@MoMoPerry
"Aquaterra may be mostly water today, but for the greater part of human history—indeed, for the greater part of the past million years—it was mostly land. And that land is where we came from."View quoted post on X
theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…
I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments.View quoted post on X
I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving.
Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing.
It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious.
It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days.
It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days.
It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification.
It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies.
And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score.
All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday.
I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature.
Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf.
To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it.
Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them.
So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it.
In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that.
The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to.
We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.
Today, after seven years of work, The Law of the Sublime is out in the world.
When I started this book, I had an ambitious plan. I would go down the Amazon, find chimpanzees in the wilds of Africa, and cross the Gobi Desert, then write about those experiences of awe.
Then, on a hot August afternoon in 2018, I had a stroke while driving in Los Angeles. A blood clot cut off oxygen to my brain, and within seconds I lost consciousness. When I woke up in the hospital, I learned how close I had come to the point of no return. My left hand was frozen into a claw, and I could barely feel my left leg, but something strange happened.
On the ambulance ride home, I looked out at the people on the street, and for a moment I felt I could be inside their bodies and hear their thoughts. It was marvelous and weird, and I knew it was time to write this book.
I couldn't type, so I wrote every page by hand, dictated it, printed it out, and edited it all over again. I couldn't take the long hikes that had carried me through my six previous books. Then one afternoon I woke from a nap in my backyard to find a grasshopper inches from my face, and I understood that this small backyard would have to be my Amazon jungle. The lizards, the hummingbirds, the insects became my teachers.
My limits turned out to be a blessing. They forced me to find the Sublime in the simplest things, and that is what this book is about.
Most of us live inside a circle: an everyday consciousness shaped by culture, convention, and, more and more, technology. That circle keeps shrinking, and we grow bored and restless. Just outside it is the Sublime, a realm that is frightening and exciting at once, pulling us out of our comfort zones and opening us to a much wider reality. The book maps 12 points outside that circle, and each one is a different face of the Sublime.
Inside, you'll find stories of near-death encounters, astonishing discoveries, and radical changes of consciousness, along with exercises and meditations so you can feel the Sublime yourself, not just read about it.
The Sublime doesn't require travel or exotic adventures. It only requires a new pair of eyes for the reality all around you.
The Law of the Sublime is available now in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.
Thank you for your support of my work. I hope you enjoy reading this book, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
With gratitude,
Robert GreeneView quoted post on X
