Why religion will save us from automated warfare in the digital age



The technology now exists to render video games in real, playable time computationally — a first achieved with the classic pixelated first-person shooter Doom.

Don’t yawn — this isn’t just a footnote in the annals of nerd history. Elon Musk promptly chimed in on the news in the replies to promise, “Tesla can do something similar with real world video.”

We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development.

The military applications of this latest leap forward are obvious enough. A person at a terminal — or behind the wheel — enters a seamless virtual environment every bit as complex and challenging as a flesh-and-blood environment … at least as far as warfare goes. Yes, war has a funny way of simplifying or even minimizing our lived experience of our own environment: kill, stay alive, move forward, repeat. No wonder technological goals of modeling or simulating the given world work so well together with the arts and sciences of destruction.

But another milestone in the computational march raises deeper questions about the automation of doom itself. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company has “witnessed our first AI-to-AI crypto transaction.”

“What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens,” he tweeted, adding a 🤯 emoji. “AI agents cannot get bank accounts, but they can get crypto wallets. They can now use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants, or other AIs. Those transactions are instant, global, and free. This,” he enthusiastically concluded, “is an important step to AIs getting useful work done.”

In the fractured world of bleeding-edge tech, “doomerism” is associated with the fear that runaway computational advancement will automate a superintelligence that will destroy the human race.

Perhaps oddly, less attention flows toward the much more prosaic likelihood that sustainable war can soon be carried out in a “set it and forget it” fashion — prompt the smart assistant to organize and execute a military campaign, let it handle all the payments and logistics, human or machine, and return to your fishing, hiking, literary criticism, whatever.

Yes, there’s always the risk of tit-for-tat escalation unto planetary holocaust. But somehow, despite untold millions in wartime deaths and nuclear weapons aplenty, we’ve escaped that hellacious fate.

Maybe we’re better off focusing on the obvious threats of regular ordinary world war in the digital age.

But that would require a recognition that such a “thinkable” war is itself so bad that we must change our ways right now — instead of sitting around scaring ourselves to death with dark fantasies of humanity’s enslavement or obliteration.

That would require recognizing that no matter how advanced we allow technology to become, the responsibility for what technology does will always rest with us. For that reason, the ultimate concern in the digital age is who we are responsible for and answerable to.

As the etymology of the word responsible reveals (it comes from ancient terminology referring to the pouring out of libations in ritual sacrifice), this question of human responsibility points inescapably toward religious concepts, experiences, and traditions.

Avoiding World War Autocomplete means accepting that religion is foundational to digital order — in ways we weren’t prepared for during the electric age typified by John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It means facing up to the fact that different civilizations with different religions are already well on their way to dealing in very different ways with the advent of supercomputers.

And it means ensuring that those differences don’t result in one or several civilizations freaking out and starting a chain reaction of automated violence that engulfs the world — not unto the annihilation of the human race, but simply the devastation of billions of lives. Isn’t that enough?

Unfortunately, right now, the strongest candidate for that civilizational freakout is the United States of America. Not only did we face the biggest shock in how digital tech has worked out, but we also have the farthest to fall in relative terms from our all-too-recent status as a global superpower. We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development.

Scary as automated conflict indeed is, the biggest threat to the many billions of humans — and multimillions of Americans — who would suffer most in a world war isn’t the machines. It’s the people who want most to control them.

Breaking the Matrix: An online right podcast takes aim at liberal orthodoxy



Alex Kaschuta is the host of "Subversive," an oddball podcast that's had maybe one of the most impressive selections of guests I can think of – everyone from Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters to journalist Michael Tracey to Twitter anons behind voice changers, who, to no surprise to her listeners, are often perspicacious critics of liberalism.

When people talk about what they like about "Subversive," it's usually something about getting to hear from people they would never have thought to pay attention to or Alex's talent for articulating the things we all feel but struggle to put into words. As an internet historian, what's always stood out to me is how thoroughly and accessibly "Subversive" chronicles one of the internet's most misunderstood and important corners: the online right.

When I asked Alex how she'd describe herself, she said, "a mother, wife, writer, and podcaster from and living in Transylvania, Romania – in that order," but to my mind, she forgot one of her most important roles: the online right's chief storyteller.

