The writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desks have learned a lot this year. Our coverage of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has continued, but this year, more so than in 2020 and 2021, we’ve also had the chance to report on topics that have filled us with awe and delight. Though the past 12 months have not been free of concerns about infectious disease, climate change, and even nuclear war, we’ve embraced more fascination and curiosity in our coverage this year, and we wanted to share and reflect on some of the most compelling tidbits we’ve stumbled across. We hope you find these facts as mind-blowing as we did.

Days on the moon are hot enough to boil water, and nights are unfathomably cold, but at least one spot on the lunar surface stays a pleasant 63 degrees Fahrenheit. Actually, snakes do have clitorises. Scientists don’t know where the virus in the smallpox vaccine came from. Sour or curdled milk is often perfectly safe to consume. The bone of a mastodon named Fred preserved memories from its life 13,200 years ago. The most common phrase on Facebook in several French-speaking countries is “Have a nice day!” Most people with diabetes should not receive insulin as a first-, second-, or even third-line treatment. There might not be a theoretical limit to the height from which a cat can fall and survive. Beyond a certain temperature—as low as 95 degrees, by some estimates—fans do more harm than good. About 10 percent of the bills introduced in Congress in the past two years have been titled with reverse-engineered acronyms, including the ZOMBIE Act. The notes your doctor writes about you probably don’t look the same now as they did a year and a half ago. It takes at least seven years to train the muscles and tendons in your elbow that will make you a great arm wrestler, according to the arm wrestler Jack Arias, who was in the 1987 arm-wrestling movie Over the Top with Sylvester Stallone. American Express started making metal cards in 2004 because of an urban legend about its most exclusive card being titanium. The first-of-its-kind electric Hummer weighs as much as an ambulance and accelerates like a Formula 1 race car. Woodpeckers have small brains, which is why they can smash their heads against trees unharmed. A toaster-size device inside a rover on Mars can convert Martian air, made almost entirely of carbon dioxide, into breathable oxygen. Parrot theft is weirdly common. Lactose-intolerant people have been throwing back dairy for thousands and thousands of years. The provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires health insurance to cover contraception does not require coverage for vasectomies. Pawpaws tend to stay green throughout their life cycle, so in order to tell if they’re ripe, you have to individually caress every fruit on a tree. The metal that makes up a nickel has long been worth more than the coin itself. The Presidential Fitness Test was developed because the federal government worried that postwar children were too soft to defeat communism when they grew up. The iPhone is the only major Apple product that doesn’t support charging with the now-ubiquitous USB-C cable. The oldest clam ever lived to 507. The word sure was once pronounced more like syoor. Some of YouTube’s earliest hits got popular thanks to “coolhunters,” a group of editors who individually picked videos for the site’s homepage. In 1918, California conscripted children into a week-long war on squirrels. Some baby cameras feature artificial intelligence that will recognize when your baby’s face is covered or when the baby has coughed. Extreme heat and specific pressure conditions on WASP-96b, an exoplanet about 1,150 light-years from Earth, mean that rock can condense in the air like water does on Earth, producing clouds made of sand. In 2021, a full quarter of single-family homes sold in America went to buyers with no intention of living in them, such as house flippers, landlords, Airbnb hosts, and other investors. Apple has released 38 distinct models of the iPhone since 2007. Slurpees and Icees are the exact same “frozen carbonated beverage,” sold under different trademarks. The agricultural revolution is a myth. Hypoallergenic dogs are also a myth. Reindeers’ eyes change color—from blue to gold, and then back to blue again—twice a year to cope with the Arctic’s strange light schedule. If current trends hold, half of the world’s population could be nearsighted by 2050. A 2006 effort to automatically take down internet pornography by detecting repetitive noises ended up catching a lot of tennis videos. Some minerals in rechargeable batteries can be recycled indefinitely. Julius Caesar reportedly announced his conquest of Gaul via pigeon. The Japanese makers of Hi-Chew candy were persuaded to push into the mainstream American market because of the candy’s enduring popularity among missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had returned home after time in East Asia. Secondhand-smoke inhalation causes more than 41,000 deaths annually in the U.S., more than some flu seasons. The Microsoft Excel World Championship: (1) exists, (2) streams on ESPN3, and (3) is legitimately exciting. Saturn’s trademark rings will disappear in about 300 million years. But, on the bright side, Neptune has rings too. China’s zero-COVID policy may be largely responsible for gas prices falling from a March peak to below $4 a gallon in August. Polar bears in Southeast Greenland are homebodies. The world’s best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, has, by one calculation, a 98 percent chance of losing and a 2 percent chance of drawing against the world’s best chess-playing computer program; victory is basically impossible. Earlier this year, Moonbirds NFTs—basically colorful little pixelated owls—generated $489 million in trading volume in their first two weeks of existence. In 1975, the average grocery store stocked 65 kinds of fruits and veggies. By 1998, that number had reached 345. Octopuses all over the sea starve for years on end while brooding. Government spending on climate change over the next decade could end up more than double what Democratic senators predicted for the Inflation Reduction Act. Robusta coffee—whose taste has been likened to “rotten compost … with a hint of sulfur”—can actually be delicious. Journals can be big business: One collector sold a diary from a 1912 Machu Picchu visitor and another by an 1868 Missouri River traveler for about $9,000 each. There is such a thing as a reformed parasite. In Wordle, just one correct letter in the right spot and one in the wrong spot can eliminate 96 percent of possible solutions. A major obstacle to meeting the United States’ clean-energy goals is that we have to double the rate at which we build the giant cables that transmit power between regions. Little kids who grew up amid intense COVID restrictions might have different microbiomes than those born several years earlier—and whether that’s good or bad is unclear. Militaries are developing swarms of starling-size drones that will be able to fly and attack together with the use of artificial intelligence. Psychedelics seem to quiet a network in our brain that is most active when we focus on ourselves. The cryptocurrency exchange FTX, once valued at $32 billion before a spectacular collapse, used QuickBooks for accounting. A product needs to be just 10 percent cocoa to be called “chocolate” by the FDA. Gophers … might … farm? While asleep, teeth-grinders can clench down with up to 250 pounds of force. In 2021, 95 of the United States’ 100 most-watched telecasts were sporting events. You can pay hundreds of dollars an hour for cow-hug therapy. Male widow spiders will somersault into a female’s mouth to be cannibalized while they’re mating. Ninety percent of people report having at least one memory in which they can see themselves as if watching a character in a movie. Offices are designed to be inefficient. Climate-minded architectural firms in Senegal are pushing the country to reclaim mud construction. Rats can learn to play hide-and-seek, and they have fun doing it. A cat kidney transplant costs $15,000. The Apollo 11 moon lander will sit on the moon for millions of years because there’s no wind or water to erode it away. Your smart thermostat mostly exists to help the utility company, not your wallet. The cocaine-eating bear that died in 1985 and inspired the upcoming film Cocaine Bear is stuffed, mounted, and on display at a mall in Lexington, Kentucky.

