The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 1

The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Freeman Dyson.

Foreword.

REMEMBER THE WAY the future was supposed to be? The path to tomorrow once seemed so clear, its trajectory limned for the entire world to see in billowing plumes of rocket exhaust in the blue sky over Cape Canaveral. We would become, President Kennedy declared in 1962, a s.p.a.cefaring nation, destineda"even obligateda"to explore what he called "this new ocean." I had barely entered grade school at the time, but I vividly remember watching the launches of the Mercury and Gemini missions and the equally dramatic splashdownsa"in those days all manned American s.p.a.cecraft landed in the ocean, their descent slowed by enormous orange-and-white-striped parachutes. By the late 1960s, astronautsa"and cosmonautsa"had walked in s.p.a.ce; the first moon landing was at hand. We had come so far so quickly: less than sixty years separated the Wright brothers' first flight and John Glenn's solo orbit of Earth in Friends.h.i.+p 7, his closet-size Mercury capsule. No doubt we'd make even greater leaps in the next sixty years. By the year 2000? A spinning, spoked s.p.a.ce station staffed by hundreds was a given; travel to the moon routine; footprints on the red sand of Marsa"of course. To my second-grade mind it all seemed closer and more imaginable than my own adulthood.

The s.p.a.ce odyssey that once seemed so inevitable never came to pa.s.s. Today, more than forty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, we're unable to follow him there. The thirty-six-story-tall Saturn rockets that made such trips possible no longer exist, and nothing of comparable power has replaced them. For nowa"perhaps quite a long nowa"we're confined to orbiting Earth. Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and destinations beyond will have to wait for their first human visitors. My eight-year-old self would have been sorely disappointed. He certainly didn't get the future he expected. On the other hand, he would have been astonished to learn that he would one day own a computer far more powerful than the ones carried aboard the Apollo s.p.a.cecraft.

Science has a seemingly bottomless capacity to astonish, a quality unmatched, I think, by any other human endeavor. It thrives on unantic.i.p.ated results and anomalous data. Some months ago, before I knew that Freeman Dyson would be the guest editor for this anthology, I had the pleasure of interviewing him while working on an a.s.signment for Discover. Toward the end of our conversation I asked if any single discovery had most surprised him during his long career. (He will turn eighty-seven in December 2010.) "Everything has been surprising," he said. "Science is just organized unpredictability. If it were predictable it wouldn't be science. Everywhere you look ... I didn't expect personal computers. Like you, I thought by now we would be tramping around on Mars with heavy boots. I did not foresee that we'd be sending unmanned instruments with huge bandwidth into s.p.a.ce. It's all been a surprise in a way. It's even more true in biology. I had no conception of the fact that we would actually read genomes the way we're doing it now. I remember when it took a year to sequence one protein. Now it's done in a few seconds. I would say there's almost nothing in science that I've predicted correctly. I hope it will continue that way; I think it's very likely it will. Really important things will happen in the next fifty years that n.o.body has imagined."

Tom Wolfe, one of the contributors to this year's anthology, would argue that we should resume our pursuit of the future we imagined forty years ago. In "One Giant Leap to Nowhere," he decries the premature end of the "greatest, grandest ... quest in the history of the world": America's manned s.p.a.ce program. Even if you don't agree with Wolfe that humanity must travel to the stars, it's impossible after reading his spirited and witty story not to wonder what the world would have been like today if the Apollo missions to the moon had marked the beginning rather than the end of a dream.

While a large part of me yearns to embrace Wolfe's vision, my sensible side yields to the arguments Steven Weinberg makes in "The Missions of Astronomy." Weinberg is an eminent physicist; he won a n.o.bel Prize for his work in describing some of the fundamental forces of the universe. He is also a pa.s.sionate and eloquent essayist. In these pages he writes that manned missions to other worlds would hinder rather than advance science. But his remarkable article covers a great deal more than the merits of manned s.p.a.ce exploration, ranging gracefully from Socrates to s.e.xtants to the Standard Model of physics.

We'll probably never reach the starsa"our fastest existing s.p.a.ce probes would need tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest onea"but we may well be close to discovering whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. To date astronomers have found more than 370 planets...o...b..ting other stars. None of those exoplanets resemble Eartha"most are ga.s.sy giants, far bigger than Jupiter. But most astronomers believe that Earthlike planets must be fairly common in our galaxy. In "Seeking New Earths," Timothy Ferris writes about the search for planets like our own and how a new generation of telescopes may be able to find signs of life on some of them.

The remaining stories in this collection are all about one planet, which is facing challenges that no one conceived of forty years ago. Elizabeth Kolbert, who edited this anthology last year, describes a dangerous organism that threatens all life on Earth: us. Several articles collected here show how we might yet reverse some of the worst aspects of the catastrophes we've set in motion. Freeman Dyson has much more to say about that in the next few pages, but I can't help wondering which of these stories will, decades from now, turn out to have accurately glimpsed our future and which will be relegated to the what-might-have-beens.

