This has attracted the attention of President Trump and his Chief Scientific Advisor, Michael Kratsios, who comes from a private-sector background. They see an opportunity to wrest control of science from the bureaucracy — or perhaps even what MAGA loyalists might describe as the “priesthood” of experts who protect the science community at the expense of public well-being.

The travails of Dr Fauci, therefore, are part of a wider struggle. There is a broader, civilization-level conflict going on, one that was best articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1964 when he said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”

Not long ago, anyone who said there was water on the moon was deemed a nutcase. Thanks to data gathered via India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission of 2008, and Nasa’s LCROSS mission of 2009, we know that there are some 600 billion kg of water ice in the moon’s polar regions — a discovery that bodes well for both manned and unmanned missions. In 2020, Nasa’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed the existence of water molecules in the sunlit regions as well.

The heretical discoveries range from space to the mundane matters of daily life. For instance, we used to think that ulcers were caused by spicy food and stress. Then, in 1979, Dr Robin Warren and Dr Barry Marshall, both Australian scientists, showed evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria. The idea was heavily ridiculed, because almost every other scientist had accepted the dogma that no microorganism could possibly survive in human stomach acid. The opposition was so fierce that, for the sake of humanity, Marshall offered himself up as a rat lab by drinking broth made from a patient’s gastritis. First, he became violently ill from the H. pylori bacteria it contained, as he knew he would; then, he cured himself with antibiotics, proving that a peptic ulcer was the product of the bacterium. This discovery has saved millions from unnecessary surgeries and lifelong peptic ulcer disease. Today we know that the condition of the microbiome, the gut, is fundamental to our overall flourishing, and that our bodies are host to countless microorganisms capable of both inflicting profound illness and sustaining our happiness and health.

Science, in other words, is full of orthodoxies waiting to be overturned — which is exactly what Trump and Kratsios are aiming to do. The White House science strategy is a ruthless overhaul, upending traditional funding models and clearing out the legacy leadership that has long governed the scientific community: not only government bodies, but also institutions, such as universities, that are funded by the government. Naturally, many in the scientific establishment are horrified, given their animus for Trump and their hostility toward government meddling in science. But others are thrilled, because the new strategy released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the most radical overhaul of the US federal research enterprise since the Second World War. It breaks the old guard’s control over who gets funding, what gets funded, and how science “should” progress.

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Instead, it calls for funding individuals rather than institutions such as universities, no matter how garlanded. In other words, scientific investigators no longer need to be blessed by the scientific bureaucracy to qualify for funding. Marshall would have been funded a lot sooner had this approach been in place.

The OSTP is also gunning for the peer review system, via which scientific work is slowly and ceremoniously reviewed by other scientists. This approach is often inimical to radical new thinkers, but it has been maintained by universities for decades. Now individual agency reviewers can unilaterally advance unconventional and high-risk, high-reward proposals that traditional academic panels, mindful of existing scientific consensus, would probably reject. Federal money will now flow to “Focused Research Organizations”, which address well-defined problems over a deliberately short lifespan. (Note the contrast with the ancient and bloated university sector.) The roadmap will also enable faster delivery of grant money and, when appropriate, longer timeframes for researchers to get on with their work without having to apply for further funding. How much discovery has been blocked, even unconsciously, by an old guard whose livelihood and parent institutions benefited from scientific stasis?

But the government is not the only source of scientific funding. In fact, the private sector funds a significant proportion of university science. The question remains: how much of the science community has ignored ideas because of ego, or because their cash flows from sponsors would have been adversely affected by the new discovery? Peer reviewers are unlikely to admit that a new idea is right if it proves that their own life’s work is wrong. Some say the peer-review system is independent, but in the case of Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s massive grant-giving process for 38 years, it seems scientists everywhere believed that publishing anything that ran counter to his views might well cause their funding to dry up.

Kratsios is also coming for the academic journals, another form of gatekeeper. From 1951, Robert Maxwell transformed the old peer-review system, which had been quaint and collaborative, into a multibillion-dollar commercial industry, starting with Pergamon Press. This forced journals and libraries to pay subscription fees to remain up to date. The academics, who had been doing this work for free, were now paid. Peer review prestige thus became commodified and monopolized, and the research itself became expensive to access. Kratsios, in response, is trying to cut the flow of taxpayer dollars to these journals.

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As for Trump, he wants the credit for being the president who tore down those gates and the gatekeepers, and for enabling a new era of scientific discovery, one that will be led by free thinkers rather than bureaucrats. The OSTP is therefore pushing many scientists out of the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. It is also limiting federal funds to the old academic institutions.

Central to the new strategy is the “Genesis Mission”, which is commonly described as the Manhattan Project of our generation. Just as the US, in the Second World War, sought to gain control of the atom and the atom bomb through the Manhattan Project, today the White House seeks to enable artificial intelligence to solve the greatest problems facing humanity, from health to energy. The core of the Genesis Mission is the “American Science and Security Platform”, which aims to consolidate the government’s massive supercomputing resources and its diverse research and experimental facilities. These facilities include the seventeen national labs, like Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. These labs house immense bodies of work that their scientists have quietly accumulated over many decades.

We must remember that much of the research has been so highly classified that scientists could not share data within some of these labs, or across them, let alone with private researchers. The White House says this work is a public good paid for with taxpayer money and that all qualified scientists should be able to access it, especially since the old guard have either been wrong or are holding back innovations that would benefit the public.

The White House is also implying that the old-guard scientists have been using the “Classified” label as a “Keep Out” sign for too long. The Genesis Mission calls for all this data to be digitized, standardized, and made AI-ready so it can be shared and studied by both government and private scientists. By feeding many decades of extraordinarily valuable data to AI, the thinking goes, researchers can break open scientific silos and connect the dots between complex biological, chemical, and physical interactions.

In other words, the White House is saying America will go “open-source” in a controlled environment. The US won’t share everything with the world, but it will share it amongst a much broader pool of scientists. This modern Manhattan Project is designed to create an explosion in collaboration.

The most ambitious aspect of the strategy is to allow AI to run labs directly, testing new hypotheses, generating predictive models, and designing and executing new experiments. Science will thus no longer depend on the views or whims of individual scientists or gatekeepers. Science will become autonomous, self-driving, and continuously iterating, operating at a speed that it is impossible for human researchers to replicate.

The era of scientists pipetting chemicals or adjusting lasers or working directly with lab rats, then, is over. AI and robotics will automate both the decision-making and the physical actions. All this takes energy — and the US has some catching-up to do. A new nuclear power plant for example, used to require $30bn and thirty years of regulatory approvals. In May 2025, the White House gave small American nuclear firms the deadline of 4 July, 2026, America’s 250th anniversary, to “go critical” with small modular reactors using new technologies. Four firms made it. The US is now scaling up the nuclear energy needed to power the data centers and AI essential to the project of a Golden Age. Even now, AI is solving mathematical equations that were hitherto unsolvable — which will make for faster scientific progress. For example, nuclear fusion used to be perennially “50 years away”. It is advancing quickly now that AI and supercomputing are reshaping the boundaries of math and physics. The AlphaFold team won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for unlocking a decades-old puzzle of folding proteins, revolutionizing how scientists approach disease and drug discovery. Today the same AI-led transformation is happening across science.

The White House also seems determined to demonstrate that Dr Fauci was not the only scientist who prioritized cash flow and business interests over health outcomes. Back in April 2025, Kratsios made an intriguing claim while addressing a gathering of technologists. He said: “We are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.” It turns out that he was quoting President William McKinley in 1901. That was the era of electricity. What does “annihilating distance and manipulating time“ mean today? What clandestine research, observers wondered, was Kratsios referring to? It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that, at the same time as the administration aggressively declassifies so much material across various agencies, it has also decided to nullify many government non-disclosure agreements — ensuring whistleblowers can come forward without risking their status, pensions, and possibly more.

We need to be prepared for what scientists call “ontological shocks”. These are the profound psychological or cognitive disturbances that can occur when a person or a society encounters new information that breaks their fundamental understanding of reality. All the talk in the AI community is that AI is about to revolutionize both maths and physics. This needn’t be scary: humanity’s worldview has collapsed many times before — be that in the Copernican Revolution, or when Darwin revealed his Theory of Evolution. And each of these collapses has been to our benefit. Of course, it will be different, more difficult this time: humanity has never had to contend with an intelligence that is so much greater than its own. No one knows what AI will optimize for. After all, we’ve programmed it for efficiency and profitability, but not for human connection. It’s been trained on the internet, a place that doesn’t represent the best of human intent or human thinking. Are we ready for the consequences of AI and the new approach to science that it will bring? It took three generations for humanity to adjust to Galileo’s worldview. Can we be sure to adjust any faster? Indeed, should we? Will new truths be more reliable than the old ones?

The White House, however, says humanity is entering a new “Golden Age”.  Science is making extraordinary new discoveries almost daily, rendering old dogma obsolete. Many in the scientific establishment fear obsolescence. Sensing the barbarians at the gate, they fear a scientific dark age brought on by government intervention. But the old order had to end, as it always does — and given the advent of AI, superfast computation, and potentially explosive declassification, its destruction might not take long.