Katherine: How would you describe your podcast?

Alex: The podcast is a way for me to speak to the people I think have important things to say about the stage we've reached in our civilization. It seems to have become somewhat of a scene report for the two spheres I'm most interested in, the "new right" or "dissident right" and the wider post-liberal arena. It overlaps with the dissident right somewhat but includes a vast range of left- and right-wing figures.

Katherine: How'd you come up with the idea?

Alex: While I was simmering in the culture wars like everyone else, I realized that much was left unsaid even in the alternative media space. It was just the same "wokeness is bad, look at these crazy people, we just need to return to liberal principles" take over and over. Many fundamental questions about those liberal principles were left open: where they failed (given that the madness mentioned above is now increasingly the norm), questions about meaning, freedom, and governance were simply not on the table.

The recipe for viewership in alternative media was straightforward – just parade some lunatics in front of your audience and then say something like: "This is race communism. Liberalism fixes this!"

The only people who had any answers that were not simple hand-waving or some baroque circular reasoning were in the dissident right or the broader post-liberal sphere. They were the only people who were even attempting to phrase coherent questions. Every other form of discourse began with liberal assumptions, and this was the only place where those assumptions were questioned from a more fundamental vantage point. So I wanted to talk to these people and make their thoughts more widely accessible. A podcast felt like the easiest way to do this.

Katherine: Do you think there's anyone out there creating similar content?

Alex: There are a few podcasts and a few YouTube channels that cover a similar space, but of course, their angle reflects the interests and background of the hosts.

"Outsider Theory," Geoff Shullenberger's podcast, and "Hermitix" from James Ellis are similar, though the tone and guest selection skew more toward academia than "Subversive."

Academic Agent, Auron MacIntyre, the Prudentialist, and Charlemagne cover the YouTube space on similar themes, but the format is more geared toward video essays and streams.

"Content Minded," Gio Pennacchietti's new project, covers similar ground. Still, he's even more of an insider to the dissident right than I am, and his area of expertise covers art and academia more in depth. I think "Subversive" is quite a broad show, and a lot of its appeal is that it brings together thinkers from the closest thing that we have to a big-tent dissident right.

Katherine: What do you think of me describing your work as "content"?

Alex: I dislike the word content because it sounds like "filler" or "placeholder," something propping up a void. It also has a very commoditized and interchangeable feel: "Just open your face sensors and let the screens pour in the day's content."

I realize there is no better word for someone's multimedia output, mainly if it's spread digitally and isn't just one type. I think I dislike it even more because, on some level, I realize that for many viewers, it is a commodity – YouTube infotainment, politics as tribal LARP – including all the work I find precious.

Katherine: Who's been your favorite guest so far?

Alex: I've loved having people like Curtis Yarvin, Patrick Deneen, or Ryszard Legutko on, who are somewhat more high-profile and intellectual heroes to many in our sphere. Still, my favorite episodes tend to be with people doing similar work to me, like my episodes with Gio Pennacchietti, Darryl Cooper, or you, Katherine.

It's probably a question of practice, but for now, I find it much easier to loosen up and have fun with people I consider peers and who have a similar experience of being (very) online.

Katherine: Do you think Twitter has influenced politics?

Alex: I think that's undeniable at this point. Twitter is the cauldron in which the professional and amateur wordcels of the world brew up the Narrative and its counter-narratives. We've been in a constant state of emergency for years now, maybe even since the Arab Spring or the migrant crisis in the wake of the Syrian war. Since then, we've had major, politically salient, narrative-driven crises every few months, crises that are based on powerful, digitally propagated images, like the death of George Floyd or people collapsing with a mysterious disease in Wuhan. These were all story-driven, and Twitter is where the story takes its initial shape. We're at an interesting point now, as some of the counter-narratives are gaining enough traction to embarrass the narrative in an important way. I'd like to believe my work is part of this growing countercurrent, but what the result of this will be exactly is unclear to me. We can expect that the mainstream will try to co-opt these new energies and try to absorb them. I think people in our creative sphere must be aware of this and guard against it.

Katherine: What's one surprising thing you've learned from your show?