I hope that readers, writers, and editors will nominate their favorite articles for next year's anthology at http://timfolger.net/ forums. The criteria for submissions and deadlines, and the address to which entries should be sent, can be found in the "news and announcements" forum on my website. Once again this year I'm offering an incentive to readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven't found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I'll mail you a free copy of next year's edition, signed by the guest editor. I'll even sign it as well, which will augment its value immeasurably. (A true statement, by the way, there being no measurable difference between copies signed by me and those unsigned.) I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the news and announcements section of the forums.

Years ago, at about the same time that I was watching the adventures of the first astronauts, I read a fascinating article about "Dyson Spheres." (Look them up; you won't be disappointed.) I never thought I would have a chance to work, however briefly, with the legendary physicist who came up with the idea. A manned Mars landing seemed far more likely. It's a bit of unpredictability that I'm extremely grateful for. Once again this year I'm indebted to Amanda Cook and Meagan Stacey at Houghton Mifflin. And I hope to remain indebted for many years to come to my beauteous wife, Anne Nolan.

TIM FOLGER.

Introduction.

THE JOB OF EDITING this collection of papers was made easy for me by Tim Folger, who did the hard work of scanning the entire scientific periodical literature for the year 2009 to select 122 articles that he found interesting. My job was only to read his 122 articles, make the final choice of 28 to put in the book, and write the introduction to explain my choices. I am grateful to Tim for doing the lion's share of the work. Unfortunately, the fraction of American magazines that publish science writing is small. The science writing that is published mostly consists of brief news items rather than thoughtful essays. Not many years ago, John McPhee used to publish in The New Yorker wonderful pieces, twenty or thirty pages long, giving readers a deep understanding of geological science. Such pieces no longer appear, in The New Yorker or anywhere else. Science writing has become briefer, spa.r.s.er, and more superficial. The t.i.tle of this volume gives equal weight to science and nature. In fact, it is one third science and two thirds nature. Nature is now fas.h.i.+onable among readers and publishers of magazines. Science is unfas.h.i.+onable.

I have divided the book into six parts, each with a common theme. The first two parts are concerned with science, the last four with nature. The two sciences that receive serious attention are astronomy and neurology. Both are rightly valued by the public as having some important connection with human destiny. Part One deals with astronomy, and its central theme is proclaimed in Steven Weinberg's article, "The Missions of Astronomy." Weinberg paints in four pages a glowing picture of the history of astronomy, the science that for 2,500 years led mankind to a true understanding of the way the universe works. From the beginning, instruments were the key to understanding. The first instrument was the gnomon, a simple vertical post whose shadow allowed the Babylonians and the Greeks to measure time and angle with some precision. The legacy of Babylonian mathematics still survives in the sixty-fold ratios of our units of time, hours, minutes, and seconds.

After the gnomon came the sundial, the telescope, the chronometer, the computer, and the s.p.a.cecraft. Now we are living in a golden age of astronomy, when for the first time our instruments give us a clear view of the entire universe, out in s.p.a.ce to the remotest galaxies, back in time all the way to the beginning. Our instruments, telescopes on tops of mountains and on s.p.a.cecraft in orbit, are increasing their capabilities by leaps and bounds as our data-handling skills improve. It takes us only about ten years to build a new generation of instruments that give us radically sharper and deeper views of everything in the sky. Weinberg ends his article by contrasting this ongoing triumph of scientific instruments with the abject failure of the American program of manned missions in s.p.a.ce. Our unmanned missions to explore the planets and stars and galaxies have made us truly at home in the universe, while our manned missions after the Apollo program have been scientifically fruitless. Forty years after Apollo, the manned program is still stuck aimlessly in low orbit around Earth while politicians debate what it should try to do next.

The remaining articles in Part One discuss manned and unmanned activities separately. Andrew Corsello sees a bright future for private manned ventures in s.p.a.ce, while Tom Wolfe explains how our public manned ventures failed. Timothy Ferris's articles describe two vivid scenes from the world of modern astronomy, one using instruments on the ground and the other using unmanned instruments in s.p.a.ce. All three authors confirm Weinberg's judgment. If you want humans in s.p.a.ce, let them go up there to enjoy a human adventure, preferably at their own expense, and do not pretend that they are doing science. If you want to do serious science, keep the humans on the ground and send instruments to do the exploring, a job they can do tirelessly, efficiently, and much more cheaply.

The view of s.p.a.ce activities in Part One is a purely American one. The whole book suffers from the same limitation. By selecting only American writing, we have narrowed the focus of the collection, ignoring more than half of the world's thinking and dreaming. We have missed a great opportunity to broaden our contacts with the rest of the world. If half of the articles in this book had been translated from French or Russian or Arabic or Chinese, its value for our understanding of the world would have been far greater. For practical and economic reasons, it might be difficult to prepare timely translations for an annual publication. But we could at least have included articles from the many countries around the world that publish magazines in English.

