Category: Technology

A generation ago, the vanishing of the Aral Sea became global shorthand for environmental desolation. Today the region has become a test bed for a resilient future.

This article originally ran in the May, 2026 issue of National Geographic.

It was the first human-made ecological disaster of the modern era.

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest lake, a rich and productive ecosystem teeming with carp, bream, and other species—by one estimate, it provided a sixth of all fish consumed in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles across, the sea was a world unto itself for the people who lived and fished on its shores and for the sailors who crossed it.

But change was coming. In 1968, Pravda, the official state newspaper of the Soviet Union, carried a story with an astonishing prophecy. This world would soon vanish, it said. Already the water level had started to fall, and it would fall further, its edges creeping away from the fishing towns on its shores, the lake bed changing to desert. By the turn of the century, “essentially, the Aral Sea will no longer exist.”

There was no magic behind the prophecy—just math. In the preceding years, Soviet officials had built large-scale irrigation projects that diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, into cotton production. Without their inflow, there was nothing to replace the water lost naturally through evaporation. For a brief time, the region enjoyed the best of both worlds: the lake, with its productive fisheries and mild climate, and the cotton industry, with the hard cash it earned. But as the rivers turned away, the lake shrank and shrank to less than 10 percent of its mid-century footprint, leaving behind a salt-encrusted desert.

The prophecy had been duly engineered: The Aral Sea as such no longer existed. “From an environmental perspective, it was a huge mistake,” says Bulat Yessekin, an environmental policy expert who spent decades working on Central Asian water access issues with international nonprofit groups.

Today the Aral Sea stands not only as a worldwide symbol of catastrophe but also as the first domino to fall in a freshwater crisis. Iran’s Lake Urmia has also shrunk over the past half century by 90 percent, as has Lake Chad in Central Africa. In the United States, the Great Salt Lake in Utah has become so salty because of water loss that its brine shrimp are at risk of dying out. All these crises are tied together with the pressures of human population growth and climate change.

But some conservationists are now looking to the fate of the Aral Sea and asking another question: If humanity can create ecological disaster, can we also undo it?

Continue reading Can the Aral Sea be reborn?

A heat-shield expert has major worries about Artemis II.

This article appeared in New York magazine’s Intelligencer section on March 31, 2026.

Some time during the first week of April, a 322-foot NASA rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center and soar deep into outer space, carrying its crew of four astronauts farther from Earth than humans have been in half a century. The Orion space capsule will loop around the moon, passing within 5,000 miles of the cratered surface, and then return to Earth. Turning its heat shield to the upper atmosphere, it will use aerodynamic braking to slow from a speed of 25,000 mph to just 300 mph, at which point it will deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific. Humanity will have returned to the moon and come home safely again.

That’s what NASA’s experts say will happen, anyway.

A guy on the internet disagrees.

Charles Camarda, a 73-year-old retiree living in Virginia, has been posting on LinkedIn and X, saying NASA has miscalculated and the Artemis IIrocket could fail catastrophically. To be clear, he is one guy, posting as a private citizen, with no institutional backing and no notable public figures standing by his side. It’s just him, one of a bazillion lone voices on the internet trying to set the world straight.

But one thing is different about Camarda that sets him apart from all those other dudes and makes his quixotic quest worth paying attention to: There is not a single person on Earth more qualified on this particular subject than he is.

“People need to listen to Charlie because he knows what he’s talking about,” says Eileen Collins, the former astronaut who made history as the first female commander of a space-shuttle mission. “He’s a high-integrity person, and his technical background is very deep.”

Continue reading A Manned NASA Rocket Is About to Take Off for the Moon. There Are Questions About Its Safety.

The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on July 21, 2025.

On a bright spring morning in 2023, SpaceX’s first fully assembled Starship launch vehicle stood at its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, ready for its debut. Gleaming in the sun, the most powerful rocket ever built stretched as high as an office tower. It was beautiful not just for the boldness and elegance of its design, but for what it represented: the next chapter in humanity’s voyage into space. Able to boost more than 100 tons into orbit, it meant that huge swarms of satellites would soon bring cheap data to the whole planet. With greater engine thrust than the Apollo program’s Saturn V and reusable, it would carry astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars.

A crowd of space enthusiasts had gathered to experience the moment, chanting along with the countdown clock, then cheering as the mighty engines let loose a wall of flame.

Then, four minutes after takeoff, the unmanned rocket blew up. The eruption of white smoke was met not with stunned silence, but whoops and cheers like you might hear at a fireworks finale. “This was a development test; this was the first test flight of Starship,” explained one of the live-broadcast presenters. “And the goal was to gather the data, as we said, clear the pad, and get ready to go again.” Mission accomplished.

Continue reading Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed?

California fights wildfires like wars, but this one may be unwinnable.

This article originally ran on January 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

Walls of flames pushed by hurricane-force winds are devouring the Los Angeles basin, leveling whole neighborhoods and overwhelming firefighters. The water streaming from fire hydrants slows to a trickle. Ash rains down over the tens of thousands fleeing their homes, masked against the choking smoke. For Angelenos watching their city burn, there is no prior experience that can help them grasp the scale of what is happening. As a friend texted me from Hollywood, “This may be the biggest wildfire disaster in world history.”