Alex: My ideas and interview style can elicit admiration from some and extreme rage from others. The spectrum between lover and hater of the show is extreme. It's taught me not to worry too much about how it's received because there seems to be a fixed percentage of people who loathe it no matter what I do.

Katherine: You always end your show by asking about your guest's favorite subversive thinker. Who's a subversive thinker you think we should be paying attention to?

Alex: This is a surprisingly tough one every time because I want to come up with something very unique and typically fail. But in reality, the podcast itself is my answer to this question.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman: Tech savior or tomorrow's supervillain?



Spend enough time around Silicon Valley these days, and you’ll hear a surprising thing — the V-word, villain, used to describe what would seem to be one of their own. Not every tech lord, venture capitalist, and founder sees OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, as a for-real bad guy, but more do than you might expect. The feeling is palpable, now that Altman speaks openly of raising $8 trillion, that today’s villain is well on his way to becoming tomorrow’s supervillain.

It’s an attitude arrestingly close to “doomer” status — the pessimistic attitude toward the onrushing future most techies decry in the name of a-rising-tide-lifts-all-boats optimism about innovation-driven progress. But even without diving into the progress debate, Altman’s uncanny advancement as the rare guy felt in the Valley to be suspect ethically raises significant questions about what can stop humanity’s human villains from accelerating us into a specifically spiritual catastrophe.

The face of our digitally manifested “collective consciousness” isn’t that of an autistic new Enlightenment. It’s schizoid pandemonium.

A fascinating piece of evidence is the euphoria surrounding OpenAI’s latest prompt-to-video product. Sora is a feature that will turn text into AI-generated videos. A series of sample clips triggered a wave of soyfacing and blown minds to rival the comparisons drawn by Apple Vision Pro testers to some kind of religious experience. “Hollywood-quality” ... “Hollywood beware” ... “RIP Hollywood” ... you can probably spend an hour on X just working through techland assessments of Sora’s impending impact. “This is the worst this technology will ever be.”

More mind blowing Sora videos from the OpenAI team\n\n1. Flower tiger
— (@)

There are skeptics, of course. Lauren Southern, who couldn’t get ChatGPT to “generate text with the word ‘libs’ in it,” mocked Sora’s prospects for sinking “woke Hollywood,” predicting “an age of censorship and gov curation the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”

The deeper issue is what exactly we mean by “Hollywood” — a matter akin to what exactly we mean by “the media.” These abstractions refer to corporations, of course, and in that sense, yes — Sora and its inevitable clones might make obsolete corporate mass entertainment in exchange for products directly from the regime itself.

But here we are again talking about abstractions. Hollywood, the media, and the regime are not simply organizations and baskets or networks of organizations, but people, specific flesh-and-blood human beings, with various spiritual lives in varying degrees of distress.

Innovations like Sora don’t just raise questions about which group of people will seize or inherit control of these video and narrative creation tools. They raise questions about whether the automation of content will cause more of us to believe that our spiritual health demands a turn away from worshipful or obsessive attitudes toward narrative altogether.

The dominance of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and government propaganda arose amidst the televisual forms of communications technology that digital tech has leaped over. The people filling the image-mongering ranks and narrative-shaping executive offices of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., came of age and rose to mastery in a world where whoever controlled the means of dream production held sway and whoever dreamed the biggest and best dreams earned an ethical right to rule.

But that state of affairs wasn’t simply determined by the formative influence of televisual tech. Fundamentally, it arose from the temptations that always bedevil us and threaten our spiritual health — not just the sparkling promise of evil and its earthly rewards but our dreams, senses, and passions.

Of course, it’s not our ability to see, smell, and taste, our imaginative and recollective faculties, or our capacity to desire that are evil. It’s that when spiritually undisciplined, all these attributes — which we so frequently idolize, trust, and artificially push to extremes — lead us badly astray into delusion, distraction, addiction, and perversion.

The rise of tools like Sora holds up an uncanny mirror to the idol factories already within in our hearts and minds, giving us a shocking vision of an infinite firehose mindlessly filling up every cranny of our awareness with everything we could ever lust after, everything we could ever describe, all we could fear, all we could imagine, all we could forget — all without us having to lift a finger.