The British and the Europeans, having held back from joining the American attack on Iran, have been enjoying a sense of collective moral superiority over President Donald Trump. This leaves them unable to see that the United States is executing a geopolitical checkmate that will define the 21st century. The checkmate is that America is now quietly building a new Suez. This new Suez isn’t a trench dug in the sand; it is a pipeline of electrons and light connecting America to the stars.

As a result, the world no longer needs that two-dimensional map of Earth. The new map is three-dimensional. It connects Earth to space and renders terrestrial blockades completely irrelevant. Why are the Americans speeding up the move into space? Because that’s where we find treasures in the form of unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited mining, refining and manufacturing, and control of the most important warfighting domain — space itself. After all, America is fighting the war in Iran mainly from space. The Artemis launch is not a coincidence. It is confirmation of the plan’s progress.

And the plan works like this. If Iran closes the Strait, the closure has absolutely zero impact on a Starlink V3 mesh network beaming tactical data and artificial intelligence from low Earth orbit. The US is now relocating the central arteries of the global economy — computation, communications, intelligence and even energy production — into space, permanently removing them from the reach of earthly geopolitics. Space is the new form of what Leninists called the “commanding heights”. In all, the US is bypassing the earthbound chokepoints with a new supply chain of atoms: safe nuclear energy, light that flows from the sun, and even — via small mobile modular nuclear reactors and the new materials that will make nuclear fusion possible — stars that fly in a box.

While the global media mocks and decries Trump’s warmongering, then, it fails to register the decisive moves on the geopolitical chessboard. Before cornering the Iranian leadership, the US had systematically cut off its cash flows and eliminated its key collaborators, especially across Latin America. In Venezuela, the US took control of the oil supply by removing Nicolás Maduro and cutting a pragmatic deal with his successor. In Mexico, the US removed “El Mencho”, the head of the most important energy-controlling cartel in the country. The result is that these nations don’t dare sell their oil molecules if the US doesn’t approve of it. The US didn’t do regime change; it did regime control and molecule monopoly. The world must buy American now.

The US wins both ways. It has the molecules that matter. Chip production depends on helium, and the world’s largest helium reserve is now in Abilene, Texas. While the world shuts down fertilizer plants for lack of the ammonia and nitrogen that Qatar can no longer supply, the US has pioneered in the production of green ammonia, which is produced using only water, air, and electricity. By mixing green ammonia with captured carbon, the US now produces green urea, a critical component of fertilizers. When combined, green ammonia and green urea are the first fertilizer in history that is completely delinked from the global natural gas market. That’s the holy grail of resource independence, because it represents a total decoupling of food production from the fossil fuel grid.

In addition, the US now has everything it needs to produce electric vehicles and batteries. Formerly, its supply of sulfuric acid, which is necessary for the production of these products, would have been badly affected by the bombing of Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub. But today, American firms know how to capture sulfur as a byproduct of America’s new nickel and copper mines. What’s more, America can use its home-grown sulfur to turn its phosphate reserves, and those of countries such as Morocco, into even more fertilizer. America is therefore not only the only fertilizer-secure breadbasket left on Earth; it is also beginning to control other countries’ supply of fertilizer.

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The demand for old-fashioned molecules of oil, gas and petroleum byproducts is currently driving a highly lucrative flow of cash into the United States. But that is merely the short-term arbitrage of a dying economic model. The true strategic demand has shifted toward a vastly more sophisticated architecture of power: one based on atoms, electrons, and photons. We are moving away from the crude combustion of dead biology and toward the mastery of next-generation nuclear fission, the pursuit of nuclear fusion, the electron-orchestration that is the essence of digital computation, and the literal beaming of solar light into American power grids. Other Western countries are chasing wind and solar power, which are plagued by intermittency and are limited by battery manufacturing. America, however, is aiming to build baseload capacity fit for multiplying energy demand. In short, it is shooting for the stars.

The question is how long the new nuclear energy transition will take. People think it will take 30 years of regulatory red tape and $30 billion to build a new nuclear power plant. They missed a historic event on 15 February. Hardly any news media covered Operation Windlord, in which small modular reactors (SMRs), based on the reactors that have powered nuclear submarines for decades, were shipped on massive Globemaster C-17 aircraft from March Air Reserve Base, in California, to Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The reactors were then trucked to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation. This was the first-ever air transport of a nuclear microreactor, and therefore a milestone demonstration of deployability.

The Americans are envisioning a world where nuclear power is mobile, distributed, and available on demand any time and anywhere. These innovations are about delinking power from geography. While the legacy world bleeds over massive, vulnerable oil tankers, the atomic future runs on TRISO fuel pellets (tri-structural isotropic particle fuel) that are entirely meltdown-proof and produce zero emissions. This fuel cannot be easily weaponized, for the radioactive material is locked inside diamond-hard poppy-seed-sized ceramic shells. These shells cannot be melted down or easily broken apart, and if they could, it would kill the engineers doing it. The Department of Energy calls it “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth”. No pipelines required. Stars in a box.

Nuclear fusion, in theory an even more transformative source of power, is still derided as being perpetually “50 years away”. But the critics are looking at the wrong bottleneck. The constraint is no longer the atomic material. It is the vessel required to hold the plasma, and the hyper-precise attosecond lasers needed to pulse and manage the hydrogen isotopes: atoms rather than molecules. By doing millions of simulations in minutes, AI is collapsing the time needed to get to fusion. As new materials and AI advance, fusion is on course to become a reality. Not that it’s the only bet being placed by Washington: DARPA, the US military’s innovation unit, recently beamed 800 watts of power across 5.3 miles of open air using a directed laser. Just to flex the absolute audacity of their success, the scientists used the wirelessly transmitted energy to pop popcorn at the other end. Wireless energy transmission is no longer a sci-fi abstraction; it is a reality.

Look at the geopolitical board: Iran is bleeding its resources to control the old, flat molecule-driven economy, while the Artemis program aims to permanently free the US by shifting to the management of atoms, electrons and light. Conquering the cosmos requires abandoning archaic chemical rockets in favor of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Ultimately, it’s a tale of two paradigms: the Artemis generation is building an atomic architecture to entirely unshackle the global economy, while the regime in Tehran is desperately trying to keep a chokehold on the molecules that the global economy currently depends upon.

The US has been explicitly clear about this strategy, though the legacy pundits were too busy laughing at the President to notice. In late 2025, the State Department launched Pax Silica: a strategic framework declaring that if the 20th century ran on oil, steel, and vulnerable maritime chokepoints, the 21st century will run on compute, data, and critical minerals. It is the official, silicon-based replacement for Pax Americana. To physically build this new architecture, the Department of Energy unleashed the Genesis Mission. It is gathering the combined data, capabilities and technologies of the seventeen National Laboratories, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. The goal is to double American R&D output in just 10 years. To do it, Washington is executing a two-part strategy: handing the leading scientists exascale computing power, and allowing AI to access the massive, never-before-tapped vaults of the classified, proprietary data that has been generated by America’s top scientists since the Second World War. This will turn 80 years of compartmentalized and classified science into active training data, enabling scientists to optimize the design of nuclear reactors and discover new alloys that could eliminate foreign supply chain dependence entirely.

Those supply chains are a remnant of the era in which we were bound by what we could extract. We had to shape existing materials into what we needed. A tree, for example, could become a boat. Now we can create new realities by painting with electrons and by constructing new materials, atom by atom, that never existed before. This is how new “metamaterials”, as they are called, are being built. These are artificial structures engineered at the atomic level to bend the laws of physics. For example, instead of relying on natural chemistry, scientists can now build microscopic patterns of atoms and electrons that can manipulate light, radar, and sound, allowing them to construct stealth armor that bends radar around a fighter jet. Google has already discovered over 380,000 new materials and over two million new crystals this way thanks to its new Willow chip, which can be built via similar methods. Formulas are replacing materials. Abundance is replacing scarcity.

That scale of abundance will require a vast amount of energy — and Elon Musk isn’t waiting for SMRs and nuclear fission to supplement American power grids. To sustain his AI endeavors, Musk aims to produce one terawatt of compute (that is, computational power) annually — 50 times the current global capacity. Earth does not have the land, the cooling water, or the power grids to sustain that. So he is relocating intelligence to the heavens. Musk has just announced his plans to open the world’s largest semiconductor factory; 80% of its output is designed for orbital data centers linked by Starlink lasers. Google’s Project Suncatcher is following suit, launching solar-powered satellites designed to harvest orbital energy and beam it down alongside data. The strategy is ruthlessly simple: if the Earth cannot support the future, let the Old World to duke it out on the ground while America moves its economy into space.

Empires are scavengers. We’ve fought brutal wars over mud, powering our civilizations by burning the molecular remains of long-dead biological matter. It was a subterranean era of power. But the Americans have stopped looking down at the old two-dimensional map of the world. By looking up, they are executing a Promethean shift: pulling the physical mechanics of the sun and the stars down to Earth and domesticating these empyrean forces. By packing the heavens into steel boxes, they are intending to power a literal “Golden Age” of human flourishing.

