The Sequencing Problem — Inga Zhuravleva

My bar for “making it” as a species is when we can casually coordinate large-scale engineering - when moving the matter of our own planet around to build something better1 is a normal thing we do, not a moonshot. That single capability is enough, because reaching it would mean we’d quietly solved two much harder things underneath. First, coordination: you don’t run century-long projects without having figured out how to keep humans aligned across time. Second, energy. Energy is the one that unlocks everything else. The moment it stops being scarce, a whole category of problems we’ve filed under “uneconomical” quietly reopens. Water desalination at scale, and the freedom to move that water anywhere - so it stops being a question of weather and geography. Which means food shortages end too - with water and energy to spare, you can grow food in greenhouses in Antarctica. Transportation gets cheap enough that where you live stops being a function of where you work. And once moving physical

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• abinaya dinesh