After all, today’s text-based prompting will “eventually” give way, as Mark Zuckerberg recently and offhandedly remarked about Meta’s Apple Vision Pro competitor, to “a neural interface.” The face of our digitally manifested “collective consciousness” isn’t that of an autistic new Enlightenment. It’s schizoid pandemonium.

It all strongly implies that the antidote to Altman isn’t a law or an Iron Man-style superhero but a return to confront the soul sickness lurking in all our hearts and a sobered new willingness to accept responsibility for taking on the discipline to bend our will toward fighting for our spiritual health.

That’s not a very amaaaaazing elevator pitch for the next generation of content creation. Yet if we want to hang on to a future rich with human art worth making and sharing, our path won’t run broadly through a mania of mind-blowing machines but through the quiet, narrow passage of the divine.

Nuclear energy is clean and safe, so why do climate doomsayers ignore it?



For the longest time, I didn’t know what I thought when someone mentioned nuclear energy.

It seemed relegated to the realm of sci-fi or "The Simpsons." I knew what Chernobyl was, and I remember exactly where I was when I heard about the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster (a dorm room in Chinatown, pulling an all-nighter). But still, I didn’t know what to make of it.

I spent several years in the trenches worrying about climate change, and I still don’t think I thought about nuclear very much. I thought we’d sooner see carbon capture than any meaningful changes to our energy infrastructure. Plus, wasn’t nuclear energy really dangerous, anyway? Maybe that’s what I thought about it. Not a pipe dream exactly; it was just dangerous.

I think a lot of people get their idea of nuclear waste from "The Simpsons," but as my friend Madi Hilly says, the only thing "The Simpsons" got right about nuclear is that a man without a college degree can make enough to buy a home and support his family while working at a nuclear power plant.

Then, around 2019, I started noticing nuclear discourse appearing in my digital life. A tweet here, a TikTok there. Suddenly, it started taking shape in my mind. It was no longer some ill-defined threat. Nuclear energy became something more tangible.

But for people like me, being able to understand nuclear power doesn’t just happen. It’s thanks to people like Emmet Penney, one of the most interesting and most accessible energy writers out there. Something of a digital renaissance man, he’s an accomplished essayist, the mind behind the newsletter Grid Brief, a podcast host times two at "Nuclear Barbarians" and "ex.haust," a contributing editor at Compact, and a recipient of a prestigious Emergent Ventures grant.

Here’s our conversation in which we discuss how he got into nuclear, whether my kids will grow extra limbs if we ever see widespread nuclear adoption, and why it feels like nuclear is entering the discourse as a perfect solution to our energy needs.

Katherine: You are a humanities guy — what’s the story on how you got into nuclear?

Emmet: I got into nuclear through Michael Shellenberger’s work and Leigh Phillips’ book "Austerity Ecology & the Collapse Porn Addicts." A few years after I got nuke-pilled, I had the wonderful opportunity to help on Michael’s book "Apocalypse Never," which turned me into a full-blown advocate. This story has a lot of twists and turns, but that’s the most direct version of how it happened. Still, it baffles me that I’m even in this space.

Katherine: Where’d the name “Nuclear Barbarians,” the title of your nuclear energy podcast, come from?

Emmet: I don’t share, as many nuclear advocates seem to, the belief that history progresses. Yet I still believe in civic virtue and the power and necessity of big industrial projects. So I wanted to come up with a brand idea that had an atavistic, John Milius tinge to it. I also wanted to head off the “nukebro” insult that renewaphiles tend to hurl around. If I’m already posting memes with Arnold as Conan and calling myself the Nuclear Barbarian, what else is there to say? I’ve already said it for you. The other reason I picked it is because if you’re a nuclear advocate, you’re more or less beyond the moat of the energy mainstream’s castle. So I wanted to feature that rather than fix it.

Katherine: Please excuse the expression, but can you red-pill me on nuclear energy? I have internalized so much anti-nuclear propaganda.