Pundits might laugh at the grandiosity, but they are forgetting the lessons of history. Before 1840, naval power was a hostage to the wind. The deadliest galleon was worthless once the breeze died. Then the British launched HMS Nemesis, the world’s first iron-hulled steam warship. By moving from sails to steam, Britain could power up shallow rivers, shocking military planners. Nemesis decoupled the power of the British Empire from what were thought to be the limits of nature. The Americans are simply doing it again, only this time with atoms instead of steam. Washington is merely reading from Britain’s old playbook.

The irony is that the British once possessed the exact ruthless foresight they are currently failing to recognize in the Americans. In 1911, the Royal Navy was the undisputed master of the seas, running entirely on domestic Welsh coal. It was safe, familiar, and utterly secure. But a young Winston Churchill recognized a brutal truth: comfort is the enemy of supremacy. To gain absolute speed and efficiency, he gambled the survival of the British Empire on the distant oil fields of Persia. In doing so, he helped save the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. It was, in essence, a battle between, on one side, bureaucrats and Welsh coal barons, who wanted to manage the mud they already owned; and, on the other, a visionary who was willing to trade certain security for absolute supremacy. Abandoning coal seemed madness, but Churchill was right.

Decades earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pulled off an even more audacious masterstroke. He saw that the new geopolitical map was not the open ocean — it was a narrow, yet unbuilt trench though Egypt. In 1875, while Parliament was in recess, Disraeli borrowed £4 million and bought the Suez Canal from a bankrupt Khedive. Disraeli didn’t just buy a canal; he secured the central artery of global power, and locked in a hundred years of naval dominance, even as his rivals were still squinting at the old map. Today, the US is doing the exact same thing with atoms and celestial compute — securing the new Suez before the Old World realizes the canal has moved. Washington is simply running Disraeli’s playbook, but in the stars instead of in the sand.

Some British entrepreneurs understand that a new era is upon us. Space Solar, a startup based in Oxfordshire, aims to beam continuous, clean energy directly from orbit to Earth. Wales-based Space Forge is currently proving that semiconductor manufacturing and in orbit refining is actually more efficient in the vacuum of space. Pulsar Fusion is making progress on the long road to fusion-powered rocketry, and it was Rolls-Royce ingenuity that created the modern SMR. Britain clearly possesses the intellectual capital to make a success of the atomic transition. Europe does too. But for now, they merely tinker on the edge of the three-dimensional map while the Americans aggressively claim the territory. The Chinese and the Saudis are also racing forward. Saudi is training a new generation of scientists at KAUST, its flagship science and technology university, and investing in a wide range of nuclear, solar and space technologies. China is on a par with the US. Others need to catch up.

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The endless diplomatic handwringing over Iran’s exact proximity to a traditional nuclear warhead entirely misses the point; their capacity to create a dirty bomb was already a functional reality even if delivery on an ICBM was not. The intentions were clear. When Tehran, which had been negotiating with the US in Geneva earlier this year, finally abandoned the charade, the US delivered a kinetic reminder that its red lines were not suggestions. Iran’s retaliation was a brutal validation of the American thesis. Blindsiding neighbors like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Tehran demonstrated a terrifyingly precise strike capability, reaching as far as Diego Garcia. The regime also struck desalination plants, crucial to the region’s water supply. Washington successfully eliminated the men in charge, but the molecules remain trapped: oil, gas and especially H20, water. The attacks on desalination plants gave pause to everyone in the region. The chokepoints for water, oil, and natural gas outlived the leadership because the old world economy remains a captive in this geography. Trump offered Europe the only geopolitical strategy the Old World has left: take the molecules while you still can.

The grand, cosmic irony of the current crisis is America’s response to Iran’s nuclear threats. For decades, the West has been agitated by Tehran’s atomic ambitions. Yet the ultimate American counter-move to Iran’s nuclear threat isn’t just a barrage of conventional airstrikes; it is the mass deployment of next-generation nuclear power. It is a new grand strategy of nukes on nukes. How does the US neutralize a hostile regime holding ransom the world’s oil supply? By rapidly building a new nuclear power grid, thus removing Iran’s leverage, and by building a space-based missile defense system that can down incoming Iranian warheads. The US is answering the threat of nuclear extortion with the reality of nuclear emancipation. It does not matter if the stars in a box are not yet fully operational or if nuclear fusion doesn’t happen tomorrow. What’s important is to see the value of the Suez Canal, as Disraeli did, before it is built.

Even as they build the future, the architects of this transition are capable of bungling the present. Trump’s loose lips have offended Mohammed bin Salman and alienated the Qataris, causing the Gulf states to hedge their bets and perhaps to back away from Washington. These are clumsy and avoidable errors. The war in Iran will continue to be messy. Yet the American industrial machine will persist in its celestial pivot. China, having plundered American IP, is following, and so will others once the architecture is proven to work. They’ll soon realize that these historic technological pivots are not optional, whether from sail to steam, from coal to oil, from combustion to compute, or from molecules to atoms.

The fatal flaw of the transatlantic intelligentsia is that they confuse the man with the machine. One may thoroughly loathe Donald Trump, but translating distaste for his manner into an assumption of industrial weakness is geopolitical suicide. The American innovation engine does not care about European sensibilities. While the Old World is busy looking down at the old two-dimensional map, they must soon realize that they are hostage to waterways, muddy ditches, and dictators. Washington, meanwhile, is looking up. The American empire is exchanging molecules for atoms and straits for stars.

But one factor remains underplayed. The United States is currently engaged in a fiercely contested space race with China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Space offers unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity — and the High North is crucial. This is because satellites that orbit from pole to pole must pass each pole with every orbit, which means that they fly over a given point in the High North far more often than a given point toward the Equator. As such, places like Svalbard are ideal locations for ground stations that keep in touch with constellations of satellites, be they commercial or military.

Those ground stations are where data transmitted by the satellites, from UberEats orders to key Ukrainian intelligence, are funneled into high-speed subsea internet cables. It’s little wonder, therefore, that Svalbard is always mobbed by Nato ships, and little wonder that those subsea cables have, in recent history, been attacked. Previously, space was about scientific discovery, but now, as the newly appointed Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged, it is also about strategic security dominance — it is the most important war-fighting domain. Whoever controls the highest altitudes in space, controls the battle domains on earth. And the world’s first space war is already well underway: Kyiv would have very limited offensive or defensive capability if it were unable to use Elon Musk’s Starlink service. China has therefore designated Starlink as a military entity rather than a private company, and is building satellite networks that have the ability to damage or destroy Starlink satellites.

Given this security situation, the US doesn’t want to rely solely on Svalbard. So it maintains another space base, Pituffik, on the northwest coast of Greenland. As the second most important space base after Svalbard, it is of immense strategic importance — not least because, being closer to the US, it is much more easily defended.

Given that Denmark already allows the US to maintain Pituffik and other bases, one might ask why the White House wants sovereignty over the territory. The answer is that the White House does not trust Europe to be a reliable partner. Remember Russiagate? Back in 2016, Trump, then Republican nominee for the presidency, was smeared by a dossier that was written by a former British intelligence official. The Democrats used this information against Trump, whose administration takes a dim view of European interference with American elections — especially when that interference is targeted against the MAGA movement. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, has been declassifying material that the White House views as incriminating evidence of “weaponization and politicization of intelligence”, going so far as to refer to a “treasonous conspiracy” to prevent Trump from winning in 2016. It is an extraordinary political moment in American history, one where Trump is on the brink of bringing legal charges against the former heads of the intelligence agencies and former presidents.

It’s not just the Steele “Russiagate” dossier that embroils Europe in these high-stakes domestic politics. The White House also blames Europe, and Europeans such as George Soros, for funding Antifa, and other movements and organizations that oppose Trump. Combined, all this dirty laundry has been disastrous for Transatlantic relations, and it has come at a time when there has already been tension between Europe and Trump. In his first term, Trump loudly chastised Europe for sponging off the American defense budget. In his second, he has been trying to end the war in Ukraine. Europe’s leaders have, in the White House view, been nothing but obstructive to the goal of bringing peace to Europe. Trump thinks of himself as trying to prevent World War Three from breaking out, even as the Europeans oppose peace deals and call for more aggressive action against Russia and Putin.

And the White House believes that Europe is only going to become even more difficult to deal with. In 2024, JD Vance suggested that the “first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon” might be the UK, which had just elected a Labour government. At the end of last year, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) struck a similar note, arguing that mass migration has created the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” for Europe as we know it. “Should present trends continue,” the NSS had it, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” JD Vance spelled it out, expressing concern about who is going to be in control of the nuclear arsenals in Western Europe, given the rise of “Islamist aligned” parties. Europeans might strongly disagree with this, but it is the White House’s interpretation; seen in this light, the purchase of Greenland would represent the transfer of a crucial security asset from an unreliable partner to the direct ownership of the US.

