Nate Hagens

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.

Because they are this channel's work.

The landscape itself has two features.

Valleys, which are the stable states where systems settle and reinforce themselves.

And hills, or more technically, ridges.

which are the barriers between these valleys, the cost of transitioning from one stable state to another.

The valleys and the ridges are the terrain of the future.

We don't choose them.

They're given to us by physics, ecology, and history.

But there are things humans can do to that terrain, two general categories.

We can create switchbacks

use physical or social technology to carve paths up ridges that would otherwise be too steep to cross.