Nate Hagens

The biosphere, these are all states that are maintained with effort.

They exist because someone or something is doing ongoing work, putting in energy, attention, and care to maintain it.

And the moment that work stops or shifts, the contours of the system's landscape reassert themselves.

And these systems devolve in years or even months because the landscape is always gently but persistently pulling them toward lower energy configurations.

So when we get to part four, probably next week or soon, and I walk through four composite worlds I've come up with, I invite you to hold this landscape idea in your mind.

Before I share those next time,

Maybe sit with a few questions.

Looking at the near and longer term future, where do you see the steep valleys and where do you see the open ground?

Which civilizational pathways feel uphill from here and which feel downhill?

Where are you actually standing in this landscape right now?

Because what counts, as I said earlier, as an uphill from a farmhouse in Malawi looks very different from what counts as uphill from an office in San Francisco.

Your sense of the terrain is shaped by where you start.

And here's a harder one.

When you imagine the futures ahead, notice which ones you find yourself wanting and which ones the physics and the data suggest are likely.

Are those the same?

And if they're not, what does that tell you?

The composites I'm building and will share are not equally accessible or equally stable, and the transitions between them are also not equally reversible.

The landscape of the future of humanity and the biosphere is tilted, and knowing which direction it's tilted is arguably as important as knowing

what the valleys look like once we're inside them.

Okay, before we conclude, I want to highlight four terms to carry through the rest of this series, and I may use them repeatedly in this channel's work.