The Americans writing in this book about s.p.a.ce all tell us that unmanned exploration is a success and manned exploration is a failure. I was lucky to be exposed to a different view when I was invited to Baikonur in Kazakhstan to observe a Russian s.p.a.ce launch. In March 2009, Charles Simonyi took off for his second trip in a Soyuz launcher to spend two weeks on the International s.p.a.ce Station. To qualify as a crew member on the ISS, he had spent three months at the Russian cosmonaut training center near Moscow. My daughter Esther went through the same training and was at Baikonur as his backup, ready to fly in case he came down with swine flu or broke a leg. Charles did not get the flu or break a leg, and Esther did not fly, but my wife and I were there for the launch and got a glimpse of the Russian s.p.a.ce culture, which is very different from ours.

American s.p.a.ce culture is dominated by the tradition of Apollo. President Kennedy proclaimed the mission as "Get a man to the moon and back within ten years," and so it was done. After that, there were five more missions, but the decision to terminate the program had already been made. The program was unsustainable for longer than ten years. It was affordable as a ten-year effort but not as a permanent commitment. After Apollo, various other missions, manned and unmanned, were undertaken, always with a time scale of one or two decades. American s.p.a.ce culture thinks in decades. Every commitment is for a couple of decades at most. A job that cannot be done in a couple of decades is not considered practical.

Russian s.p.a.ce culture thinks in centuries. Baikonur, the original home of the Soviet s.p.a.ce program, now belongs to Kazakhstan, but Russia rents it from Kazakhstan on a hundred-year lease, as Britain in the old days rented Hong Kong from China. The lease still has eighty years to run, and Baikonur feels like a Russian town. Historical relics of Russian s.p.a.ce activities are carefully preserved and displayed in museums. The three patron saints are the schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who worked out the mathematics of interplanetary rocketry in the nineteenth century; the engineer Sergei Korolev, who built the first orbiting s.p.a.cecraft; and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who first orbited Earth. Korolev and Gagarin lived side by side in Baikonur in simple homes, which are open to the public. In a public square is a full-scale model of the Soyuz launcher that Korolev designed. It is a simple, rugged design and has changed very little since he designed it. It has the best safety record of all existing launchers for human pa.s.sengers. The Russian s.p.a.ce culture says, "If it works, why change it?"

The day of Charles Simonyi's launch was rainy and windy. If the launch had been in Florida in such foul weather, it would certainly have been postponed. At Baikonur, it went up within a second of the planned time. The launch was a public ceremony in which the whole town partic.i.p.ated. The cosmonauts paraded through the town at the head of a procession of dignitaries including an Orthodox priest, with townspeople carrying umbrellas on either side. In the main square, the mayor was waiting with other dignitaries. The cosmonauts stood facing the mayor and formally announced that they were ready to fly. Then, after a couple of speeches, they proceeded to the launch site. The whole performance had the ambience of a religious sacrament rather than a scientific mission. In Russia you do not go into s.p.a.ce to do science. You go into s.p.a.ce because it is a part of human destiny. To be a cosmonaut is a vocation rather than a profession. Tsiolkovsky said that Earth is our cradle, and we will not always stay in the cradle. It may take us a few centuries to get to the planets, but we are on our way. We will keep going, no matter how long it takes.

The Russian view of the International s.p.a.ce Station is also different from the American view. The biggest museum in Baikonur contains a full-scale model of the ISS and also a full-scale model of the Mir s.p.a.ce station, which the Russians had built twenty years earlier. The Mir was the first s.p.a.ce station built for long-duration human occupation. When you look at the two s.p.a.ce stations, you can see that the ISS is an enlarged version of the Mir. The Russians are proud that they built the essential parts of the ISS as well as the Mir. The ISS is a part of their culture. They welcome American pa.s.sengers, who help to pay for it, but they still feel that they own it. American scientists and s.p.a.ce experts mostly consider the ISS to be an embarra.s.sment, a costly enterprise with little scientific or commercial value. They regret our involvement with the ISS and look forward to extricating ourselves as soon as our international commitments to it are fulfilled. To an American visitor, it comes as a surprise to see the ISS enshrined at Baikonur together with the Mir, two emblems of national pride.

I learned at Baikonur that the American s.p.a.ce culture as it is portrayed in this book is only half of the truth. The Russian s.p.a.ce culture is the other half. If you think as Americans do, on a time scale of decades, then unmanned missions succeed magnificently and manned missions fail miserably. Even the grandest unmanned missions, such as the Ca.s.sini mission to Saturn, take only one decade to build and another decade to fly. The grandest manned mission, the Apollo moon landing, ends after a decade and leaves the astronauts no way ahead. The decade time scale is fundamentally right for unmanned missions and wrong for manned missions. If you think as Russians do, on a time scale of centuries, then the situation is reversed. Russian s.p.a.ce-science activities have failed to achieve much because they did not concentrate their attention on immediate scientific objectives. Russian manned-mission activities, driven not by science but by a belief in human destiny, keep moving quietly forward. There is room for both cultures in our future. s.p.a.ce is big enough for both.