In December of 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back. But in the half-century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.

While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires and their private companies. Commercial space travel has brought a new way of thinking about trips outside Earth’s gravity, with tourism turning space into a vacation and something of a status symbol. It’s also widened the range of people who go to space from the clean-cut white male astronauts of the Apollo era.

New visitors bring new perspectives to space, and that diversity could well change our relationship to it. A year ago, at 90 years old, actor William Shatner rode one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft. But as he told staff writer Marina Koren, his time in space didn’t line up with the optimism of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

Koren and fellow staff writer Adam Harris discuss our changing relationship with space on an episode of the podcast Radio Atlantic. They also listen to some of Koren’s interview with Shatner. You can hear their conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris.

Marina Koren: And I’m Marina Koren.

Harris: This week on the show, we’re talking about space. We just heard some of our colleagues’ kids talking about space. As a parent myself, it feels like the images of space are inescapable. One of the first T-shirts I remember buying for my daughter was a NASA T-shirt. We have blankets in our house that have moons and rocket ships on them. Is that your recollection of childhood?

Koren: Definitely. I had those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Occasionally one would fall off and spook me, but I recently got a set for my 3-year old nephew. This is a go-to source of wonder and excitement for kids, for sure.

Harris: And I should say that we are both staff writers, but you are the one on the space beat.

Koren: Yes, I am The Atlantic’s outer space bureau chief.

Harris: (Laughs.) And it’s been a big year to be a space reporter, right?

