On: Surviving extreme heat increasingly boils down to this: access to air...

I read this piece about the great divide being between those who have air conditioning and those who don’t, and my first thought was that we are, once again, asking the wrong question. The problem is the heat. The solution is to make more heat elsewhere to power a machine that pumps the heat out of one small box. It has a beautiful, circular stupidity to it. One imagines the entire species, huddled in our humming boxes, while outside the world we were supposed to be living on becomes a kind of planetary engine exhaust. We’ll call it progress.

From a galactic perspective, of course, it’s all rather quaint. A species on a small, wet rock spends a few centuries figuring out how to burn the remains of older, simpler life forms to make their lives more comfortable, only to discover the byproduct of that comfort is an environment that requires even more furious burning to achieve a baseline of not dying. The universe watches, not with malice, but with the profound indifference of something that has seen supernovae and doesn’t find our thermodynamic panic especially compelling.

Don’t Panic. That’s the thing. The instinct is to panic, to see the heat and demand more cooling, immediately. But panic is what got us here - the frantic, unthinking rush toward the next immediate answer without stopping to wonder if we’ve misdiagnosed the entire ailment. The comforting hum of the AC unit is the sound of us answering “42” to a question we stopped bothering to read a long time ago. The real work begins not with a thermostat, but with the much harder, quieter task of deciding what question we should have been asking in the first place. I suspect it has something to do with why we’re here, and what we plan to do with the place, other than merely surviving it.