Part Two contains three articles about neurology, the science of human brains. For the last fifty years, most popular writing about biology was concerned with molecular biology, the study of the chemical const.i.tuents of life. This tradition began soon after the discovery of the double helix by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 and rose to a brilliant climax with the publication of Watson's book The Double Helix in 1968. For fifty years, popular writings described how biologists explore genes and genomes and how geneticists identify the molecular machinery that guides the development of an egg into a chicken. For fifty years, the progress of molecular biology was driven by the invention of marvelous new tools, allowing the explorers to handle and dissect individual molecules with ever-increasing precision. But in recent years the tools have become too complicated and the ideas too specialized to be easily explained. Molecular biology has become a mature science with many subdivisions, each with its own jargon. The readers and writers of popular science are moving from molecular biology to neurology.

Neurology is now entering its golden age, with new tools answering simple questions that ordinary readers can understand. The three articles in Part Two describe three basic questions that neurologists are on their way to answering. How do our brains give us rational control over our actions? How do our brains give us rational control over our memories? How do our brains give us rational control over our sensations of physical pain? The tools of neurology are beginning to come to grips with the working of the brain as an organ of rational control. Each of the questions is not only important scientifically but also directly illuminates our personal experiences of thinking and deciding. Within the next fifty years, the tools of neurology will probably bring us a deep insight into our own thought processes, with all the good and evil consequences that such insight may bring. The three stories, about real people with real problems, give us a foretaste of the effects of deeper insight on our lives. The stories are told with a minimum of scientific jargon and a maximum of human sympathy.

The longest section is Part Three, with seven articles describing wonders of nature. Here the quality of the writing is as important as the subject matter. The pieces are written for nature lovers, not science lovers. There are many other nature articles of equal quality in the thick pile that I discarded. In making my choices, I tried to choose pieces that were as different as possible from one another. I chose some that are outstanding in style and some that are outstanding in subject matter. But I have to confess that for me, "The Flight of the Kuaka" is in a cla.s.s by itself. It is a celebration of nature's glory, going beyond science and beyond poetry.

Parts Four, Five, and Six deal with the environment, the most fas.h.i.+onable subject of popular writing in recent years. Environmental ism has now replaced Marxism as the leading secular religion of our age. Environmentalism as a religious movement, with a mystical reverence for nature and a code of ethics based on responsible human stewards.h.i.+p of the planet, is already strong and is likely to grow stronger. That is the main reason why I am optimistic about the future. Environmentalism doesn't have much to do with science. Scientists and nonscientists can fight for the environment with equal pa.s.sion and equal effectiveness. I am proud to stand with my nonscientist colleagues as a friend of the environment, even when we disagree about the details. The fact that we all share the ethics of environmentalism, striving to step lightly on the Earth and preserve living s.p.a.ce for our fellow creatures, is one of the most hopeful features of our present situation. Each of the writers in this collection shares those ethics in one way or another.

I divided the articles about the environment into three parts: gloom and doom, small blessings, and big blessings, to emphasize the ways in which their authors disagree. Everyone agrees that human activities are having a huge impact on the environment and that the impact could be substantially reduced by various remedial actions. The articles in these three parts emphasize different aspects of the problem. The orthodox belief of the majority of climate experts is "climate alarmism." Climate alarmists say that climate change is mainly caused by humans' burning of fossil fuels and that our present patterns of fuel burning are already leading us to disaster. Elizabeth Kolbert's two pieces in Part Four are strong statements of the climate-alarmist position. The articles in Part Five do not concern themselves with global climate; they describe local environmental problems that may have local remedies. "The Monkey and the Fish" gives us a wonderfully vivid picture of an intractable environmental situation in Mozambique. Finally, Part Six pays attention to climate problems but asks new questions that the orthodox climate alarmists have ignored. Richard Manning's piece, "Graze Anatomy," is to me the most illuminating of the whole collection.

Before I discuss Manning's piece in detail, I must first declare my own interest in climate and the environment. Thirty years ago, it was already clear that fossil-fuel burning would cause climate change and that this was an important problem. It was also clear that fossil-fuel burning would have large effects on the growth of vegetation. Carbon dioxide is an excellent fertilizer for agricultural crops and for natural forests. Commercial fruit growers were enriching the air in greenhouses with carbon dioxide in order to accelerate the growth of fruit. From the experience of greenhouse growers, we can calculate that the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel burning has increased the worldwide yield of agricultural crop plants by roughly 15 percent in the last fifty years. In addition, when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants will put more growth into roots and less into aboveground stems and leaves. These effects of carbon dioxide on vegetation might in turn cause large effects on topsoil. After they decay, roots add carbon to the soil, while stems and leaves mostly return carbon to the atmosphere. The plowing of fields by farmers all over the world then exposes topsoil to the air and increases the loss of carbon from soil to atmosphere. The flows of carbon among soil and vegetation and atmosphere may be as important as the flows between fossil fuels and atmosphere.