Emmet: Depends on what your concerns are. Many people are worried about safety issues, but nuclear power is among the safest energy sources. It also has the lowest land footprint. If you’re really worried about climate and you think it’s a good idea to electrify everything so as to reduce emissions, then you’ll want to look at the two canonical examples of decarbonizing the electricity sector: Ontario and France. Both were accomplished with nuclear. No one’s done it with renewables. If you want to know how nuclear got such a bad name (and how it became so expensive to build in America), you can check out this piece I wrote for American Affairs. It was my attempt to write the article I wish someone could have handed me when I first started getting into all this five years ago.

Katherine: What about nuclear waste? Will my kids grow extra limbs if I live near a reactor?

Emmet: The waste is the best part. Renewables end up clogging landfills and leaching toxic chemicals into the ground. Coal stores a lot of its waste in the air we breathe. On the other hand, nuclear has highly monitored waste stored in highly durable casks. Check out this photo of my friend Paris hanging out with the waste at the Paolo Verde plant in Arizona.

I think a lot of people get their idea of nuclear waste from "The Simpsons," but as my friend Madi Hilly says, the only thing "The Simpsons" got right about nuclear is that a man without a college degree can make enough to buy a home and support his family while working at a nuclear power plant.

Katherine: What should freak me out the most about energy these days?

Emmet: The general hostility to energy abundance that Western elites exhibit. People think they can do whatever they want with fossil fuels or nuclear and nothing bad will happen. Or they don’t care that bad things happen because it doesn’t affect them as much. But get a load of Germany right now – they closed their nuclear plants, made themselves dependent on natural gas from Russia, and now they’re firing up their coal plants to keep the lights on. So much for the all-renewables dream of their Energiewende. What we’re experiencing right now is the trailer for the feature-length suffering that’s about to play out over the next few years. Few in charge seem to have really internalized this.

Katherine: You wrote about renewable energy credit scams in your newsletter, Grid Brief. It’s not the first time I’ve heard chatter about this. What’s the story there?

Leif Skoogfors/Getty

Emmet: Renewable energy credits are a way to say you run on clean energy from renewables without actually doing it. They’re like the indulgences for sins the Catholic Church put on the market way back when. The basic idea is that you offset your “sin” of consuming fossil fuels by purchasing some credits that go towards renewable energy projects. Does this actually happen? It’s a Barnum and Bailey world out there, so not really. It’s more like an accounting trick.

They’re useful because if you’re, say, running a huge data storage facility, you’re power-hungry and most likely getting all of your juice from fossil fuel generators because fossil fuels are energy-dense, reliable, and dispatchable (you can call on them when you need them). But maybe you’re in a state that has certain standards around how much clean energy you have to use. Well, you can buy some credits and say, “Hey, look! I bought all these credits that cancel out all my emissions! I’m 100% clean now.” Unless you’re parked next to a major hydro dam or a nuclear plant, that’s probably a load of bull. And part of that’s just the nature of electricity. Once electricity is created, you can’t analyze it and go, “Ah, yes! This is coal electricity.” It’s just watts. There’s no such thing as an electricity sommelier.

Anyway, RECs are a big scam.

Katherine: It’s weird that energy doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the hot-take economy given how it … well, undergirds everything. But part of me wonders if it’s because it’s just complicated to write about and there’s a barrier to entry to understand what you’re talking about. Is that it? Or do you think there are other reasons?

Emmet: I’d say the barrier to entry for energy discourse is inherently higher than other spheres. Anyone can watch some new Netflix show and fire off a spicy take on it — and good for them. With energy, you have to put some work in over time. Lots of homework. I’m absolutely a beginner. Part of the reason I got into all this is because there’s something new to learn every single day.

It’s also because — and this is especially true when it comes to electricity markets — there are loads of specialized language. If some dude with a wind turbine in his profile pic tweets out “MOPRs are for utilities cucks,” who the f**k is going to like or RT that? No one knows what he’s talking about outside a very small circle. Hot-take economies run on the structure of jokes, and jokes are structured like a 2010 American Apparel ad. It’s about what information is missing, not what information’s there.

All that being said, there are still flame wars and hot-take economies that play out within the energy sphere. It’s like any other online discourse, really. Just with more white papers and graphs.

Katherine: Who’s one person everyone should be reading on any topic? Or listening to, for that matter?

