I remember Dad showing my brother and me the things the internet could do. "Look," he would say. "The internet can show you what the weather is like right now in Beijing." Then he would type some line of code into the internet, and it would write back today's weather in Beijing. "Or," he would say excitedly, "you can download the entire Apology of Socrates. For free! And read it right here, in the house."

But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I'm certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

Even the reading experience you're having right now is contingent upon air-conditioning——this book was printed in an air-conditioned facility. In fact, air-conditioning was invented for a facility not too dissimilar from the one that printed this book.

One of the reasons for this huge shift in human geography is the miracle of air-conditioning, which allows people to control the temperature of their interior spaces. Air-conditioning has deeply reshaped human life in rich countries——from small things, like the declining percentage of time that windows are open in buildings to large things like the availability of medication. Insulin, many antibiotics, nitroglycerin, and lots of other drugs are heat sensitive and can lose their efficacy if not stored at so-called "room temperature," which is defined as between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures that no rooms in summertime Phoenix could have hoped to achieve before air-conditioning.

Two of the Anthropocene's major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful——and on some level made-up. The United States isn't real the way a river is real, nor is the Walt Disney Company. They are both ideas we believe in. Yes, the United States has laws and treaties and a constitution, and so on, but none of that prevents a country from splitting apart or even disappearing. From the neoclassical architecture that attempts to give the U.S. a sense of permanence to the faces on our money, America has to continually convince its citizens that it is real, and good, and worthy of allegiance.

But of course I wanted those people to be freaked out by me because I was freaked out by them. I was repulsed by the idea that they were giving money to a corporation in order to escape their horrible, miserable lives that were horrible and miserable in part because our corporate overlords controlled all the means of production.

But then I got older. As a teenager, I began to define myself primarily by what I disliked, and my loathings were legion. I hated children's books, the music of Mariah Carey, suburban architecture, and shopping malls. But most of all, I hated Disney World.

For many species of large animals in the twenty-first century, the single most important determinant of survival is whether their existence is useful to humans. But if you can't be of utility to people, the second-best thing you can be is cute. You need an expressive face. Ideally some large eyes. Your babies need to remind us of our babies. Something about you must make us feel guilty for eliminating you from the planet.

When I was a kid, a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin became popular, but what I loved about teddy bears was their silence. They didn't ask anything of me or judge me for my emotional outbursts.

In the daily grind of human life, there is a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way.

And that seems to me one of the great oddities of the Anthropocene. For better or worse, land has become ours. It is ours to cultivate, to shape, even ours to protect. We are so much the dominant creature on this planet that we essentially decide which species live and which die, which grow in numbers like the Canada goose, and which decline like its cousin the spoon-billed sandpiper. But as an individual, I don't feel that power. I can't decide whether a species lives or dies. I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast.

You can do something about abandonment. You can construct a stronger independent self, for instance, or build a broader network of meaningful relationships so your psychological well-being isn't wholly reliant upon one person. But you, as an individual, can't do much about the Canada goose.

Just before graduating from college, my girlfriend and I were on our way to pick up some groceries in her ancient blue sedan when she asked me what my biggest fear was. "Abandonment," I said. I was worried the end of college would spell the end of our relationship, and I wanted her to reassure me, to tell me that I need not fear being alone, because she would always be there, and etc. But she wasn't the sort of person to make false promises, and most promises featuring the word "always" are unkeepable. Everything ends, or at least everything humans have thus far observed ends. Anyway, after I said abandonment, she just nodded, and then I filled the awkward silence by asking her what her biggest fear was. "Geese," she answered.

Like humans, Canada geese usually mate for life, although sometimes unhappily. Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.

With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.

Like the velociraptor, I have a large brain for my geologic age, but maybe not large enough to survive effectively in the world where I find myself. My eyes still believe what they see, long after visual information stops being reliable. Still I'm fond of raptors—— both the ones I've seen that never existed, and the ones that existed but I've never seen.

Knowing the facts doesn't help me picture the truth. That's the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn't nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not. We've long known images are unreliable——Kafka wrote that "nothing is as deceptive as a photograph."——and yet I still can't help but believe them.