Thirty years ago, the place where all these ecological effects of fuel burning were studied was the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. I went to Oak Ridge to work as a consultant, and I listened to the experts. They understood fluid dynamics and climate modeling, but they also knew a lot about forestry and soil science, agriculture and ecology. I learned two basic facts from them. First, the natural environment contains five reservoirs of carbon of roughly equal size: fossil fuels, the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, land vegetation, and topsoil. Second, these five reservoirs are tightly coupled together. Anything we do to change any one of them has important effects on all of them. The carbon that we add to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has major effects on the growth of food crops and forests. The carbon that we subtract from the atmosphere by building up topsoil has major effects on climate.

The orthodox climate-alarmist view describes the problem of climate change as involving only two reservoirs of carbon, fossil fuels and the atmosphere, ignoring the other three. This simplification of the problem makes predictions seem more certain and more dire. Nothing is said about the large fertilizing effects of carbon in the atmosphere and in topsoil upon food crops. Nothing is said about the large fluxes of carbon into the atmosphere caused by the plowing of soil. For reasons that are not clear to me, the public debate about the environment is dominated by climate scientists who are expert in fluid dynamics, while experts in soil and land management remain silent. The problems of climate change become much more tractable if we look at them through a broader lens.

Having lived for thirty years with these unorthodox opinions about the climate-change debate, I was amazed and delighted to read Manning's article. Here is a story about two farmers in Minnesota who actually make a living by raising beef on gra.s.s instead of on feedlots. This is just what I have been hoping for the last thirty years. The prevailing method of raising beef is to keep the animals in feedlots and to grow corn and soybeans to feed them. This method is prevalent partly because it is profitable and partly because it is subsidized by the United States government. It has at least six seriously harmful effects on the environment. First, it requires ma.s.sive amounts of fertilizer to keep the corn growing, and the fertilizer carried off by rainwater causes excessive growth of green algae in rivers and lakes, using up the oxygen in the water and finally killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Second, it decreases the ability of the land to retain water and increases the frequency of serious flooding. Third, it increases the erosion of topsoil. Fourth, it destroys habitat for birds and other wildlife. Fifth, it raises the price of corn for poor countries that need corn to feed humans. Sixth, it is cruel to the animals and creates a stinking atmosphere for human farm workers and their neighbors. When the Minnesota farmers switch from feedlots to gra.s.s, all six environmental insults disappear. The gra.s.s is efficiently fertilized by the animals, the rainwater mostly stays in the ground instead of running off, and the erosion is reduced to zero.

These two farmers are not the only ones. It turns out that many others in different parts of the country are doing similar things. This might be a growing trend, and it might have a major effect on the environment. Raising beef on gra.s.s without plowing means reversing the flow of carbon out of the soil into the atmosphere. It means pus.h.i.+ng big quant.i.ties of carbon down into the roots of the gra.s.s and turning a substantial fraction of it into topsoil. Instead of shouting, "Stop burning coal!" the climate alarmists might shout, "Stop plowing soil!" The effects on climate of plowing less soil might be as large as the effects of burning less coal, while the eco nomic costs might be smaller and the ancillary ecological bene fits might be greater.

For a farmer, it is not enough to be environmentally virtuous. A farm must be financially profitable, and it must be economical in its use of land. Manning brings us the splendid news that the farmers who switched from feedlots to gra.s.s are doing well. On the average, they are making net profits about eight times larger than the government subsidies that they received for their feedlots. Since the quality of their beef is superior, they have no difficulty selling it for good prices to food stores and restaurants. In addition, they are using less land in gra.s.s than they used for the same number of animals in feedlots. They can raise roughly two steer per acre on gra.s.s instead of one steer per acre on corn and feedlot.

We do not know whether the switch from feedlot to gra.s.s could be practical for a majority of Midwestern farmers. Farming on gra.s.s requires skills and motivation that an average farmer may not possess. It is at least possible that a ma.s.sive switch to gra.s.s farming may be practical and profitable, with or without a change in government subsidies. Until we explore these questions, we cannot say that reducing consumption of coal is the only remedy for climate change. Richard Manning estimates that switching the entire American Midwest from feedlot to gra.s.s would remove from the atmosphere to topsoil about one quarter of the total greenhouse emissions of the United States. Raising beef on gra.s.s will not solve all our environmental problems, but it might give us a powerful push in the right direction. Even the reddest-blooded Americans do not live on beef alone. Additional environmental benefits will come from raising pigs and chickens or vegetable crops on unplowed land in other parts of the country.

I find another feature of Manning's story attractive. The key to the efficient raising of beef on gra.s.s is low-tech rather than high-tech. No genetic engineering or other controversial biotechnology is required. The key technical innovation is polywire, a simple and cheap electric-fencing material. Polywire makes it possible to move the animals frequently from place to place by moving fences, so that they eat the gra.s.s more uniformly. This simple technology will be easily adaptable to big and small farms and to rich and poor countries. It will not raise religious or ideological opposition. I also find attractive the fact that the switch to gra.s.s came from the bot tom up and not from the top down. Social changes that come from the bottom up are usually more solid and more durable. In the eyes of most ordinary citizens, Minnesota farmers have more credibility than professors of economics.