Emmet: There are so many people I could list that it’s overwhelming me. So I’ll instead give some advice that I wish someone had given me when I started exploring various domains for myself: Go to the library and find out-of-print books on the topic you’re interested in. Or buy them online if you’re so inclined. Understand that what you’re curious about has probably been litigated over and over again — tear through works cited and bibliographies and figure out the genealogy of the debate to the best of your ability. Try to wade into the flow of time.

And reread Plato’s "Republic" a few times a decade.

Can science birth artificial wombs? Lab-grown babies raise major ethical concerns



Since the first man, the human race has expanded and developed in a simple way: A man and a woman have sex, and a man's sperm fertilizes the woman's egg. Within four days of fertilization, a tiny cluster of cells begins to develop – the embryo. That embryo, which has now expanded to around 100 cells filled with fluid, travels along the fallopian tube and, within a week of conception, resides in the uterus, anchoring into the mother's body, growing by drawing nutrition from blood vessels and glands.

Within two months of conception, the embryo becomes a fetus and, after nine months, a baby. This is a miracle of human nature you likely learned in science class – and is solely down to the wonder of a mother's womb.

Infertility rates are rising by 1% every year in men. "By 2045, if that trend continues, the majority of couples would need reproductive assistance," Cohen says.

However, a minority of the scientific community have taken a different view. These scientists have a plan to remove the human from the post-conception process – to grow embryos independent of a womb and instead to nurture them artificially. The ability to independently develop a human being outside a mother's womb would have enormous ramifications for society and the human race. "What does it mean for society when we can produce children without any burden on women?" asks Maneesh Juneja, a digital health futurist. "It would have huge economic and societal effects."

Its potential has been backed by the likes of Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who have both said that the development of artificial wombs could solve the world's imminent population crisis.

The potential ramifications of this research are so significant that there are plenty of competing projects to try to bring artificial wombs out of the laboratory and into reality. Exo-Genesis, a community looking to promote the development of extra-uterine devices that can grow human babies in vitro, held its first in-person meetup in San Francisco in late February. Among the attendees was Divya Cohen, a medical doctor, MBA, and MPA with nearly two decades of experience in health tech startups. "I feel very strongly that we need to make this a reality," says Cohen.

About 13% of women want to be mothers but don't want to go through pregnancy. Infertility rates are rising by 1% every year in men. "By 2045, if that trend continues, the majority of couples would need reproductive assistance," Cohen says. "This isn't the only technology that would be useful, but it's certainly a tool."

Technological wombs

gremlin/getty

It's a technology that is reportedly being developed in university laboratories around the globe. China's Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology claimed to have developed an AI-based technology that can nanny human embryos in artificial wombs by monitoring levels of nutrition and carbon dioxide in artificial environments that help grow embryos to term – a key issue in previous experiments that have tried to develop embryos outside a natural womb. The goal of the AI is to mimic the inexplicable alterations and changes that a mother's body subconsciously undergoes to nurture an embryo throughout pregnancy – and that is easier said than done.

While AI gained plenty of attention and many news stories, the reality is more prosaic: The technology hasn't been tested in humans. Despite the splashy headlines, it isn't guaranteed to be all that effective.

One project at the forefront of artificial womb development – one of three papers discussed at the Exo-Genesis meeting in San Francisco – was based in the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Alejandro Aguilera Castrejon is the lead author of the project to gestate a mouse embryo.

"The goal is to inject human cells into embryos to create chimeric models," says Aguilera Castrejon. So-called chimeric models, where human cells are injected into the embryos of other species and then tracked to model as closely as possible what would happen to the human cells in the embryonic stage, are used because it's impossible to conduct laboratory tests on human embryos.

Prior experiments had allowed similar chimeric-modeled embryos for two days – but Aguilera Castrejon's carefully monitored conditions permitted the embryo to grow for six days after it was implanted into a mouse, five days after fertilization. He and his colleagues are now working on starting the same process to grow embryos from day zero of fertilization rather than day five. The hope is that similar methods can be applied to humans. But there are some issues. The mouse embryos Aguilera Castrejon works with die after day eleven of the fertilization process because they become too big, preventing the oxygen and nutrients that would help them grow further from entering the embryo. "They basically die," he says.