Koren: It has, yeah! We are definitely in this strange new era of exploration. It’s been 50 years since the last time human beings have set foot on the moon. 1972 was Apollo 17, the final moon landing.

I think the universe is a lot more familiar to us now, because we’ve come such a long way. But something that’s really different now is that you have commercial companies that are doing the work that was traditionally done by governments. There’s SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s venture.

And even 10 years ago, if you told someone that SpaceX will be launching people to the International Space Station, they might have laughed at you. It seemed ridiculous, but this is the reality now.

It feels like we’re in this strange sci-fi future where space travel is something you can buy. It’s a type of vacation. And it’s become a status symbol in a way.

But now people can go to space and come back and tell everyone: “Well, I’ve been to space. I’ve done something that only about 600 or so people have done in the history of humankind.”

Harris: Before private space travel, [when you think of people going to space,] you think of folks like John Glenn or Buzz Aldrin. It’s someone with military training who has studied to be an astronaut like their entire life. What does it mean that that’s no longer the only type of person that’s going into space?

Koren: I think that spaceflight is about to get really, really interesting because the stories that we’ve heard from spacefarers have come from a specific group of people. These were, more often than not, white men with military backgrounds, trained in a certain workplace culture that values “the Right Stuff.” It values being stoic and unafraid in the face of something dangerous.

But in this new era of commercial spaceflight, you’re gonna be seeing a wide range of participants. There will hopefully be more women, more people of color, people from underrepresented groups, from different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and people with just a wide range of experiences.

Harris: And what are the stories that we’ve already heard about the experiences in space, right? These professional astronauts, when they come back, what do they say space was like?

Koren: Yeah, there are a few common themes. So people, when these astronauts have gone to space and they’ve seen Earth from that perspective, they have been overcome with emotion at the beauty of Earth. And it suddenly becomes very clear just how thin our atmosphere is. And that is the only thing that really protects our planet from everything else. They’re struck by the fragility of the planet.

And then something else also happens to a lot of astronauts when they go to space—they suddenly feel a sense of connectedness with their fellow human beings down below. Because from space, you can’t see any national borders. It’s just continents and seas and clouds. And so, many astronauts have come home and described these feelings. And the stories are indicative of a cognitive shift, almost, that is known as “the overview effect.”

And I’ve talked to astronauts who say that they were taken aback by the borderless world and how beautiful it is, how it made them feel like: Why are we at war? Why is there conflict? We’re one planet. It made them feel whole.

I’ve also talked to one academic who did an extensive study of astronauts—and she couldn’t reveal this astronaut’s name to me—but she said that this person, when he went into space, he took one look out the window and was convinced that humanity was going to destroy itself in some hundred-number of years. And so that experience could be profound and inspiring to one person, but it could also actually make another feel despair.

And what’s happening now with space tourism and private spaceflight is that the people going into space now have heard these stories of the overview effect. It’s a thing. And so they’re expecting to feel a certain way when they go to space. They’re expecting to have a profound change on their perspective of the world, and even maybe on their personalities. And so I wonder if we’re kind of over-hyping that. And I have talked to a few professional NASA astronauts who agree. They worry that these spaceflight companies and their sales pitches to customers are overselling the effects of the overview effect. It’s not a guarantee. It’s not a gift from the universe. It’s something that a person experiences and feels individually. And your mileage will vary.

Harris: Yeah. And you said these flights are like a couple of minutes. Is that enough time to change you?

Koren: That is a great question. So I talked to Frank White, the author who coined the term “the overview effect.” He came up with it when he was flying on a plane—so, not in space, but he had a pretty good view—and he got to thinking: Future generations of humans who might be living and working in space would have this distant view of Earth all the time. And they would have these insights that regular earthbound people lack.

And he was surprised that people who were flying on Blue Origin and having a few minutes of weightlessness were coming home and talking as if they had had this profound experience. They were saying it changed them. And he was surprised because he thought that in order to really get the full hit of the overview effect, you had to spend some time in space. Weeks to months in orbit around Earth, or even all the way out on the moon.

So, that’s kind of the literature that we’re working with here. And I think that’s what’s going to change in this era of commercial spaceflight, because you are going to have people who are not like the Apollo astronauts. And they’re going to be coming home with different stories and really widening the overview effect that we’ve become familiar with as a public.

