond simply controlling CO2 and temperature, we might develop technologies to...
Sep 26, 2025 | Jason Crawford
A Paper by Jason Crawford We have already come quite far in our mastery of materials and manufacturing. Our materials have gotten stronger: the tensile strength of stone, or of wood perpendicular to the grain, is on the order of 10 MPa (megapascals, a unit of pressure...
Sep 24, 2025 | Jason Crawford
A Paper by Jason Crawford The bold, ambitious future is going to require a tremendous amount of energy. Most people have been taught to believe that energy usage is at best a necessary evil—or perhaps that it’s not even all that necessary. Journalist Cleo Abrams...
Sep 22, 2025 | Jason Crawford
A Paper by Jason Crawford Starting with the first passenger railroads around 1830 through the deployment of passenger jets in the 1960s, powered vehicles have dramatically shrunk travel times, at all scales, from the neighborhood to the world. Yet we are still limited...
Sep 19, 2025 | Jason Crawford
A Paper by Jason Crawford I’ve already described why AI has the potential to create a new economic era. Let’s consider what this might look like. In the bold, ambitious future, AI workers may have enough different skillsets to enable entire virtual businesses. Today,...