The last two stories in Part Six are staged in India and China. They reinforce the evidence that Manning's story brings from Minnesota. India and China are now the center of gravity of the world's population and of the world's environmental problems. The fate of the planet, from an ecological point of view, is being decided by India and China and not by the United States. These two stories, one in India and one in China, bring us good news. Neither India nor China is about to stop burning coal, but both countries are taking environmental problems seriously. Each in its own way is putting big efforts into the healing of nature's wounds. Indian entrepreneurs and Chinese government officials are like Minnesota farmers. When they see something obviously wrong, they are willing to take responsibility and work hard to put it right. They take a long view of the future and try to solve only one problem at a time. They do not despair. They are happy if they leave their piece of the planet a little healthier than they found it. The lesson that I learn from these stories is that our future is in good hands.

FREEMAN DYSON.

Part One.

Visions of s.p.a.ce.

ANDREW CORSELLO The Believer.

FROM GQ.

ONCE IN A WHILE, this planet gives birth to a child with freakish talenta"freakish not only because it is vast but because it is ready upon arrival, with batteries included and no a.s.sembly required. One need only open the box and step back.

In this case, the talent belongs to a six-year-old boy with a rather odd name. The year is 1977, and Elon (p.r.o.nounced Ee-lon) Musk lives in the most odious country in the world: South Africa. It's summertime, and Elon and his kid brother and sister and their cousins have been playing outside their grandmother's suburban Pretoria home for hours. Now it's getting dark. The other children head for the house. Come on, Elon. Let's go.

But Elon doesn't want to go inside and doesn't understand why the others do. It's beautiful out here in the dark.

Elon and his siblings and cousins start to argue. Come on, Elon. No! Come, Elon! I won't! Please, Elon.

Tosca, the three-year-old, starts to yell, then cry. Then she blurts out what the other children are thinking.

"Elon, I'm scared!"

Tosca's mummy has come outside to see what the tears are about. Huddled there on the porch are Tosca and Kimbala"the middle sibling, fifteen months Elon's juniora"and the cousins. And there at the tree line is Elon. The light has mostly waned, but Elon, he's so white, skin as pale as a fish's belly, and Maye Musk can see his face so clearly. Beaming. Euphoric. Because he knows.

Elon hasn't been bickering with his sister and brother; he has been evangelizing. And now he raises both arms to make sure they can see, as well as hear, the good news.

"Do not be scared of the darkness!" Elon Musk calls out to them from the wilderness. "There is nothing to feara"it is merely the absence of light!"

Though Elon has been issuing such p.r.o.nouncements for several years, it seems to Maye Musk that the distinct way her son has of inspecting the world around hima"so precise, so sobera"was fully formed even before he could speak. A carefulness was evident, a stillness. Now, at six, he is creative and imaginative, but not in a fanciful way. Other than a fondness for comic books and Tolkien, he doesn't engage in make-believe, doesn't make things up. There are no imaginary friendsa"a surprise, since he doesn't have many real onesa"or monsters in the closet. Elon simply isn't interested in things that are not there. Only in things that are, or plausibly could be. Facts. Elon needs facts the way he needs air.

And so he reads. Four, five hours a day, even as a first-grader. He forgets nothing he reads. Tosca will say, "I wonder how high up in the sky the moon is!" and Kimbal will respond, "A billion kilometers!" And Elon, smiling, sharing, will say, "Actually, it is 384,400 kilometers away." His siblings will stop and look at him then, and Elon, interpreting the silence as an invitation, will add, "On average."

Just the facts. They're all Elon needs. What he doesn't seem to need is a mentor, or even encouragement. Sometimes he fires questions at his father, an electrical and mechanical engineer. Problem is, many of his questions involve computers, which Errol Musk dismisses as "toys that will amount to nothing." His son calls this opinion "very silly" and, at the age of ten, buys his first computer and begins teaching himself how to program it. Two years later, he sells his first piece of softwarea"a video game called Blastara"for $500.

Intelligence like Elon'sa"self-originating, self-sustaining, seemingly parentlessa"provokes a reflexive question from everyone who encounters it. Where does such a child come from? It's also a rhetorical question. The better thing to ask is: Where does such a child go?

This is the more relevant question not only because it is answerable but because it can and must be asked and answered now. Nowa"when we are more uncertain about one another and about ourselves and about our direction than we have been in decadesa"it is important for us to hear a story like Elon Musk's. As a reminder. And as a bracing slap to the face.

Because when children like Elon Musk attain the kind of self-awareness that leads to questions about environmenta" Where in the world can I go for the license and the room to do what I must do? Where in the world are my peers? a"they always, and still, come to the same conclusion.