The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them. Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect.

Each time I drink Diet Dr Pepper, I am newly astonished. Look at what humans can do! They can make ice-cold, sugary-sweet, zero-calorie soda that tastes like everything and also like nothing.

Dr Pepper marks such an interesting and important moment in human history. It was an artificial drink that didn't taste like anything. It wasn't like an orange but better, or like lime but sweet. In an interview, Charles Alderton once said that he wanted to create a soda that tasted like the soda fountain in Waco smelled——all those artificial flavors swirling together in the air. Dr Pepper is, in its very conception, unnatural. The creation of a chemist.

The scent of Chanel No. 5, for instance, is not patented, and doesn't need to be, because no one can re-create it.

One of the things that makes smell so powerful, of course, is its connection to memory. Helen Keller wrote that smell is "a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived."

Smell is one of the last realms where virtual reality still feels deeply virtual.

The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we've built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave art very much like the paintings it represents.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave's protection, and that when humans became a danger to that cave's beauty, we agreed to stop going.

... and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn't optional for humans.

I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn't just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at the leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face to face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.

Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream. The only people who end up rich or successful in the novel are the ones who start out that way. Almost everyone else ends up dead or destitute. And it's a critique of the kind of vapid capitalism that can't find anything more interesting to do with money than try to make more of it.

Fitzgerald writes, "For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Perhaps that's why I find it so comforting that we do know when Halley will return, and that it will return, whether we are here to see it or not.

That noted, Halley's comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986. It'll be brighter in the night sky than Jupiter, or any star. I'll be eighty-three——if I'm lucky.

I don't know how to explain to you how important that bench was to me, how much it mattered that my dad and I had made something together. But that night, we sat next to each other on our bench, which just barely fit the two of us, and we passed the binoculars back and forth, looking at Halley's comet, a white smudge in the blue-black sky.

It's the only periodic comet that can regularly be seen from Earth by the naked eye. Halley's comet takes between seventy-four and seventy-nine years to complete its highly elliptical orbit around the sun, and so once in a good human lifetime, Halley brightens the night sky for several weeks. Or twice in a human lifetime, if you schedule things well.

We. Just. Keep. Going. We spread across continents, including one that is entirely too cold for us. We sailed across oceans toward land we couldn't see and couldn't have known we would find. One of my favorite words is dogged. I love dogged pursuits, and dogged efforts, and dogged determination. Don't get me wrong——dogs are indeed very dogged. But they ought to call it humanned. Humanned determination.

It's easy to forget how wondrous humans are, how strange and lovely. Through photography and art, each of us has seen things we'll never see——the surface of Mars, the bioluminescent fish of the deep ocean, a seventeenth-century girl with a pearl earring. Through empathy, we've felt things we might never have otherwise felt. Through the rich world of imagination, we've seen apocalypses large and small.

There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don't. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth's greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.

But we'll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else.

The anthem of West Ham United is called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and at the start of each game, you'll see thousands of grown adults blowing bubbles from the stands as they sing, "I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air / They fly so high, nearly reach the sky / Then like my dreams, they fade and die."

I think two of the fundamental facts of being a person are 1. We must go on, and 2. None of us ever walks alone. We may feel alone (in fact, we will feel alone), but even in the crushing grind of isolation, we aren't alone. Like Louise at her graduation, those who are distant or even gone are still with us, still encouraging us to walk on.

The song tells us to "walk on through the wind and through the rain," which is not a particularly clever evocation of a storm. We are also told to "walk on with hope in our heart," which feels aggressively trite. And it reports that "at the end of the storm, there's a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a lark." But in reality, at the end of the storm, there are tree branches strewn everywhere, and downed power lines, and flooded rivers.

When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect it with irony, or something else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

My brother, Hank, who started out his professional life as a biochemist, once explained it to me like this: As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans, but we are a hugely powerful force on Earth in the twenty-first century.

I suppose I missed writing, but in the way you miss someone you used to love.