In Reed's ‘Terrestrial History,' homesick for an abandoned Earth
The book begins in an all-too-familiar present. 'It was 2025,' Reed writes, 'another summer of climate breakdown.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Over 40 years later, Hannah's son Andrew has grown up to become a politician, desperately trying to hold the world together amid growing civil unrest and increasingly unpredictable weather. He is skeptical of his mother's technological pipe dreams, putting his faith in our ability to solve the crisis through collective action. 'Our diminished world is still enough if we work together,' he avers, 'if we share.'
Advertisement
His daughter, Kenzie, is not so sure. An engineer, she has successfully taken up her grandmother's mantle; by this point, however, most believe the Earth is too far gone for Hannah's reactor to make a difference. Instead, it becomes the centerpiece of a plan to escape the failing Earth for
In 2079, Kenzie abandons Earth for a Martian colony led by the celebrity industrialist Axel Faulk, a man she admires for his 'cold foresight.' But the colony proves to be less than advertised, and she is disillusioned by the constraints of her new life. Faulk runs it like a corporation; its residents are treated like employees rather than citizens. By the early 22nd century, Kenzie's Martian son, Roban, has grown deeply resentful of the colony's soft totalitarianism and dreams of striking out on his own in search of a life that's about more than mere survival.
Advertisement
Each of these characters tells their own story in four distinct, yet intricately braided narratives. Reed sweeps you back and forth in time from chapter to chapter, illustrating how the past, present, and future are often imperceptibly in dialogue with one another. His style is diaristic, giving readers access to his characters' innermost thoughts. This allows us to empathize with them as they struggle to explain themselves to one another and fail to bridge the philosophical chasms that divide them. While the occasionally loopy sci-fi conceits of Hannah and Roban's stories drive much of the book's action, it's the emotionally fraught, contemplative tone of Andrew and Kenzie's stories that forms the true heart of the book. Reed never lets you forget that this is, most importantly, a story about people.
With 'Terrestrial History,' Reed deftly taps into our present anxieties, not just that of our worsening climate, but of our worsening relationship to one another. In these trying times, it's easy to let cynicism take hold — to imagine it easier to leave the planet than to find common ground with someone who holds beliefs different from our own; to fantasize about some quick-fix tech solution rather than rethink our expectations around material culture and personal comfort; to think our problems are so large and so deeply rooted that nothing short of reversing the arrow of time could solve them.
But the key to building a sustainable, prosperous future for humanity lies in confronting these Earthly challenges and uprooting the pernicious, zero-sum thinking that pits us against one another. While setting out to colonize the universe might on its face seem to be a bold endeavor or a triumph of human ingenuity, 'Terrestrial History' suggests that it is in fact a failure of our collective imagination and a distraction from the real work of knitting our tattered social fabric back together, starting with those closest to us.
Advertisement
TERRESTRIAL HISTORY
By Joe Mungo Reed
Norton, 256 pages, $29.99
Michael Patrick Brady is a book critic from Boston. He can be reached at mike@michaelpatrickbrady.com.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
European Mars orbiter spies crumbling crater 'soaked in layers of Martian history' (photo)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A European Mars probe captured a stunning view of a Martian crater that's rich in many of the features that help scientists reconstruct the planet's dynamic history over billions of years. The image, taken in October 2024 using the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, shows a crumbling crater called Deuteronilus Cavus. It is "soaked in layers of Martian history," having been exposed to volcanic lava flows, erosion from liquid water, repeated freeze-thaw cycles that expanded its edges, and layers of wind-blown volcanic dust settling over time, according to a statement from the space agency. Located in a transitional zone between the planet's rugged southern highlands and smoother northern lowlands, Deuteronilus Cavus is believed to originally have formed following an impact roughly 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, when Mars and other planets were being bombarded by huge numbers of asteroids and comets. Over time, the nearly circular 75-mile-wide (120 kilometers) depression has been eroded by water and ice, enlarging it to nearly twice its initial size. ESA shared a fun "recipe" outlining the series of events that shaped the crater, offering valuable insights into the planet's climatic and geological evolution. For example, the presence of clay minerals indicates past interactions between volcanic materials and water, hinting at the possibility of ancient habitable environments, according to the statement. This is further supported by channels cut through the crater's rim, likely formed by surface water flow or the collapse of weakened ground above draining subsurface water. Meanwhile, grooves in the crater rim suggest that ice once formed when Mars' axis tilted more sharply away from the sun than it does now. Related Stories: — Mars: Everything you need to know about the Red Planet — Facts about ESA's Mars Express orbiter — What happened to all the water on Mars? Here's why the debate continues "The linear grooves indicate where boulders frozen into the base of a glacier were dragged along, gouging out the troughs visible today," ESA officials said in the statement. "Around the base of the crater's inner walls, we can see the smooth, tongue-shaped ends of rock-covered glaciers. These 'debris aprons' formed when ice mixed together with rocky debris along the crater walls during a period of glaciation, and slowly crept downslope." The crater's interior also exhibits a mix of rock knobs, mesas, channels and plains, believed to be remnants of a collapsed central peak. Dark volcanic ash covers much of the crater floor, while surrounding wrinkle ridges mark ancient lava flows. "This feature-rich crater has all the ingredients for exploring Mars' varied geological processes, giving us a tantalizing taste of its complex history," ESA officials said in the statement.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
These mysterious dark ‘streaks' on Mars aren't what scientists initially believed