Elon Musk knew when he was a child. A remarkable conviction for a child to have, and all the more so because there was no specific dream attached to it. There was no "to build rocket s.h.i.+ps" or "to make millions" or "to design computer software." Instead, Elon had this thought, consciously, literally, at the age of ten: America is where people like me need to go. That is where people like me have always gone. A place that was the photographic negative of apartheid South Africa, a place less enc.u.mbered than any in the world, ever, by fear.

"It is as true now as it has always been," says Elon Musk, the man who is endeavoringa"as preposterously as he is crediblya"to give the human race its biggest upgrade since the advent of consciousness. "Funny how people seem to have forgotten that. But almost all innovation in the world takes place in the United States."

By the time he's ten he's reading eight to ten hours a day. Elon reads and Elon retains, and his retention armors him. When the negative injunctions You can't and You won't come at Elon the way they come at all children, tens of thousands of times and in every conceivable form, sometimes overt and hard, sometimes insidious and soft, he simply doesn't hear them. Another couple of decades will pa.s.s before his biography fills in the specifics, but Elon Muska"the metamorphic intellect, the stuntman brazenness, the aura of immanencea"is already there. The twenty-four-year-old physics Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who drops the program after forty-eight hours to become a software programmer who sells his first venture, a media-software company called Zip2, for $307 million? There. The propulsive personality who, within weeks of that sale, starts X.com, an online-banking company that morphs into PayPal before being sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion? There. The thirty-year-old autodidact who then dispenses with digital ephemera in order to become a man, a rocket man, a rocket scientist, and creates s.p.a.ce Exploration Technologies (s.p.a.ceX), a company whose short-term purpose is to commercialize an endeavora"orbital rocketrya"that has previously been the province of a handful of nations and huge aeros.p.a.ce concerns (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) and whose long-term aim is, yup, a mission to Mars? There. The thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur who decides it's time to gin up some ambition already and wean America off the teat of foreign oil while combating global warming and in 2004 makes himself the controlling shareholder and, eventually, CEO of Tesla Motors, manufacturer of the world's first all-electric sports car? There. The thirty-four-year-old penitent who realizes he's just not doing his part, greenhouse-gas-wise, and becomes the chairman and controlling shareholder of SolarCity, turning the company into one of the nation's biggest installers of solar panels? There.

The above reads like a chronology, which it is, but much of it is also a simultaneity: Elon Musk is currently helming three companies, all of them start-ups, each of them created to address an intractable global problem, two of them on the cutting edge of entirely different engineering technologies, and none of them in even remotely related industries. He is doing so as a businessman (he devised the business plan for SolarCity, which is run by his two cousins, and is the chief executive of the other two) and as a financier (having put more than $100 million of his own money into s.p.a.ceX and $55 million into Tesla), and that's something.

But really, it's nothing, because he's not just the vision guy or the money guy or the marketing guy, although he's all of those, too. He's also designing the stuff. At each of his companies, he knows what the engineersa"chemical, mechanical, electrical, structurala"know and what the software programmers know, and he does what they do. When the brushed-aluminum pedal of the Tesla Roadster is floored, unleas.h.i.+ng 650 amps and 14,000 rpm from the car's 6,831 lithium-ion cells and launching it from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds, the engine roars like ... a cell phone on vibrate modea"a phenomenon made possible not only by Elon Musk's money but by his mind. Likewise, the "CTO" in his official s.p.a.ceX t.i.tle is descriptive, not ceremonial: Elon Musk taught himself how to design and build rockets. "I'd never seen anything like it," says Chris Thompson, explaining what persuaded him to leave a senior position at Boeing to oversee "structures" at s.p.a.ceX. "He was the quickest learner I've ever come across. You had this guy who knew everything from a business point of view, but who was also clearly capable of knowing everything from a technical point of viewa"and the place he was creating was a blank sheet of paper." Musk says (as do the rocket scientists he works with) that after founding s.p.a.ceX, it took him "about two years to get up to speed." How is such a thing possible?

Books. They did for Elon what they'd always done. They gave him what he neededa"facts. And, less obvious but just as crucial, they took away what he didn't need: fear, or even any kind of hesitation.

Did you see what Elon did this fall? It was big. It almost, but not quite, made up for what he did in August, when one of his Falcon 1 rockets failed to make orbit and ended up dumping James Doohan's ashesa"Scotty's ashesa"in the Pacific Ocean. The achievement might have slipped under your radar, though, because it came at the very end of September, just before the bottom truly fell out. Most of us had already a.s.sumed the fetal position by then, thrust our eyes into the softs of our elbows, anything to avoid looking at our latest 401(k) statements. So know this: on September 28, Elon Musk did something that had never been done before, and which experts had repeatedly said could never be done: launched a privately funded rocket built from scratch into Earth orbit. Previously, only nine nations (and the European s.p.a.ce Agency) had independently done such a thinga"each after decades of trial and error, dozens of failed launches, and billions (of dollars, rubles, francs...) invested. Musk's Falcon 1 rocket, built for $100 million by a company with fewer than 150 employees, succeeded on only its fourth attempt.

