Summary

In the concluding section to his book, Wallace-Wells writes that the question how climate change will ultimately play out is not a test of climate science, but “a bet on human activity” (219). To the extent that we live “under clouds of uncertainty about climate change,” he writes, “those clouds are projections not of collective ignorance about the natural world but blindness about the human one, and can be dispersed with human action” (219). Climate change inspires both human humility and human empowerment, he argues: “If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it” (220).

Wallace-Wells then goes into various theories of intelligent life on planets other than earth, beginning with Fermi’s paradox – also known as “the Great Silence” – which poses the question, “If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in...