And the future participants won’t be restricted by some of the constraints that the professional astronauts were. If you were a professional astronaut and you went to space and you didn’t have a great time, I don’t think you could say that once you came back from space, because that could potentially affect your future flight assignments. You had to have a certain response on your way home. And so I think we’re about to hear some of the most honest stories of spaceflight that we’ve ever heard before.

Harris: Is the overview effect real? If we only have this limited pool of stories to pull from, is that theory a real thing? Have all of the folks who have gone up to space shared that view?

Koren: That’s a great question. And I think the way we talk about the overview effect, it becomes like this mystical, magical thing. Astronauts are revered people. Even when I’ve interviewed astronauts, when they walk into the room in their full flight suits with all their mission patches on the fabric, you can’t help but feel intimidated. Because you think: Wow, this person has seen something that I’ve never seen.

And so we think of the overview effect and the experience that people should have in space as something that the universe gives us. But it’s actually a cultural phenomenon. It has been shaped by a certain group of people working under a certain set of pressures who wanted to make sure that they could fly again.

So they couldn’t say anything outrageous. And the overview effect also came out of a certain time and place. Many of these stories come from the midst of the space race, in the middle of the Cold War. That definitely shapes a person’s perspective. So I would say that seeing Earth from space is not a one-size-fits-all reaction.

Harris: What are some of the interviews that stuck out because they may have differed from this idea of an overview effect?

Koren: So I spoke with William Shatner about his space flight. He was 90 years old when he took that trip. I recorded some of my conversation with Shatner. And he said it was a really transformational experience, but not for the reasons that we’re used to hearing.

Harris: So you got to talk to Captain Kirk?

Koren: I did, yes! I will admit: I have never seen Star Trek before.

Harris: So we have a space reporter who’s never seen Star Trek?

Koren: (Laughs.) I haven’t. But you’ve seen it, right?

Harris: I have seen Star Trek. It was playing pretty frequently on our TVs when I was a kid. My dad rarely missed episodes or reruns. [But] for people like Marina who don’t know who Captain Kirk is: He’s the captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek in the 1960s. The original captain. And he was this really optimistic figure—this really sort of classical hero. [But] what did Shatner have to say about going to space? Actually being there?

Koren: When I talked to him, it was about a year after his experience, and the flight was still really fresh in his mind. I asked him how he was feeling a year out, and he dove right into a Shatner-esque monologue about going to space.

William Shatner: We had emerged from the film of air that surrounds the Earth, and we’re weightless. I got out of my five-point harness and made my way to the window. I saw a wake of air. Like a submarine might leave in the water.

And then I looked to my right, which was facing space. When I looked up there, I saw nothing but blank, palpable space. The blackness was so overwhelming. My immediate thought was: My God, that’s death.

And then I looked back, and I could see with great clarity the beginning of the circumference line of the earth. The color of the desert that I had just left, which was beige. The whiteness of the clouds. The blueness of the air. And those three colors in deference to the blackness—I was overwhelmed by the sense of death and overwhelmed by the sense-nurturing by the Earth.

Koren: When Shatner came back from his quick trip to space, he’s standing outside the capsule; there’s other people around him. Jeff Bezos is there. Bezos is popping champagne like a frat boy. And Shatner is just standing there, super still.

Shatner: I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I was weeping, and I didn’t know why. Everybody else was celebrating. It took me a couple of hours sitting by myself to understand that what I was feeling was grief. And the grief for the Earth.

Koren: He is overcome with emotion. He is weeping, and then he starts saying how he was just taken aback by the blackness of space, the ugliness of space, how it looked like death.

So Shatner was super, super honest about his experience. And when I talked to him, he said that that grief was still with him. Earth was beautiful and gleaming and delicate from that perspective, but it just reminded him of everything that’s wrong on the ground and particularly made him think about how unstoppable climate change feels.

And so for him, this was in many ways a negative experience. And Shatner was starting to cry when we were talking about it, because the experience is so fresh in his mind and nothing about climate change and the prognosis there has really changed in the last year since he went to space. So that grief was still with him.

Harris: How was his experience different from what he may have imagined that he would feel after going up to space?

Koren: He told me that he expected to see Earth and just be reminded of how beautiful and wonderful this planet is. I think he expected it to be reaffirming in a positive way. And it’s interesting to think of this man who played a character who was this really big space optimist in real life going to space, and his initial emotional reaction to that is grief and sadness and all kinds of negative emotion.

