It’s something of a miracle that life on our planet has been left to evolve without fatal interruption for billions of years. Such a long unbroken chain of survival, however unlikely, is necessary for bags of mud and water like ourselves to eventually sit up, and just recently, to wonder how we got here. And like the bullet-riddled—but safe—planes, our planet has survived countless near-fatal blows. There have been volcanic apocalypses, body blows from supersonic space rocks the size of Mount Everest, and ice ages that might have frozen the planet almost to the tropics. Had any of these catastrophes been worse, we wouldn’t be here. But they couldn’t have been worse for precisely that reason.
As Sandberg and his coauthors Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković write, “The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovas/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated.”
That is, our forecasts about the future could be blinded by our necessarily lucky past. Not only is it impossible to look back and find truly world-ending impact craters in our planet’s history—stranger still, it would be impossible to find these impacts in the rock record even if they struck planets like ours all the time. Existential hazards, even if they’re extremely likely, might hover just out of frame, concealed by our “anthropic shadow.”
When I first touched a brain, it was braised and enveloped in a blanket of beaten eggs. That brain had started its life in the head of a calf, but ended in my mouth, accompanied by some potatoes and a beverage at an economical eatery in Seville. Seville is a Spanish city famous for its tapas, and tortilla de sesos, as well as other brain preparations, are occasional offerings. On my brain-eating trip to Seville, I was too poor to afford sophisticated gastronomic experiences. Indeed, some of my most vivid recollections of the trip included scrounging around supermarkets for rather less satisfying food, while the delectable tapas remained out of reach, only for the ogling. The brain omelet was certainly one of the better meals I had.
My next encounter with sesos came many years later in a laboratory at MIT, in a crash course on neuroanatomy whose highlight was certainly the handling and dissection of a real sheep’s brain. At that time, I was drawn to the class and to the sheep’s brain by a diffuse set of concerns that motivate many of my fellow humans to follow and even embed themselves in neuroscience. The brain is the seat of the soul, the mechanism of the mind, I thought; by studying it, we can learn the secrets of cognition, perception, and motivation. Above all, we can gain an understanding of ourselves.
“The People vs Democracy” is a chastening read for all sorts of reasons. It provides lots of evidence to suggest that the battle between illiberal democracy and liberal elitism will only become more intense. It demonstrates that those harbingers of openness, young people, are in fact much more sceptical about democracy than are their seniors. But the biggest reason for its chilling effect is unwitting: the prescriptions for saving democracy are so much feebler than the explanation of why it is in danger.
Her tone is chatty. She’s chatty. At the festival, her moderator Marianne Elliot, who handled the panel of three chefs with aplomb, did a magnificent job of the solo act with a crisp introduction, a gentle push, then Nosrat was like a balloon whizzing round the room in no danger whatsoever of deflating. The book does not have the normal layout, managing successfully to incorporate a touch of memoir, comment, information and actual recipes in a fairly loose format. This tone means that at any stage you can go back into this book and just enjoy any bit of it. A glance at any page will mean you’ve learnt something new.