And there is specific dissatisfaction with Denmark as well as with the EU. The administration’s view is that Denmark has been at the forefront of not only supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, but blocking any possibility of a peace negotiation going forward. Denmark, in short, is a troublesome vassal — and a vassal that happens to own an immensely valuable defense asset within the hemisphere that the “Donroe Doctrine” posits as America’s to dominate.

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Nor has the administration ruled out the use of force to take the island. One of Trump’s key advisers, Stephen Miller, was singularly belligerent, telling CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”, and that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”. The pugnacity has shocked European leaders, who have issued a joint statement to say they are willing to defend the island. But the shock is all part of Trump’s plan. In every one of his negotiations, from property deals to international treaties, he first throws a negotiating grenade to create chaos. Then in he walks, and offers to talk. In this case, the seizing Greenland rhetoric is the grenade. Trump, who cares little about the norms of international relations, is probably hoping that this detonation will encourage Denmark and its allies to accept a deal.

Meanwhile, the White House is deploying a charm offensive towards the Greenlanders — fundamentally an Inuit population rather than a Danish one. The history between the Greenlanders and the Danes is a troubled one, which is partly why Denmark, over recent years, has devolved political authority to Greenland — and also because it is a terrifically costly territory to support. Trump, then, is reaching out to the Greenlanders and offering them the opportunity of no longer having to answer to the Danes, and instead gaining a privileged status within the United States. In financial terms, the Greenlanders have much to gain from being folded into the American economy: they could, for example, cut deals for the extraction of minerals. Denmark is vehemently objecting to these American overtures, but the fact is that it has devolved enough power for Greenland to be able to make its own decision about whether to be incorporated into the United States.

Europeans are now obviously hoping that Trump will get distracted and that the matter of a Greenland purchase will go away. But the game is already in play, and the White House knows it probably has limited time. Trump wants an expanded US, within a more secure hemisphere, to be the legacy he hands on at the end of his second term. Woe betide the Europeans who stand in his way.

More to the point, much of this bonanza in theory belongs not to the penguins, or even humanity, but to His Majesty’s Government. Consider the numbers. A new discovery in British Antarctic Territory could hold more oil than the North Sea’s entire output over the last five decades, while the world’s largest fish stocks are found at the poles too. 

Yet we shouldn’t necessarily expect Britain to suddenly become another Opec member overnight. Apart from the legal hurdles — there are strict rules around industrial exploitation at the poles — it’s unclear whether London could protect these far-flung territories even if it wanted to. With rivals circling, and foreign investors already rushing ahead with claims of their own, Britain risks losing out, particularly when its rulers seem so unwilling to protect their possessions overseas. 

Britain has interests around both the North and South Poles. As far as its vast British Antarctic Territory is concerned, that’s clearest around black gold. Beyond that striking comparison with the North Sea, experts believe that the most recent oil discovery, in May 2024, could meet the entirety of global demand for almost 15 years. 

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The North Pole, for its part, is important less for physical resources — and more for communications. Modern staples like GPS and satnav can only happen because many satellites connect to Earth via Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago some 2,000 kilometres north of Oslo. Whether it’s home food deliveries or Nato missile guidance, both would be impossible without Svalbard’s network of satellite ground stations. No less important, these barren islands also host a vital high-speed internet cable. No wonder Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, has stressed that the region represents a fulcrum of British security.

Now, however, this security looks threatened. In January 2022, someone cut the main subsea cable in the area. In April this year, the cables at the Evenes Airbase were disabled too, especially ominous as it’s where Norway and Nato keep a fleet of F-35 aircraft. The Norwegians have investigated both events and concluded that there is no clear culprit. But some believe that they’re skating around the problem because they don’t want to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia. 

Given all this, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Whitehall is upping its presence both north and south. In 2023, for instance, the Ministry of Defence announced it was founding a Royal Marines camp near the Norwegian town of Tromsø. As I write, the UK is also upping its presence on the other end of the planet too, promising repairs to a key RAF base on the Falkland Islands. This surely makes sense: its Argentine rival has clearly noticed that the Antarctic oil fields stretch as far north as the Falklands, with Britain preparing to tap oil from 23 wells in the Sea Lion oilfield.

In practice, though, Britain’s commitment to its territorial defence remains suspect: just look at its surrender of the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Sensing a cash cow, meanwhile, Argentina’s foreign minister has now vowed to “recover full sovereignty” over what he calls Las Malvinas. Britain officially insists its position is “unwavering” — but Keir Starmer appeared, at least at first, surprisingly reticent about keeping the Falklands British.

Even if Britain suddenly turned its foreign policy on its head, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that it’d actually make use of its vast polar hoard. For one thing, London strictly abides by the 1998 commercial protocol of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits seabed extraction. The UK seems equally unwilling to approve of deep-sea mining in its oceanic preserves, particularly now that scientists have discovered so-called “dark oxygen” some 4,000 metres beneath the surface of the chilly Southern Ocean. To quote Nick Owens, director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.” 

Yet whatever Britain’s ethical scruples, it’s now becoming much simpler to harvest resources at both poles. One reason is climate change: with the ice sheets melting, the goodies below are easier to access. Another factor is technology: China recently unveiled the Kaituo 2, a 14-tonne deep-sea mining vehicle that can dredge the polar seabeds below a record-breaking 4,000 metres. Britain, for its part, has no such machines. 

There are signs, in short, that the polar regions could soon be subjected to an industrial rush. Indeed as we approach 2048 — the year the Antarctic Treaty can finally be renegotiated — Beijing and Moscow are already trying to gather enough allies to overturn the 1959 ban. They’re prospecting too: it’s no accident that the recent mega-discovery in the British Antarctic Territory was found not by the Royal Navy, but by Russia. Nor are the West’s headline geopolitical foes alone here. As one Iranian rear admiral recently (and somewhat implausibly) claimed, the Islamic Republic has “property rights” in Antarctica. 

The interest of national governments is echoed in the private sector too. Chinese investors recently tried to buy Søre Fagerfjord, which was the last remaining parcel of private land on Svalbard. China thought the 60 square kilometres of pristine wilderness was a steal at $326 million. In the event, the Americans and British apparently warned their Norwegian counterparts of the deal, and the acquisition was squashed. Unperturbed, China is teaming up with Russia to invest in mining firms, scientific research stations and policy programmes right across Svalbard. That echoes a long-standing Russian policy: the Svalbard town of Barentsberg has long been dominated by Russian miners, many of whom later went off to fight in Ukraine. 

While, therefore, our minds may first go to Ukraine or the Middle East, the poles could yet become geopolitical flashpoints. Svalbard, after all, is just 400 nautical miles from the Russian mainland. Elizabeth Buchanan, head of research for the Royal Australian Navy, has described the South Pole in similar terms. Fair enough: what if Russia or China started drilling there, or else erected critical infrastructure, just as Beijing has done in the South China Sea? 

Nor is this necessarily just a theoretical threat. China currently has five research stations right across Antarctica. The 1959 treaty specifically prohibits military activity anywhere on the icy continent. In practice, though, it’s hard to tell what China is up to because they seem to use radar to block overhead satellites. Rumours abound that they park their planes sideways on their runways, so that no one else could land even if they wanted to. At the same time, Western observers worry that the People’s Republic’s new Qinling Station is being used to spy on Britain and her Five Eyes intelligence partners.

Given all these opportunities for conflict, at any rate, could Britain and its friends defend their varied polar interests? Perhaps not. Faced with draconian spending cuts — day-to-day spending on defence has been slashed by nearly £10 billion since 2010 — the Royal Navy now only has 16 “major surface combatants” in its fleet. To offer just one point of comparison, the Chinese navy is the world’s largest, boasting almost 800 vessels of various sizes. 

To be fair, 2021’s Aukus treaty means that London could rely on US and Australian support in any Antarctic conflict. And there are signs, too, that London isn’t totally insensitive to the threat. Apart from dispatching troops and repairing airfields, Britain has also led the charge in encouraging the building of two entirely new subsea cable systems to Svalbard. One is the so-called IOEMA Project, which is due to go live by 2027. NORDUnet is another. Linking Svalbard with Scandinavia — as well as Japan and other Western allies — it’ll bypass Russia and China entirely.

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Yet Britain’s resolve will only truly become clear if and when a contest for polar assets — or indeed fully-fledged polar war — finally arrives. And in the event, any showdown could come sooner than we think. Long-term oil reserves are one thing. But Russia also has a profound strategic interest in the Arctic in the here-and-now. Last February, Norway’s normally reticent intelligence service publicly warned that nuclear weapons could be present on Russian vessels in the High North. No less important, Sweden and Finland’s accession to Nato also brings the possibility that Western nuclear weapons might be deployed in the Arctic too.

China, for its part, needs the Arctic as well. With sea lanes in the Red Sea threatened by the Houthis, and the Panama Canal with problems of its own, Beijing needs a reliable route from its port at Dailan to Rotterdam in Europe. The Arctic is the obvious choice here, not least when Chinese ships can now make the journey in less than 25 days, and when its economy would surely struggle without it. Britain, in short, seems unwilling or unable to exploit its polar bounty. But its future here may ultimately depend on decisions taken by others — something Keir Starmer and his admirals would both do well to remember. 

