“When my wife was an undergraduate, back in the day,” he said, “her fieldwork involved tracking rodent species that had adapted to live in high-radiation zones. Old reactors and fission test sites. They had evolved to fit into environments that were specifically created. By humans. Well, we’re those rodents now. We’re adapting ourselves into spaces and environments that were left behind by the vanished species or groups of species that created all this. The changes in technology we’ve seen are immense, and they promise to be just the beginning.”