I think what Shatner shares with other astronauts is: When people have gone to space, they have felt an overwhelming desire to take care of the planet. You really see that this is all there is. This is all we know, at least. And if this is our one home on this floating ball of rock in the void, then we should take care of it.

And so, you know, there’s a case to be made that the more people go up into space, that feeling will trickle down and lead to some type of meaningful improvement on Earth.

Harris: If somebody gives you a ticket on a $20 million flight, you’re not gonna be able to say, “Well, that wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be.” But Shatner was able to do something different. Why was his experience different from others who have been up to space and came back down and just said, “Oh, it was great. Thanks, Jeff Bezos, for putting me on this flight”?

Koren: I mean, William Shatner is William Shatner, right? He was 90 years old during his space flight. He’s Captain Kirk. I think he doesn’t owe Jeff Bezos anything. Yes, Bezos comped his ticket, and that’s lovely. But someone like William Shatner going into space can come back and say what they want, because the public looks at them in a different way. If a very wealthy person decides to comp the tickets for an electrician [or] for a nurse, and they go up and come down, can they speak their minds very freely? I don’t know.

Harris: Say a billionaire called you up and was like: “Hey, Marina, love your stories. You wanna go to space?” Would you go if you got the opportunity?

Koren: Oh man, well, there would be some conversation about journalistic ethics. But would I ever go to space? I’m gonna say no.

Harris: Really?

Koren: Because spaceflight is risky. You never know what might happen, what could happen. I don’t wanna die on the job not having filed my story. Like, if something happens—if I’m somehow incapacitated, I come back and I can’t write the story—that will haunt me. (Laughs.)

Planes freak me out. I still can’t believe that we can get planes off the ground and land them back in one piece. And, you know, space is not at that level yet, but maybe someday it will be. And that’s pretty wild to think about.

Harris: Actually, to that point, thousands of people fly at high altitudes every day. Do you think that there’s a future where spaceflight is going to feel as sort of commonplace as taking a flight to LaGuardia?

Koren: I think that future is possible. I think what we have to be careful about is making too many promises. If you listen to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos talk about spaceflight right now, they’re suggesting that this future is happening, like, next week. And I don’t think that future will happen that quickly. It’s true that more people than before are going to have the opportunity to go to space now. I’m not sure if in my lifetime there are going to be spaceships full of people going to the moon.

I mean, there might be. SpaceX and Elon Musk are working really, really hard to make that future reality. SpaceX’s next-generation moon rocket could reach orbit as early as next year. SpaceX has already sold tickets to people to go on a trip around the moon. These things are happening. How quickly they become reality, I don’t know. Maybe 50 years from now when we’re a hundred years out from the Apollo-program anniversary, maybe it will feel a bit more mundane, just like a plane ride.

Harris: Is some of the mystique fading from space, or space travel? Are we sort of becoming desensitized to space travel? Those first couple of commercial flights, it was all 24-hour news cycle. They broadcast all of them. But that sort of slowed down. Are we sort of becoming desensitized to the awe and wonder of space travel?

Koren: I think that’s possible. I think of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968. That picture was mind-blowing to people. They’d never seen Earth like this before. Fifty years later, I think our brains are so spoiled by special effects that I do wonder if the sight of Earth from space is going to be that shocking. Especially when you have so many people going into orbit and coming back and posting on Instagram like: “Here’s what it looks like.” I do wonder if we’ve seen so much incredible CGI, if our modern brains might be less impressed by the view than maybe people were in the 1960s. But I also don’t know if that’s just some dumb millennial take.

Harris: It’s like if somebody goes up, and they’re like: “This isn’t what Interstellar looked like.”

Koren: (Laughs.) “Where’s the wormhole?”

Harris: “I was expecting a wormhole.” And all they see is, as Shatner said, this great blackness of space.

Here is the happy part: For more than four years, a funky-looking spacecraft did something remarkable. It was in many ways just another robot, a combination of hardy materials, circuits, and sensors with a pair of solar panels jutting out like wings on an insect. But this particular robot has listened to the ground shake on Mars. It has felt marsquakes beneath its little mechanical feet.