Walk into the giant hangar housing the offices of s.p.a.ceX and you will immediately find your eye drawn to a large gla.s.s-walled s.p.a.ce named after Wernher von Braun, the Teutonic creator-G.o.d of rocketry and, like Elon Musk, a naturalized American citizen. Spend an hour or two at the company and you'll realize that von Braun refers less to a room than a state of mind. "We'll take it to the von Braun"a"that's the argot, the invocation, in the face of any conflict that requires immediate resolution. Engineers at s.p.a.ceX talk about takin' it to the von Braun the way toughs in dive bars talk about takin' it outside.

It's early November, late in the afternoon on election eve, as the dozen men who make up s.p.a.ceX's senior design team file into the von Braun Room. (Yes, they're all men, ranging from their early twenties to early fifties. Two wear wedding rings; all but Elon sport metal watches chunky enough to deflect gunfire.) There is every reason to believe that this will be a truly terrible meeting for Elon Musk. Actually, meetings are terrible almost by definition in Musk's view. Meetings, he's fond of saying, are what happens when people aren't working.

But this Monday afternoon is special, thanks to Tesla. October has just proven to be the single worst month for the auto industry in twenty-five years. Despite being a new kind of company making a new kind of car, Tesla isn't immune from what is ailing Detroit. People aren't buying cars, period, much less $109,000 electric sports cars with a 244-mile rangea"a fact not lost on the venture capitalists Tesla relies on for financing. In recent weeks, Musk has had to close Tesla's engineering office in Michigan, lay off 20 percent of the company's staff (mostly from the Michigan office but also from the Silicon Valley headquarters), and announce a significant production delay in Tesla's Model'Sa"the $57,000 sedan that Musk (and those venture capitalists) have been hoping will broaden the company's client base.

Yet more: that announcement about the'S has nearly coincided with another, on the blog of Elon's wife, the fantasy novelist Justine Musk, that he has left her and their five boys (four-year-old twins and two-year-old triplets) for a twenty-three-year-old English actress named Talulah Riley. ("By all accounts she is bright and sweet and of course beautiful, and about as personally responsible for the death of my marriage as she is for the dynamic that played out inside it. In other words, not very," Justine wrote. "Also, she is not blonde, and I do find this refres.h.i.+ng.") And about a week after that, a Tesla employee leaked information to a popular Silicon Valley blog about how low morale at Tesla had sunk and revealing the proprietary fact that the companya"which has taken more than a thousand deposits from buyers who haven't yet received their Roadstersa"was down to its last $9 million in liquid reserves. The same day the blog item appeared, Musk issued a statement confirming the $9-million figure while announcing his intention to bolster Tesla's cash with at least $20 million in additional financing. Then, in search of the leaker, he sent a computer-forensics team to seize and search the computers of various employees. The only redeeming pieces of news about Tesla? Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and George Clooney are all having their Roadsters delivered this week.

Today, Elon and his s.p.a.ceX engineers are takin' it to the von Braun to discuss a fine point of reentry physics, per an exchange in one of the day's earlier meetings.

Engineer #1: Would you VPPA?

Engineer #2: [l.u.s.tily] Naaaaaah, I'd probably go to soft plasma.

Elon: You always get misplaced diameters with that.

Engineer #2: What if the heat s.h.i.+eld attached to the Dragon's base...

[A prolonged exchange of glances; a clear consensus that there are sometimes feelings for which there can be no words.]

Elon: We'll take it to the von Braun.

[Satisfied nods from all. Exeunt, pursued by a bear.]

Now Musk sits, his engineers loosely grouped around him, waiting for one of them to begin a PowerPoint presentation. He just misses being extremely handsome, and somehow, by just missing the extreme of handsomeness, he also just misses being merely handsome. Yet Elon Musk draws eyes the way an extremely handsome man does, for two reasons. The first is that he is unusual-looking, in a boyish and pleasant way. The second is that physically, Elon Musk is a very, very still human being, and there is something arresting about that. Or as one Silicon Valley blog recently put it, "The liquored-up consensus at San Francisco watering hole Joey & Eddie's last night: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is actually kind of hot."

"The economy is s.h.i.+t," he says, apropos of nothing and everything. Though Elon Musk almost never raises his voice and doesn't now, his tone is unmistakably ... chipper. "Do you realize what that's going to do to the value of secondhand machines? They'll be in the toilet! We can get an EB welder on-site!"

It's the d.a.m.nedest thing. The world is s.h.i.+t. Elon's world is s.h.i.+t. Yet when Elon asks, "Should we buy a welder?" he seems to be doing so in the same way a ten-year-old asks, "Should we ride the roller coaster now?" Here in the von Braun, everything that comes out of his mouth, whether in the form of a question or comment, is about building, hiring, investing. If and when the present woes of the world are acknowledgeda"the economy is s.h.i.+t!a"the point is to exult in how easy that's going to make things.