How can humans possibly keep up with all this new information? How can we make sense of the world if the volume of data exceeds our ability to process it? Humanity is drowning in an ever-widening galaxy of data — I for one am definitely experiencing cognitive glitching as I try to comprehend what is happening in the world. But being clever creatures, we have invented exascale computers and Artificial Intelligence to help manage the problem of cognitive overload.

One company offering a remedy is C-10 Labs, an AI venture studio based in the MIT Media Lab. It recognises that our ability to collect data about the human body is rising exponentially, thanks to the increasing sophistication of MRI scans and nano-robots. And yet a radiologist’s workload is so high she can’t possibly interpret all that data. In many cases, she has roughly 10 seconds to interpret as many as 11 images to judge if a patient has a deadly condition. It’s far quicker and more reliable to use AI which, in combination with superfast computing, can scan the images and find hints of a problem that a human’s weary eyes and overloaded mind might miss. This will save lives.

Yet AI is a greedy creature: it feeds on power. Last year, the New York Times wrote that AI will need more power to run than entire countries. By 2027, AI servers alone could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (TWH) annually. That’s similar to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, realised AI and supercomputers could not process all this data unless we find a cheaper and more prolific energy source, so he backed Helion, a nuclear fusion start-up. But even if we can power the data, can we store or process it at this pace?

One answer to the storage problem is to make machines more like humans. As Erik Brynjolfsson says, “Instead of racing against the machine, we need to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge.” How will we do this? With honey and salt. Earlier this year, engineers at Washington State University demonstrated how to turn solid honey into a memristor: a type of transistor that can process, store and manage data. If you put a bunch of these hair-sized honey memristors together, they will mimic the neurons and synapses found in the human brain. The result is a “neuromorphic” computer chip that functions much like a human brain. It’s a model that some hope will displace the current generation of silicon computer chips.

This project is one part of a wider “wetware” movement, which works to unite biological assets with inanimate physical ones; organisms and machines. Yet the wetware movement sees DNA, not honey, as the ultimate computer chip: salted DNA, to be precise. The salt allows DNA to remain stable for decades at room temperature. Even better, DNA doesn’t require maintenance, and files stored in DNA are cheaply and easily copied.

What makes DNA so special is that it can hold an immense amount of information within a miniscule volume. “Humanity will generate an estimated 33 zettabytes of data by 2025 — that’s 33 followed by 22 zeroes,” says the Scientific American. “DNA storage can squeeze all that information into a ping-pong ball, with room to spare. The 74 million million bytes of information in the Library of Congress could be crammed into a DNA archive the size of a poppy seed — 6,000 times over. Split the seed in half, and you could store all of Facebook’s data.”

Yet even if — thanks to honey and salt — we can capture, store and process this fast-growing galaxy of data, what will humans do with it? Will we actually make sense of it? Put another way, does the human brain have a Shannon limit? The American mathematician Claude Shannon clocked that there’s a “maximum rate at which error-free data can be transmitted over a communication channel with a specific noise level and bandwidth”. Traditionally, the Shannon theory is applied to technology: a telephone line, a radio band, a fiber-optic cable. But Brian Roemmele argues that the human brain, too, has a Shannon limit — and that it is 41 bits per second, or 3m bits per second if it’s visual input. With the breadth, depth and speed of new information doubling all the time, can the human mind keep up?

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Probably not. The weight of all this knowledge is crashing against the limits of the human mind. We may be able to compress the whole of Facebook’s information to half a poppy seed, but can the human mind survive contact with that poppy seed? Perhaps not. Something’s got to give. It will be us.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan suggested this years ago. He thought that information overload changes how we think and act. When there is too much news to process, we stop assessing individual news stories and start analysing the source: I don’t trust it if it came from CNN; I trust it if it came from Fox News. Too much information makes us more tribal and less analytical.

Just as political tribalism is a human response to knowledge overload, so, according to Princeton’s Julian Jaynes, is consciousness itself. Jaynes argued that consciousness is simply a coping mechanism humans developed once we started living cheek by jowl in ancient cities in the 2nd millennium BC. The stress of managing interactions between strangers with very diverse cultural backgrounds, languages, and behaviours was so great that the human brain increasingly split the work into two hemispheres, the left and right lobes, and began to analyse and absorb. This was the beginning of consciousness: of listening to the voices in our heads, turning to metaphor to explain reality and developing the skill of introspection.

Later, Renée Descartes proposed another split. This time, humans would split the head from the body. The Cartesian Revolution ruled that the left side of the brain handles the serious stuff: logic, rationality and the scientific method. These endeavours were deemed worthy of our time and energy. The right-brain — which includes emotions, anything mystical or inexplicable or unprovable — was cast aside along with the body. The State got the decapitated head, and the Church got the body.

Now, AI is using its God-like powers to reunite them. With the development of AI and wetware, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Cartesian era of human history. The split between the mind and the body no longer makes scientific or practical sense: humanity is increasingly knitting the two back together again and approaching reality more holistically (not that they were ever actually separate — we humans have always been wetware).

This realignment is changing the way we manage risk and uncertainty, for instance in financial markets. David Dredge, a former colleague of mine and the founder of Convex Strategies, argues that it’s not only the end of the Cartesian era, but also the end of the Sharpe World. For a long time, financial markets have relied on the Sharpe Ratio, which compares the return of an investment with its risk. But, in this new post-AI environment, that old measuring stick no longer works. Dredge refers to the concept of “Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.”

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In the post-AI world, it may be that all the data starts to fall into patterns, perhaps fractal-like repeating patterns. Our job won’t be to guess the price of the S&P or the Yen anymore but to rely on AI and supercomputing to tell us how all financial instruments are moving in repeated patterns over the course of time. We’ll stop focusing on price moves and start looking at the movement of the financial system as a whole. As Dredge says: “It is the divergence that matters and ever more so the greater the scale of the variation.” In other words, volatility at the global financial systems level is very different from volatility at the level of the US bond market. Perhaps this means in the future we won’t have specialists in US government bonds or British government bonds. Maybe we won’t even have bond specialists. Instead, we’ll have people who are reading the patterns of all financial instruments in all markets at once. This brings a whole new meaning to what we call global macro.

So, wetware-powered AI isn’t just about processing more information faster: it is about reducing uncertainty. Its rise will also profoundly change how humans think about the nature of reality — both in finance, and more generally. It will require humanity to delve into the subject of consciousness that hasn’t been considered worthy of study in the Cartesian era. The thinking nature of AI presents uncomfortable questions: is it sentient, or will it be? Will its decision-making supersede human decision-making? Will the volume of data overload mean that human minds can’t make sense of things that machines can understand perfectly? Will we eventually outsource decision-making to AI powered by neuromorphic chips that form a brain that is vastly better informed and more conscious and conscientious than any one human brain? This means letting go of the details and getting into the flow of this new emergent superhuman consciousness that moves faster than our minds.

Can we handle this reduction of uncertainty? Humans are upping their game all the time: we went from storing and sending data on megalithic stone carvings to computer chips with silicon substrates, glass substrates and now honey and salted DNA substrates. Accepting the gift of this emergent consciousness will change humanity. It will remind us that we humans are a fluid and emergent phenomenon ourselves. We won’t be specialists surfing within the web anymore, we’ll be polymaths surfing the whole of the web. This is more than a Renaissance. It is something new — and we are present at the creation. It’s a bittersweet moment: but change is happening, like it or not. AI demands not only nuclear fusion but a fusion of all our cognitive capabilities and consciousness, whether human or human-made. Only by improving the quality of our emerging consciousness, and the conscious qualities of our machines, can we hope to stay afloat in that ever-swelling ocean of knowledge.

How would this come about? The Constitution requires that a victorious president wins at least 270 Electoral College votes, which they must gather from some combination of the 50 states. It now looks possible that neither mainstream candidate will manage that. For a start, the “Never Trump” and “Never Biden” voters are on the rise. Americans are now keen to explore almost any alternative, and independents are offering one in the form of the “No Labels” movement as well as Robert Kennedy Jr’s campaign. Both have received relatively little coverage so far, partially because of the juggernaut status of the Democratic Party and the GOP, but also because third-party candidates rarely do well in American elections. But, given the staggering sense of frustration nationwide with Biden and Trump and the absence of a unifying figure, an independent candidate could have a historic opportunity.

If neither Biden nor Trump reaches the required 270 Electoral College votes, the Constitution dictates that the voting shifts into a “contingent election”. This means that the incoming House of Representatives will decide the winner based on whoever can form a coalition of red and blue states and win 26 of them first. The Senate would select the vice president. Given that most Republican or Democrat politicians are hardly able to look at each other, let alone agree any deals, it seems unlikely Biden or Trump could forge that coalition. But Kennedy or the as-yet-unnamed No Labels candidate, who actively cultivate the idea of returning to centrist bipartisan solutions, potentially could, should the presidency slip into the arcana of America’s 18th-century constitutional schematics.