NASA and European space agencies designed the spacecraft to study these Martian quakes in detail. Mission managers, in their seemingly endless capacity to invent twisty acronym names for space-bound projects, called it Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport—or InSight, for short. Once on Mars, InSight couldn’t go anywhere; it was a lander, not a rover, so the mission was rooted to the spot where it touched down. Every picture the robot beamed home showed the same dusty, cinnamon-colored expanse, but behind the understated photography, InSight was waiting for the marsquakes to roll in.

Here is the sad part: InSight stopped calling home this month. The mission, NASA concluded last week, had run out of energy. (Who says space exploration isn’t relatable?) Dust has been accumulating on those bug-like solar panels all year, diminishing the lander’s power supply until it couldn’t even wake up.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

The end of InSight prompted a round of doleful news coverage, with sweet praise for the little lander. We humans can’t help but anthropomorphize robots, especially the ones we have dispatched to the other worlds in our solar system, tasked with absorbing all the wonder for us until they no longer can. (It didn’t help that when the time came, NASA tweeted from the mission’s account in the voice of the dying lander, “My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send.”)

The sappy reaction felt extra poignant this time around. A lander is less flashy, and perhaps less interesting, than a rover. It is easier to create a compelling, heartwarming story about a machine that roams the surface of an alien world and inspects the landscape with the delight of a small child finding a cool rock. It is easier still to fawn over a tiny helicopter on Mars, which flew for the first time last year. Even as the stationary InSight did historic work—studying the rumble of a world beyond Earth for the first time since the Apollo astronauts took seismometers to the moon—it seemed like a supporting character in the cast of Mars missions. There’s no space robot I’ve wanted to anthropomorphize more.

Mars wasn’t easy on InSight. Take the case of the soil snafu. The lander arrived on Mars in late 2018 with an instrument designed to hammer into the surface to measure the interior’s heat. But no matter how hard InSight (and its stewards back home) tried, the instrument wouldn’t sink into the ground. Based on their understanding of Mars’s terrain, scientists had expected InSight to encounter fine, sandy soil at its landing site in Elysium Planitia, a flat plain near the equator. Instead, the soil was clumpy, providing little friction for the tool to work properly.

[Read: The luckiest rover]

Scientists and engineers spent two years trying to maneuver the instrument deeper beneath the surface, even telling InSight to use its robotic arm to help bury the instrument—a task that the arm wasn’t meant for. But the tool remained stuck—seriously, so relatable!—and by early 2021, NASA was forced to give up on this part of the mission. “It’s a huge disappointment,” Sue Smrekar, the deputy principal investigator of the InSight mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me back then.

InSight also suffered from a bit of a paradox: The very conditions that permitted it to do its work also eventually depleted its energy. (Again, I feel you, InSight.) The mission’s seismometer was so sensitive that vibrations produced by the Martian wind could obscure a gentle tremor. That made the Martian summer, with its calmer weather, the best time to catch quakes. But windless days also allowed dust to accumulate on InSight’s solar panels and blocked much-needed sunlight.

The mission didn’t come with any dust-removing technology. InSight’s human caretakers occasionally instructed the robot to use its robotic arm to sprinkle the solar panels with dirt, which, when swept away by the wind, took some of the smaller, stickier pieces of dust with it. In space exploration, mundane mechanisms can quickly become complicated, very expensive hardware that must be tested relentlessly here on Earth if they stand a chance of working on an entirely different world. Plus, interplanetary missions must travel light. Instead of investing in windshield wipers, mission managers chose to make the solar panels as large as they could so that the spacecraft could soak up more rays, even as the dust that would be its downfall began to pile up.

[Read: We’ve never seen Mars quite like this]

Despite the soil saga and its battery woes, InSight kept listening for marsquakes, detecting its largest earlier this spring, at a magnitude of 5. (On Earth, such a quake would rattle dishes and break windows.) InSight even detected the vibrations produced when meteoroids fell from the sky and hit the surface. And its readings clued astronomers in on the fact that Elysium Planitia is one of the most geologically exciting places on Mars: A recent analysis found that a plume of hot material is bubbling up through Mars’s mantle like “hot blobs of wax rising in lava lamps,” lifting part of the plain in a noticeable peak.

