Despite all we have learned about the risks of life on a superheated planet, despite all our technological sophistication and our knowledge of history, we are still hiking up that same mountain trail, one that leads not just to a vista point atop of a pile of skeletons, but into the desert beyond the Goldilocks Zone. “Right now, in the amazing moment that counts to us as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open to us and which will be forever closed,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. “No other
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