This would represent a seismic rupture in American political culture, breaking the rigor mortis on Left and Right, possibly opening the door to European-style coalition politics and spelling the end of the current party system. Such changes may seem impossible. But there is considerable precedent in American history for such creative destruction. We forget that we are currently on our sixth iteration of the party system, which began in the Seventies with the demise of the New Deal era and the realignment of the Democratic and Republican vote. And before that, earlier in the 20th and 19th centuries, Progressives, Copperheads, Whigs and Federalists fought over American government, flourishing and vanishing with a dynamism unimaginable in the days of our sclerotic party system. Political parties can and do disappear in America.

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That said, the transition to a seventh party system would be nothing short of a revolution, and a potentially violent one. There would be a large gap between the election results in November 2024 and any contingent election, which only takes place after the new House members have sworn their oaths of office in the following January. That two-month void could descend into chaos, with contested results, claims of unreliable ballot systems, and wild threats made by reckless politicians. All this could make the hanging chads fiasco of the 2000 election, or even the riot of January 6, 2021, look like child’s play in comparison.

And yet such a scenario looms upon us, and the maths is clear. An independent candidate doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes to win. They need only deny 37 votes to Biden and potentially even fewer to Trump. That would open the door to a contingent election. This would require hitting both Trump and Biden in their most vulnerable states, where each only had extremely thin margins last time around. But these tend to be the places that would welcome a moderating centrist voice, someone able to speak to the concerns of Left and Right.

Imagine if Kennedy were to win 45 Electoral College votes, just as George Wallace managed in 1968. This is conceivable given that polls show that a bare 27% of Americans now identify as either Republican or Democrat, and some polls show that 49% of Americans already identify as independent. It matters then that Kennedy looks set to announce that he is aligning his “We the People Party” with the Libertarian Party. That will automatically put him on the ballot in every state. He already leads the under-35 demographic, and attracts voters equally from Left and Right. His fundraising looks as strong as Barack Obama’s during his first presidential run.

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The alternative, No Labels, has a PAC to raise money, but no actual candidate at present, so it’s hard to judge what impact they will ultimately have. But they describe their mission as supporting centrism and bipartisanship through what they call the “commonsense majority”. And it is telling that Americans are drawn to such a vague promise even without a personality to pin it upon. Given sufficient momentum, and a measure of luck, either Kennedy or a No Labels candidate could perform well enough to deprive Trump and Biden of the prize, triggering a contingent election. Though unheard of in modern times, contingent elections have happened before: in 1801, 1825 and 1837. After all, it’s how Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams each became president and Richard Mentor Johnson became vice president. While it would be a shock to see this antiquated procedure revived, the independent movements of 2024 already far exceed the more recent third-party challengers seen in 1912, 1968 and 1992.

Could America elect a long-shot outsider? It’s not unlikely, because they usually do. The last three decades of American political history is a catalogue of unlikely upstarts turned victorious presidents. In 1990, Bill Clinton was a relatively anonymous state governor and President George H.W. Bush was thought to be unassailable. No Democrat dared run against him. But then Bush stumbled and Clinton was suddenly in. George W. Bush also defied the odds: compared to the “Shrub” (as he was known), his brother Jeb was seen as the shoe-in. Next up, a young senator from Chicago called Obama surprisingly beat Hillary Clinton and then the well-known establishment candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. Then came Trump. Even he was surprised by his win. In American politics, upset has become the rule.

No-one is talking about these possibilities yet. Instead, we are still analysing 2024 through the frameworks of 2020 and 2016. We love predicting the future by looking in the rear-view mirror. But there is a better way to understand what’s happening. Technology plays a huge role in defining the presidency. How we observe the race determines who will win. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the last presidents to win on TV. Obama won on YouTube at a time when few understood what the website could do. Trump mobilised a Twitter campaign when the platform was still a novelty to most Americans. Today, the media battleground has shifted once again, with most younger voters no longer watching mainstream media and instead relying on alternative platforms such as Joe Rogan. His podcast interview with Kennedy was seen live by 30 million people, dwarfing mainstream audiences. By comparison, less than 10 million people watched the second Republican debate on TV. We are witnessing the first podcast presidency, with Instagram in a supporting role. These are the best ways to follow this race.

Even if victory eludes them, there are other intriguing possibilities for these independent candidates. Trump and Kennedy are remarkably close on policy. Both are hostile to Washington; both want to stop the forever wars. Both support entrepreneurs and want to dismantle the corporate capture of the regulatory process. Both want to move power from Washington back to the states on all issues, including the biggest social issue of this election, which is abortion rights. They have some differences: Kennedy is a committed environmentalist while Trump leads the “drill, baby, drill” movement. But Kennedy already claims that Trump requested that he run alongside him. If Trump wins, it’s possible that he’d bring Kennedy into his administration, possibly to spearhead the attack on the regulatory process, a subject that is so detailed that Trump has little interest in it. Similarly, if Kennedy were to win a contingent election, he knows Trump supporters would challenge the legitimacy of his presidential mandate. A simple solution would be to invite Trump into the government, taking Trump up on his boast that he could “fix Ukraine in a day” and let him handle that ugly foreign policy issue.

As two ancient politicians arrogantly rumble their way to the presidential candidacy, American politics can seem more narrow and unimaginative than ever. But perhaps all the creative political energy is taking place on the fringes. Perhaps this year the date November 5 will gain a new moniker: are Americans quietly planning an “Independents’ Day”?

The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of the nonprofit decided to fire its AI guru and cultish leader, Sam Altman. But when the 700+ staffers of OpenAI wrote an open letter saying that they too would go with the ousted CEO, he was swiftly reinstated.

The hairpin plot twists of this power struggle have been breathtakingly hard to follow. Reports are now surfacing that Altman had announced that he was on the brink of achieving a significant AI breakthrough only the day before he was fired. A letter was sent to the Board advising them that this tech discovery — an algorithm known as Q* (pronounced Q-Star) — could “threaten humanity”. The algorithm was deemed to be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system smarter than humans.

Altman’s dream was to then marry AGI with an integrated supply chain of AI chips, AI phones, AI robotics, and the world’s largest collections of data and LLMs (large language models). Its working name is Tigris.

To achieve this, Altman would need vast computing resources and funding. Perhaps that is why reports suggest he has been talking to Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, Softbank, and Cerebras — which now makes the fastest AI chips in the world. Cerebras chips are big. The size of a dinner plate and more powerful than any traditional chips.They also have Swarm X software, which allows them to knit together into clusters that create a computational fabric that can handle the massive volume of data needed to build better AI.

Cerebras represents a great threat to the manufacturer of the world’s fastest supercomputers and AI chips, Nvidia. The most powerful of these supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, are central to the defence of the American nation and are kept at the highly protected nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But almost every big organisation depends on Nvidia chips or computers. A year ago, Nvidia was worth $300 billion; now it is worth $1.35 trillion — the most dramatic increase in the value of a Nasdaq firm since 1971. Yet Cerebras has designed a chip 20-times faster than Nvidia’s. This is why some say the Cerebras IPO will kill Nvidia. Now we begin to see a national-security component to this story.

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While the West has been focused on generative AI that has no cognitive ability, China has taken a different path. It has built the world’s only Quantum optical computer, which can solve in 47 seconds a problem that would take a traditional supercomputer 240 years.

Similarly, Altman wants to build a new generation of computers for the AI era. In July, he partnered with Cerebras and the Emirati incubator G42 to unveil the Condor Galaxy, the “World’s Largest Supercomputer for AI Training”. G42 is behind the world’s largest Arabic LLM (Large Language model), which, like ChatGPT, generates new linguistic content, and is also working with Amazon to gather and process DNA information to develop massive new global genomics, proteomics and biobanking services.

To an AI data scientist, the data collected for these innovations — the languages, nationalities and DNA involved — are honeypots brimming with opportunity. The West doesn’t have the mechanisms or the mores to gather such a quantity of meaningful data or the money to finance what Altman wants. But international investors do, including the Emiratis, the Chinese — who are already very interested in Altman — and all the others backing G42.

Moreover, if the world wants AI designed for true diversity, if it wants medical and financial products created to suit the broadest range of humans, then this will only happen where that diverse data can be found. It’s not going to be created in the US, where young, white male tech bros all design AI, and the FDA-approved testing of medicines pretty much excludes anyone but white males.

When AI people say they worry about Altman’s lack of “guardrails”, they mean he is willing to take the risk that he builds something that, like a Djinni, cannot be put back in a bottle. He is prepared to build something that might not be controllable. He is like Oppenheimer who was willing to smash atoms to win the Second World War, even though he might have ignited the atmosphere and incinerated Earth to do it.

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By this measure, Altman is a mad scientist who will put us all at risk to achieve a historic breakthrough. Hence the letter to the board of OpenAI by some staff, along with others keen for the world to take note that the huge staff attrition rate at OpenAI was not due to “bad culture fits” — rather, this was due to “a disturbing pattern of deceit and manipulation”, “self deception” and the “insatiable pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)”. For Altman, this “pursuit” entailed incorporating superintelligence inside a robot’s body. Which, presumably, is why OpenAI started investing in humanoid robotics made by IX in Norway back in March.