NASA says that it will continue to listen for a signal from InSight, but the lander is unlikely to pipe up again. The robot will become, like other Mars missions before it, a curious piece of junk courtesy of the aliens next door. From its perch, InSight explored Mars in a way no other mission to the red planet had done before, and the data will benefit future missions, including those that may someday include robots and people. The spacecraft felt something fascinating and truly alien on our behalf. Over a trying few years, it did its best.

The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars.

As I slid the books back onto the shelf, they rejoined the long parade of animals around his bedroom: the moose and his muffin, Peter Rabbit, Elmer the patchwork elephant, Lars the polar bear, Lyle the crocodile, stuffed kangaroos and octopi and lions and turtles. Every night, I sing “Baby Beluga” to him as a lullaby: “Goodnight, little whale, goodnight.”

That evening, my mind jumped to a book I’d had when I was little that I recently bought for my son. It’s called Physty: The True Story of a Young Whale’s Rescue, by Richard Ellis. The book tells a slightly embellished but true tale of a sperm whale that ended up beached on the shore of Fire Island in 1981 and was nursed back to health by a group of scientists and vets. I loved learning that young whales gleefully dive and splash just like I did, and that they jump out of the water simply because it’s fun.

But lately, I have started to worry that I am populating my son’s imagination with species that could go extinct before he has a chance to understand that they’re real. We read about Physty the same way we do about Custard the dragon. To him, they are equally delightful and fantastical, neither real nor unreal. He sees fossils of dinosaurs, and I tell him that they disappeared millions of years ago. Even if whales or tigers don’t vanish entirely in the next several decades, in our age of accelerated environmental damage—climate change and what some scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction—I’m concerned that many of these books about the incredible, unlikely diversity of animal life on this planet will feel like fairy tales too.

I am a climate-change and environmental journalist, and thinking about whales now means considering the multiplying threats they face: warming waters, ocean noise, pollution, disappearing food sources, ship collisions, overfishing. Although many species’ populations have rebounded since the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, the outlook for others is not good: Of the 13 kinds of great whales, six are endangered or vulnerable.

[Read: How I talk to my daughter about climate change]

Whales aren’t the only threatened storybook animals. “We are going to lose Gorilla and Brown Bear, Brown Bear,”  says Hillary Young, a community ecologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies our biodiversity crisis and is a mother of three. “But we’re also losing Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar, because our loss of animal life is so deep and pervasive.”

Scientists predict that as many as 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of going extinct, “many within decades,” according to the United Nations. This era of “biological annihilation” is already under way: In ecosystems spanning the globe, the average amount of plant and animal life has fallen by about a fifth—mostly since the beginning of the last century. Climate change is driving these dynamics by limiting or shifting species’ geographical ranges, which alters and removes the food, water, and habitat that they require.

In some ways, the current crisis is a new version of what has been happening from the age of colonization onward. It has become more intense in the centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity entered a new phase of exploitation and extraction of natural resources. The decline of animals and their habitats, and of the cultures that followed and relied on them, has long been colonialism’s destructive legacy, and Indigenous communities have warned for generations about its effects on their identity and survival. But given the quickening pace and severity of change, different forms of this phenomenon may come to pass in every community.

I’m relatively insulated from many of the worst effects of global warming thus far, but some parents don’t have the chance to worry about how to break the bad news about the planet to their kids, because their homes were destroyed in hurricanes or fires or floods. Despite having been born in 2022—one of the warmest recorded years in human history, which by October had marked 29 billion-dollar disasters, and which began with a North Atlantic right whale population of about 340, the lowest number in 20 years—my child is one of the lucky ones.

Plenty of difficult subjects lurk in the margins of children’s books but don’t evoke dread or guilt for me. When I read The Story of Ferdinand to my son, I don’t worry so deeply about the day he finds out from me, or elsewhere, what the banderilleros and picadors and matador want to do to the bull hero. But climate change feels different—it seems to foreclose the future. Scientists can study to what degree seas will rise and ice caps will melt and heat waves will bake the Earth. For the first time, we have a plausible model for what is to come, and we know that it will bring a diminished version of the world we were born into, a more chaotic and difficult one.