Mysterious dark streaks first observed on Mars in the 1970s are not what many believed they were. Scientists now say the curious features that stretch for hundreds of meters down Martian slopes were likely signs of wind and dust activity — not water. 'A big focus of Mars research is understanding modern-day processes on Mars — including the possibility of liquid water on the surface,' Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, said in a statement. 'Our study reviewed these features but found no evidence of water. Our model favors dry formation processes.' Valantinas and the University of Bern's Valentin Bickel coauthored the research which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. To reach these conclusions, the researchers used a machine learning algorithm to catalog as many of the odd streaks as they could, creating a first-of-its-kind- global Martian map containing some 500,000 from more than 86,000 high-resolution images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then, they compared their map to databases and catalogs of other factors, including temperature, wind speed, hydration, and rock slide activity. They looked for any correlations over hundreds of thousands of cases. The authors found that the ominous streaks that don't last for decades, known as recurring slope lineae or RSLs, are not generally associated with factors that suggest a liquid or frost origin. Those factors might include a specific slope orientation, high surface temperature fluctuations, and high humidity. The features were more likely to form in places with above-average wind speed and dust deposition. That points to a dry origin of formation, and they seem to show up in the same locations during the warmest periods of the Martian year before mysteriously vanishing. They concluded that the older slope streaks, which run down cliff faces and crater walls, most likely form when dust suddenly slides off slopes following seismic activity, winds, or even the shockwaves from meteoroid impacts. The streaks appear most often near recent impact craters, where shockwaves may shake the surface dust loose. The shorter-lived ones are typically found in places where dust devils or rockfalls are frequent. 'There were statistically significant correlations between new impact sites and the appearance of nearby slope streaks in certain regions, supporting this view,' NASA said. Previously, some had interpreted those streaks as liquid flows. It's possible that small amounts of water could mix with enough salt to create a flow on the frozen Martian surface, Brown University noted. The red planet was once more temperate, and there is water under the surface of Mars. Others believed they were triggered by dry process. These results cast new doubt on slope streaks and RSLs as habitable environments. 'That's the advantage of this big data approach,' Valantinas said. 'It helps us to rule out some hypotheses from orbit before we send spacecraft to explore.'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Why does NASA's Perseverance rover keep taking pictures of this maze on Mars?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you've spent any time perusing the carousel of raw images from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, you might have stumbled across an odd subject: a tiny, intricate maze etched into a small plate, photographed over and over again. Why is the Perseverance rover so obsessed with this little labyrinth? It turns out the maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known for its fun acronym, SHERLOC. This Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool is designed to detect organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where the maze comes in. Located on the rover's seven-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, SHERLOC uses spectroscopic techniques — specifically Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy — to analyze Martian rocks. In order to ensure accurate measurements, it must routinely calibrate its tools using a set of reference materials with specific properties. These are mounted on a plate attached to the front of the rover's body: the SHERLOC Calibration Target. "The calibration targets serve multiple purposes, which primarily include refining the SHERLOC wavelength calibration, calibrating the SHERLOC laser scanner mirror, and monitoring the focus and state of health of the laser," Kyle Uckert, deputy principal investigator for SHERLOC at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells The target is arranged in two rows, each populated with small patches of carefully selected materials. The top row includes three critical calibration materials: aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) on sapphire discs; the UV-scattering material Diffusil; and Martian meteorite SaU008, whose mineral makeup is already known and helps align wavelength calibration with real Martian geology. This is also where you'll find the maze. Why a maze? "SHERLOC is all about solving puzzles, and what better puzzle than a maze!" says Uckert. The purpose of the maze target is to calibrate the positioning of the laser scanner mirror and characterize the laser's focus, which requires a target with sharply contrasting spectral responses. The maze serves this purpose well." The maze is made of chrome-plated lines just 200 microns thick (about twice the width of a human hair) printed onto silica glass. "There are no repeating patterns and the spectrum of the chrome plating is distinct from the underlying silica glass," says Uckert. That makes it possible to measure the laser's focus and accuracy with extreme precision. If you look closely at the maze, you'll also notice a Sherlock Holmes portrait right at the center. While it's a cheeky nod to the instrument's name, it serves a practical function. "SHERLOC spectral maps can resolve the 200 micron thick chrome plated lines and the 50 micron thick silhouette of Sherlock Holmes at the center of the maze," Uckert notes. Like the portrait, the bottom half of the SHERLOC Calibration Target also serves a dual purpose: spectral instrument calibration and spacesuit material testing. It contains five samples of materials used in modern spacesuits, including some materials you might be familiar with, like Teflon, Gore-Tex, and Kevlar. And don't miss the "fun" target in this row — there's a geocache marker backing a polycarbonate target, and it does indeed have a tie-in to Sherlock Holmes. RELATED STORIES: — Perseverance rover's Mars samples show traces of ancient water, but NASA needs them on Earth to seek signs of life — Perseverance Mars rover finds 'one-of-a-kind treasure' on Red Planet's Silver Mountain — Perseverance Mars rover becomes 1st spacecraft to spot auroras from the surface of another world These materials are actively being tested under Mars conditions to determine how they hold up over time in situ, which is crucial for planning human exploration of the Red Planet. "Note that we use all of these materials to fine-tune SHERLOC," adds Uckert. "As a bonus, the spacesuit materials support unique science that will help keep future astronauts safe." Now, if all these Sherlock Holmes–related Easter eggs on the SHERLOC Calibration Target aren't enough for you, there's one final link. SHERLOC has a color camera as part of its instrumentation suite that sometimes images the target, and it's called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. Yes, SHERLOC's sidekick is called WATSON.