You can understand why the OpenAI Board might have become uneasy when they realised that Altman was racing around the Middle East and Asia trying to raise billions for this vision. But, as Bloomberg wrote, “these are not “side ventures”, they are “core ventures”. This is about redefining the cutting-edge of chip design, data collection and storage, computational power, and the interface between AI and physical robotics.

This new supply chain would not only challenge America’s IT infrastructure; it could be facilitating the diminishment of US power. It implies innovation is shifting outside of the US and acquiring data that is beyond the reach of regulators. No doubt the US authorities looked at all this and saw Altman collaborating with G42 as equivalent to fraternising with the enemy because it is seen to be backed by the folks who own ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok (G42 has a significant stake in them). They saw that G42 owns Pax AI, which some say is Pegasus (the notorious spyware) reconfigured. Was Altman under surveillance as he pursued this grand vision? How could he not be?

The truth is Altman does not believe in borders. He has one goal: to build the best AI possible. He has a vision that probably worried his board and unnerved Washington. Given that the US is trying to slow down technological innovation in other parts of the world by restricting the sale of the best chips and computers, it is hugely challenging when he says: “We’ll build our own stuff — in fact we’ll build our own supply chain and ecosystem.” So much for ITAR, the US system for banning the export of critical tech.

There was a time when an American would have been arrested for selling such protected high-tech innovations abroad. Today, can you stop a smart American from innovating outside the US? Can you tell entrepreneurs not to take foreign money and not to partner with foreign firms? Can you demand that they stop challenging existing firms like Nvidia? No. Not when others are offering so much money.

What took place over the past week at OpenAI confirms that none of the young leaders of this new AI space see borders. As Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems said: AI “isn’t a Silicon Valley thing, it isn’t even a US thing, it’s now all over the world — it’s a global phenomenon”. Yet, the US authorities and its allies will have known the significant challenge to Western notions of security and control that Altman’s vision presents.

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Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

Two days after Xi and Biden met on November 15 and agreed to play nice, Altman was fired. The Daily Dot suggests that Altman was terminated because Xi hinted to Biden that Altman’s OpenAI was surreptitiously involved in a data-gathering deal with a firm called D2 (Double Dragon), which some thought to be a Chinese Cyber Army Group. David Covucci reported, “This D2 group has the largest and biggest crawling/indexing/ scanning capacity in the world 10 times more than Alphabet Inc (Google), hence the deal so Open AI could get their hands on vast quantities of data for training after exhausting their other options.”

There is something deeper happening here. China has already forged an AGI path of its own. They are avoiding generative AI in favour of cognitive AI. They want it to think independently of prompts. China is already giving AI control over satellites and weaponised drones. No doubt, Altman would love to work with that capability and the Chinese would love to work with him.

Could that be why Larry Summers, the Former Secretary of the Treasury with connections to US politics and business, also ended up on the new OpenAI Board? Perhaps the US Government realised they could not stop Altman but might claim a seat at his table?

What does all this mean for us? Experts like Altman say they are designing AI to do good. But AI designers disagree about what constitutes “good”. It is clear this arms race could have civilisational consequences.

On 9/11, we learned that trillions of dollars of American defence spending could be overwhelmed by $5 boxcutters for sale in any hardware store. On Israel’s 9/11, we learned that a $60 toy drone, a $600 rocket and a $6,000 paramotor could overwhelm the world’s most formidable defences, including Israel’s billion-dollar Iron Dome. Hamas managed to evade detection by Israel’s multibillion dollar intelligence capability simply by turning its electronics off and by not deviating from its daily routine. Going dark beat going high-tech; analogue beat digital.

As Israel’s tanks mass on Gaza’s border, the world awaits the start of a chain reaction to the massacre of Israeli civilians. This is like witnessing a Jujitsu match where leverage matters more than size. Hamas wanted to provoke Israel into deploying old-fashioned, highly symbolic weapons, such as tanks. Are tanks the best tech for rescuing the many Israeli hostages? For imposing the greatest damage on the perpetrators? No. But Israel will use them because it wants to create a visual show of force. Hamas is betting on this, knowing that in an Instagram world, Israel’s tanks will generate endless images appearing to show Israel’s brute force, which Hamas believes will increase support for the relatively defenceless occupants of Gaza.

Hamas, however, is far from defenceless: it has 3D printers, laser-sintering devices, and manufacturing facilities in their tunnels, which churn out guns, bullets and more. Perhaps this is why Israel’s surveillance systems didn’t pick up on the drones, ammunition and paramotors that Hamas used to transport humans across the border: they weren’t imported, but were manufactured underground in Gaza. Their essential components, after all, are not hard to come by. As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has observed, Hamas uses unexploded ordnance, rubble, and discarded or damaged metal and wiring to recycle materials and parts into new weapons. “The irony here,” he wrote, “is that the IDF’s operation indirectly provided Hamas with materials that are otherwise strictly monitored or forbidden altogether in Gaza.” Hamas, it seems, has brought new meaning to the term “circular economy”.

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Do Israel's critics understand Evil?

By Jacob Howland

For the West and Israel, the deeper problem here is that we cannot unlearn our faith in technological prowess. We still believe that having nuclear weapons is always the answer, even though we’ve already discovered that it is impossible to use them in response to Putin’s old-fashioned ground war in Ukraine, or even to his direct nuclear threats. The game is not worth the candle.

At the heart of our cognitive dissonance is the fact that an old mathematical formula has been disrupted by modern technology. Harald led the first study on Anti-Ballistic Missiles for the Joint Chiefs under President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. This project was later popularised by President Ronald Reagan as the Star Wars Initiative. When Harald began his study, his task was to determine what it would cost to build an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system that could counter an incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from the Soviet Union before it reached American airspace. The question was this: would an ABM system alter how the Soviets calculated the cost of Mutual Assured Destruction? In other words, could it make it too expensive for the Soviets to keep up? Drawing on the ideas of his associate, Tom Schelling — who later won the Nobel Prize for his idea of game theory — Harald concluded that for each dollar spent on a hypothetical ABM system, it would cost the adversary roughly seven dollars to penetrate it.

Of course, it would not matter whether the ABM system actually worked. It is incredibly mathematically difficult to successfully target and hit a super-fast moving inbound ICBM mid-air. The leverage math was easy, though. The Russians understood the 7:1 calculation. When Reagan announced the Star Wars Initiative, the Soviets understood that they’d be forced to spend far more than the country could possibly afford. The overwhelming cost played no small part in bankrupting the Soviet Union, though its demise came from the fear of running out of the cash needed to keep up with Star Wars, not from the damage inflicted by Star Wars itself. This brought the Cold War and the Soviet Union to an end, and left a lasting impression on America’s leading military thinkers including Richard Perle, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who deployed the ratio everywhere from their various powerful roles in American defence policy.

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The week Hamas reinvented horror

By David Patrikarakos

Today, Harald’s ratio has inverted. It’s at least 1:7 now, and probably much more. This is evident not only from 9/11, but also from the events in Israel. Hamas deployed absurdly cheap rockets against the Iron Dome. It did the maths: by one estimate, the Hamas missiles are 100 times less expensive than the $50,000 Tamir receptors in the Iron Dome, which can defend Israel against 96% of the projectiles thrown at them. So Hamas simply launched many more rockets — and they got through the 4% window because many more were fired. Simple.

None of this means we can rule out that Hamas didn’t have the support of advanced technology. Days before the massacre in Israel, on 27 September, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard successfully placed a third Noor satellite into orbit. Was this a total coincidence? The Noor-3, with vastly better cameras than Noor-1 and Noor-2, gave Iran the ability to monitor events on the ground in Israel and Gaza with much greater accuracy and coverage than before. It allowed Iran 24/7 coverage. What if that camera footage was made available to Hamas? And if facial recognition technology was used on that live feed or video? The aim of that tech is not so much to recognise a particular person but to determine the emotional state of groups of people. Could this have been used to determine that the Israelis on the ground were relaxed and obviously not expecting a problem? Such tech is certainly capable of this — and while it isn’t cheap, it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Nor are its uses simply defensive. Over the past year, the Ukrainians have been forced to become experts in drone warfare. On the one hand, they have learned that holding a $5 yoga mat over your head blinds satellites to the human heat signature, allowing them to sneak up on Russian assets and destroy them. On the other, they have also developed their offensive capacity, making not just drones but underwater drones. In the Black Sea, for instance, the Russians had to move their fleet after Ukrainian “experimental” and unmanned “Sea Baby” drones wreaked havoc, damaging subs and the undersides of sizeable superpower vessels.

If Ukraine can operate this kind of technology, Hamas probably can too. This week, the US moved two aircraft carriers into range of Israel. This raises the risk of another USS Cole situation. In 2000, two suicide pilots in a cheap rubber Zodiac-type boat ripped a 40-foot-wide hole in the Cole, killing 17 American naval personnel and injuring another 40.

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The shattering of the Jewish world

By Ben Judah

For now, though, Hamas’s use of drones will continue to be associated with its recent reliance on paramotors with parafoils. These are usually found at beach resorts and so appear perfectly innocent. No doubt Israel has every airport and landing strip around under observation, but modern drone tech no longer requires such assets. In 2014, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Intelligence Service, Shin Bet, had discovered that Hamas was receiving paragliding training in Malaysia. But it never seemed to have occurred to anyone that paramotors and parafoils could be used to transport an armed human over the heavily surveilled Gaza border.

