Topics: a brief shift from Mars, global warming, climate engineering, standing in the middle of an ecological disaster zone, government broadly, and the state of California’s war on ride-sharing

Terraforming Terra Prima. How do we bring a dead world back to life and build another home for humanity? This is the central question of Anatomy of Next: New World, the second season of the podcast I run for Founders Fund. If you haven’t yet checked out the Martian arc, you can give the full season a listen on whatever podcast platform you prefer (Apple link here). Trust me, it’ll be a nice break from our protracted 2020 dystopia vibes.

But while New World remains some of the work I’m most proud of, the show is not without its flaws. From the start it was always meant to be a concrete direction for the human race: how to get to Mars, how to adapt biology to new environments, how to terraform an alien planet and turn a red, barren hellscape into a lush world of forests and fields and oceans. But the story was also meant to be a kind of metaphor. Everything we learn on the Martian frontier can be used on Earth, and when I started the project I hoped that thinking about all of the amazing things we could do on alien world, where no current model for civilization exists, might inspire people here at home. We can build whatever kind of world — right here, today — that we want to build. But all of this was perhaps not as clear as it could have been, as one of the big criticisms leveled against the season was “what about Earth?” This is a great question, and yes, I agree, we should absolutely terraform this planet too.