The scale of the destruction is all the more dismaying given how assiduously California has prepared itself to combat wildfires. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as CAL FIRE, spends $4 billion a year on prevention and mitigation. Over the last decade that money has allowed it to assemble an army-like force of unprecedented sophistication and scale, with a staff of 12,000 and an aerial firefighting fleet larger than most countries’ air forces.

Yet in the face of some of the worst fire conditions in over a decade, it hasn’t been enough. Though some 9,000 firefighters were on hand to battle this week’s blazes, they were overwhelmed by the multiple wildfires that moved at hundreds of yards per minute. “We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this,” L.A. County fire chief Anthony Marrone told the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The winds slackened Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, helping firefighters gain the upper hand against some of the infernos. The city’s fire chief announced on Thursday that the Woodley fire in the San Fernando Valley had been brought under control and that firefighters had made gains against the Sunset fire threatening Hollywood. But other fires still burned out of control and further danger loomed. According to the National Weather Service, humidity remains dangerously low and gusty winds of up to 70 mph are expected between Thursday night and Friday evening. By Thursday morning, five major fires were still burning and tens of thousandsof people were under evacuation orders. Warned the NWS: “Any new wildfires that develop will likely spread rapidly.”

Continue reading How Do You Stop a Hurricane Made of Fire?

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on December 26, 2024.

In 1959, physicist Robert Noyce and his colleagues at the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation created a nifty little piece of technology: a wafer of silicon with an entire electronic circuit printed on it. As a technical breakthrough, it was an impressively clever feat, but what made Noyce’s achievement historically important was the cascade of innovations that followed. By making it possible to progressively shrink computing power into smaller and cheaper packages, the integrated circuit gave rise to wave after wave of transformative products, from the pocket calculator to the personal computer, the internet, and mobile computing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Noyce’s invention engendered the entire digital world as we know it today.

Noyce and some of his collaborators left Fairchild to form their own company, IntelINTC $19.92 (-2.41%), in 1968. Like OpenAI today, Intel had a head start on a new field of almost unlimited promise, and it used its advantage to great effect. In 1971 the company invented the microprocessor chip, a development that would later enable personal computers to bring the information age into homes of retail consumers. In 1997, Time magazine named Intel CEO Andrew Grove its Man of the Year. By 2000, the company had a market cap of $250 billion and ranked as the sixth-most-valuable business in the world.

That, however, proved to be the company’s high-water mark. In the years that followed, the company learned that being present at the birth of a technology and riding it to great heights doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be able to sniff out market trends and outcompete newcomers indefinitely. In 1999, NvidiaNVDA $138.46 (0.28%), a much smaller rival, began shipping its first graphics processing unit, or GPU. In the decade to come, these chips would prove essential to the growth of PC gaming and multimedia applications, and then proved equally vital to both cryptocurrency mining and the large language models that power OpenAI. This time it was Nvidia, not Intel, whose chips were powering the revolution, and the changing of the guard was reflected in the company’s share prices. Ten years ago, Intel’s market cap was 15x bigger than Nvidia’s; today Nvidia’s is 30x bigger.

Investor Warren Buffett famously once said that he likes to invest in companies whose business has an “economic moat” around it — some factor, whether brand strength, network effects, patents, or economies of scale, that prevents rivals from swooping in and poaching its business. A head start in a technology can function as a moat for a while. But success inevitably draws rivals, and sooner or later some of them will catch up, or the demands of the market will change and favor a different technology. For now, OpenAI has a first-mover advantage in machine learning, and it has every reason to be optimistic about its fortunes in the years ahead. But if history is any guide, its halcyon days will eventually go the way of all flesh.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 9, 2024

The warnings began arriving by telegram. A fierce hurricane had just swung around the western tip of Cuba and was heading for Tampa, Florida. When it made landfall at Tarpon Springs on October 25, 1921, it was the storm of the century. Winds of 120 mph smashed steamships and toppled trees, and an 11-foot storm surge swept away buildings and destroyed crops. At least eight people were killed. “Tampa City of Ruins,” a local newspaper declared.

It’s been more than 100 years since a storm this fierce has hit Tampa, but given the climatic trends, storms that formerly registered as once-in-a-lifetime events are going to be happening a lot more frequently. Hurricane seasons are getting more intense, researchers say, and outlier storms are getting bigger. So while Milton is going to be the worst storm that anyone alive has ever seen in the area, it might not be the last of its scale to come around for a while.

Jill Trepanier, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University, has studied the kind of extreme storms that only appear every 30 years. She found that as waters have gotten warmer, the intensity of these storms has increased. “Thirty years ago, when we thought about what a typical 30-year event looked like in Tampa, it was a Category 3,” she says. “Now, it’s inching toward Category 4.”

Continue reading Hurricane Milton Will Be Bad. The Next One Might Be Even Worse.