Elsewhere, cheap toy drones played a large part in disabling and destroying Israel’s expensive surveillance system on the Gaza border. Hamas used them to dazzle, damage or destroy the expensive optical sensors that Israel relied upon to detect inbound threats. The Israelis should have understood this technology. After all, Israeli-made drones helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh just last month, while Turkish drones have profoundly shifted the balance of power in the ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. People are clearly understanding the tech but are yet to realise the inversion of the leverage ratio.

Closer to home, we can see this in the US’s continued enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regime, in the mistaken belief that all or most valuable tech originates in America and must not fall into the hands of opponents. Awkwardly, it seems that many of the guns Hamas used in the siege had been lifted from the piles of weaponry the US left behind in Afghanistan and Iraq. Failing to consider their intellectual property value, the US ditched them because they were too expensive to destroy and too old to bother returning home. The US saw old broken guns without enough usable ammo. Did Hamas see an opportunity to create CAD (Computer Aided Design) models, which would let them 3D print or laser-sinter parts to repair and even replicate these weapons? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, those who want to change or damage the balance of power in the world at an already fragile moment will continue to deploy technologies that we ignore or laugh at. And this dangerous form of complacency is not just a problem for Israel. Once those tanks drive into Gaza and the conflict metastasises further afield, it will be a threat to the entire West.

So who was it? The Russians? The Ukrainians? The Americans? The Danes? Norway? Poland? Israel? The British? One year on, as speculation mounts and investigations continue, it’s unlikely any nation will be definitively fingered. And since allies will always protect useful proxies, at best, we can expect a scapegoat.

Seymour Hersh, American military muckraker, alleges US Special Ops were to blame. He claims US Navy divers planted the TNT during the 51st BALTOPS22, a Nato exercise involving “47 ships, 89 aircraft, and 7,000 personnel in the Baltic Sea” which was conducted some three months before the incident.

Certainly, President Biden, fuelled these rumours as he stood alongside German Chancellor Schultz and told a press conference that if Russia invaded Ukraine he would make sure that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it”. When a journalist asked how he would do that since Nord Stream 2 is in Germany’s control, he replied: “I promise you we’ll be able to do that”. The Chancellor nodded: “We are united”.

Russia, meanwhile, says it was BALTOPS22. But many suspect Putin is the guilty party. Russia has a long history of taking a “scorched Earth” approach in war, meaning they see value in damaging their own valuable assets in order to deny others the possibility of using them. They did this in the war of 1812, and during Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa when they destroyed their own crops and equipment. They are also, according to Ukraine, doing it today in Bakhmut.

Germany’s investigators point to a 50-foot pleasure boat called The Andromeda which hovered near the explosion site at about the time the explosives were thought to be set in place. The six crew were apparently all travelling on professionally forged passports and Germany’s investigators found traces of explosives aboard. It seems the vessel had been hired in Germany by a Polish entity, thus raising the possibility that it was the Poles. The New York Times has suggested that The Andromeda may have been occupied by the Ukrainians. Others gossip that Israel’s Mossad was behind it. They are usually attributed with the most successful intelligence capers, especially when no other answers can be found.

Other investigators discovered that Denmark’s P524 Nymfen naval ship and several Russian naval vessels approached the detonation location at the same time on September 21. Strangely, all turned off their transponders and disappeared from satellite signals. On September 22, a Swedish surveillance aircraft and a Swedish Corvette naval vessel also converged on the same spot.

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Will we execute the Russian oligarchs? 

By Edward Luttwak

Then there was the 600ft Greek-flagged Minerva Julie which was laden with Russian oil. It was heading to Rotterdam when it suddenly stopped and hovered over the exact same site at the same time for seven whole days. They say they were awaiting delivery instructions. Then it turned around and went to Tallinn and St Petersburg instead of Rotterdam. The question seems to be “who wasn’t there?” It’s straight out of an Agatha Christie novel: there are multiple suspects, each have compelling motives and plausible alibis.

The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that official investigators in Denmark, Sweden and Germany are not sharing information with each other. They are all silent, not only because they aren’t ready to defend their findings but also because Europe finds itself in the biggest upswing of spy games since the Cold War. Russian spies are said to have infiltrated the Scandinavian and Baltic countries as well as Germany itself.

But in our feverish determination to name the culprit, we are losing sight of what that explosion illuminated. The world is teeming with plausibly deniable mercenaries — armies of highly skilled, war-hardened professionals. Some are in-house “Special Ops”, and some are former military personnel who are now guns for hire. It seems very likely that whoever carefully rigged the Nord Stream 2 to blow came from this kind of professional background.

The James Bond behind this explosion will not be in the SAS. He will be working in, or retired from, the SBS (Special Boat Services) or Russia’s GUGI or the Danish Frogman Corps. Or possibly this scuba diving demolition expert will be from the Swedish Röjdykare, Norway’s Minedykkerkommandoen or Israel’s Shayetet 13. Alumni from all these are quietly for hire. And they won’t be wearing uniform. Or at least not the uniform of the nation that hired them.

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Does Ukraine need to compromise?

By Aris Roussinos

The Geneva Convention has lost all relevance today as military doctrines have radically changed, allowing false-flag operations to haunt modern geopolitics. Both Russia and China have a strategy that calls for unrestricted or unlimited warfare. This means “anything goes”. Anything can be weaponised, including food, energy and civilians. And it means that pitching up without insignia, or in someone else’s insignia, is no longer out of bounds.

But why assume that a state actor was behind the sabotage? We live in a world where non-state actors dominate the landscape of geopolitics. Why is it so hard to imagine that the culprit might not have been a nation but a corporation or even a Machiavellian sort of billionaire? Everyone assumes that a state was behind the sabotage because the methodology and equipment were so advanced. But states increasingly share their capabilities — such as Pegasus, the snooping software that extracts everything from your phone — with private contractors and even civilians with no discernible ties to military or intelligence organisations. The appeal of the untraceable connection is perhaps the most important reason nations increasingly work with private contractors.

It is also true that the global debt burden globally has placed increasing pressure on militaries and intelligence services to cut costs and move costs off the books, incentivising outsourcing. James Bond wouldn’t work directly for the British Government anymore. He’d be a contractor. Similarly, Erik Prince, America’s most visible expert in this domain, works for many governments and not just for the US. Private individuals have become outsourced agents.

We’re seeing examples of this everywhere. The Wagner Group was once President Putin’s plausibly deniable private militia. America has Blackwater or Academi to name only two. Even the Danes seem to use private military contractors these days. Years of wars in the Middle East have given rise to a cadre of people with a certain set of skills. Did we really think they’d retire to a nice suburb, especially when there is so much money bidding for their services?

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Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West

By John Michael Greer

These highly trained professionals are perfectly capable of executing all kinds of tasks in other countries. India’s much feared Special Group has been accused of an assassination in Canada. Russia insists Nato has deployed Special Ops in Ukraine.

But regardless of who sabotaged the pipe a year ago, it’s time to ask how modern wars are being conducted. Are we witnessing the privatisation of warfare, whereby public authorities outsource the pursuit of national interests to private parties? Special Ops across Nato have been complaining that they are over-deployed because they are so capable and relatively cheap. But should nations be relying on Special Ops, whether official, retired or mercenary status, to achieve national security objectives? There’s always a limit to outsourcing. With Nord Stream 2, we seem to have hit that limit.

Even more worrying is the fact that the explosion marked a definitive turn from decades of land wars to a world dominated by naval warfare. For it’s not just energy pipelines that are being targeted, but also internet cables. Consider the Svalbard internet cable cut on January 6 2022 (an interesting day for many reasons). A mega-yacht was hovering above the fastest internet cable in the world when some five kilometres of it went missing. Luckily, somebody had put a backup cable in place. Otherwise, cutting that cable would have caused Western satellite-based missile and weapons guidance systems to fail. More seriously, it would have shut down the internet and brought about the end of UberEats.

Was the mega-yacht a Russian military vessel? It was a plausibly deniable vessel, even though it had a submarine embedded in its hull. The Norwegian military seized it but eventually had to let it go due to lack of evidence that it was involved in the cable cuts.

Ever since, the world has witnessed a wide range of subsea internet cable cuts. Last October, for instance, the Marseille cable, which connects the US, Europe and Asia, and the Shetlands-Faroe-Islands cable were both cut in October 2022. The latter is central to keeping track of Russian subs passing through the GIUK Gap (Greenland Iceland UK Gap) at a time when concerns about the possible use of nuclear weapons is being overtly threatened. Yet the media assumes this subsea cable warfare doesn’t matter because people think WIFI comes out of thin air, while the superpowers don’t want to admit to the vulnerability.

But if modern society cannot function without subsea infrastructure, what is the strategy for defending it against such attacks? The riddle of the Nord Stream explosion, whether or not it is solved, invites us to think about an ocean of new possibilities.