That problem with mouse embryos is likely to be compounded with humans. Another challenge Aguilera Castrejon and his colleagues faced was keeping the embryo free of infection and contamination – an issue exacerbated should a similar experiment take place with human embryos because they take longer to develop. A mouse pregnancy lasts twenty days; humans, nine months. "The longer you have the embryo in culture, there are more things that can go wrong," he says.

The 29-year-old researcher, who has been working on his project for five years, believes that artificial human wombs are a while off. "In mice, I would say maybe it'll be a reality in ten years," he says. In humans? "I don't think I'll live to see humans," he says.

Aguilera Castrejon believes it'll take "at least fifty years" for science to bring a human embryo to full term and that it's not just the technological and biological challenges of doing so that are preventing development. In Israel, even if Aguilera Castrejon and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute had the technical knowledge to grow a human embryo for the first month of its formation, they couldn't. "Maybe at some point society will advance to allow us to be born outside the uterus," he says. "I think technically this will be possible, but the main limit is the ethical aspect."

Regulations are being removed

In May 2021, the stem cell research community's public voice, the International Society for Stem Cell Research, dropped a rule that had previously prevented human embryos from being cultured for more than fourteen days. Some concerns remain about mixing human stem cells and non-human embryos in chimeric models – most recently over a 2021 U.S.-China project that combined humans with macaque monkeys – but there is a growing acknowledgment that such experiments are necessary steps for the future of fertility.

While Aguilera Castrejon is pessimistic that babies grown outside their mothers' wombs will be born in his lifetime, he does see a shift in attitudes, even in his five years in the field. For Cohen, the conversation must move beyond the field into the wider world. When she brings up the topic with her friends in science, they too often don't know about the risk of a potential population crisis. "We want [the rate of population replacement] to be 2.1, but in the U.S. it's 1.6, and in Japan it's 1.3," she says. "That means that we are very quickly turning into an upside-down pyramid society. If that continues, we're going to be in serious trouble by then. I think we could see a future similar to 'The Handmaid's Tale.' I used to read that book and thought it would never happen – but now the science suggests it could happen."

As for Aguilera Castrejon's skepticism about whether it's possible in his lifetime, Cohen says that we need less talking and more action. "I'm worried we're seeing a trend where that's going to hit us in 2045, and there are two alternatives," she says. "One is we get into this scary dystopian future, or we start working on the science and building what would help us outmaneuver that."

Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters and Jewish ceasefire advocates shut down Brooklyn Bridge, New York City's Grand Central Terminal



Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters shut down the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City on Saturday. On Friday, a Jewish organization advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza forced service to be suspended at Grand Central Terminal.

The protest at Grand Central Station was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace – self-described as: "The largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world" that is "organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people."

Thousands of demonstrators took over the main concourse and steps of Grand Central Terminal. People were waving Palestinian flags, holding signs demanding an immediate ceasefire, and the crowd was chanting: "Let Gaza live!"

The protesters caused a nightmare for commuters by forcing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to suspend service at Grand Central Station – one of New York City's major transit hubs.

— (@)

Police reportedly arrested hundreds of "Jews and allies," according to the Jewish Voice for Peace.

Then on Saturday, thousands of pro-Palestine protesters marched in Brooklyn, New York.

The "Flood Brooklyn for Palestine" protest featured demonstrators holding signs that read: "Biden is funding genocide," "Occupation is a crime," "Free Palestine," "Zionism is Terrorism," "By any means necessary," "F*** Israel, Justice Palestine," and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."

A 24-year-old protester from Queens declared, "Freedom by any means, land back by any means. I believe the settler state of Israel must be taken down."

There are estimates that more than 7,000 people participated in Saturday's protest against Israel. The massive demonstration was accompanied by approximately 1,800 police officers, drones for crowd control, and two NYPD helicopters.

The march against Israel caused traffic to be stopped and the Brooklyn Bridge to be temporarily closed.

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Vandals blanketed storefronts with stickers that read: "Zionism is terrorism." Vandalizers also spray-painted stores with the message: "Free Gaza."

One demonstrator was holding a Palestine/LGBTQ+ pride flag.

The crowd chanted: "Allahu Akbar!" and "Long Live Hamas!"

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