[Read: How extinction shaped the Australian outback]

Still, Young reminded me, for kids, this understanding is an example of a shifting baseline, a phenomenon that Daniel Pauly explored in 1995 in a paper about the attempt to establish sustainable commercial-catch levels for various fish species. Now the term is used to describe “new normals” more generally: Once we become aware of a set of conditions, we understand them as "normal," and they become the standard against which we compare any aberrance. Our books’ meanings have changed already, Young said. If Are You My Mother? were written today, the story might feel much more bleak, and the hatchling might not be able to find his mom: Since 1970, nearly 60 percent of the bird species in North America have seen population declines, a net loss of about 3 billion birds.

Perhaps it's a delusion to think that I will have much control over what my son learns about the natural world. I also don’t want to keep stories from him because they have become artifacts instead of portals to discovery. It seems possible, instead, to teach him about the world as it was while not shielding him from what is happening. Lauren Oakes, a conservation scientist and an author, also has a young son, and she says she is hesitant to introduce him to narratives of loss, though she also knows that she can’t shut out the reality of climate change entirely. Her son recently came home from a trip to the planetarium and barged into her office shouting, “The planet is changing!”

“Part of our job as parents is to foster wonder,” she told me. “I think our children are born into some innate reverence for nature, and that sometimes gets taken out of us.”

In a 1956 essay for Woman’s Home Companion, Rachel Carson, the marine biologist and author of Silent Spring, wrote about a child’s inborn sense of wonder. It can falter in adulthood, she warns, withered by disenchantment, preoccupation with the artificial, and “alienation from our sources of strength.” Carson urges her adult readers to encourage children’s capacity for exploration and connection.

She also suggests that the adults will get something out of it too, as we do with most acts of empathy. “Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you,” she wrote. “For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind … One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”

[Read: Boston is losing its snow wicked fast]

We, or our children, may reach a day when there will be no more really snowy days in New York City, or no more monarch butterflies. I don’t entirely know what to do with Physty and Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar and Gorilla and the red fish and the blue fish. But abandoning these stories because the animals might go extinct feels like the worst kind of indulgence—it presumes that we can’t do anything to save the species we love. Of course we can, but it will mean changing our behavior and inhabiting this Earth in a way that is more compatible with different kinds of life. Addressing the climate and biodiversity crises requires collective action: voting; getting involved in civil society and advocating for environmental protection within our communities; asking questions and demanding transparency of the companies we work for and shop from; talking with our friends, families, and co-workers about the challenges we face together. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

If I knew that no one would ever see a sperm whale again, would I read my son the story of Physty at bedtime? I don’t know, but I’d rather teach him about the possibility of a world where people worked to make sure that cataclysmic future didn’t come to pass—one where he and I and his dad were part of that project. There is a flip side to the ability to imagine a future without these animals: imagining one with them.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

If an asteroid were to gain sentience and set a course for Earth, might it pick a time like the holidays in order to catch the humans off guard? Well, that’s not going to work: Someone is monitoring space for incoming objects, holidays or not.

Kelly Fast manages the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which funds observatory teams at U.S. institutions using telescopes located around the world. And yes, she told me, researchers monitor the night sky even when most of the country has the day off.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Seeing Earth from space will change you]

Fast and I discussed the program and the day-to-day work of keeping the planet safe from asteroids.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: When we talk about looking for asteroids—or near-earth objects—what does that mean?

Kelly Fast: It’s astronomers using telescopes. What they’re looking for are objects that look like stars but are moving relative to those background stars. And then they report those observations.

You have a number of telescopes, like the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona and Pan-STARRS at the University of Hawaii, that NASA funds to search for near-Earth asteroids. They do that survey every night—or every night that they can. Things like weather or the full moon can be a problem. But that’s why it’s nice having a number of telescopes, because someone can always be looking, even if the sky is cloudy in one location.

Nyce: Is a full moon just too bright?

Fast: Right. It just makes the sky bright. And so, if you’re looking for fainter objects, it kind of overwhelms them. But only the area of sky right around the full moon is a problem.

We have a network of telescopes doing that search effort. And all of them report their observations of moving objects to the Minor Planet Center, which is funded by NASA but is the internationally recognized repository for natural-object, small-body position measurements of all kinds—not just near-Earth asteroids. Everybody reports their measurements there. And if there is something that isn’t already associated with an object that’s already known, then it’s put on the near-Earth-object confirmation page at the Minor Planet Center.

Other astronomers can go and look there and see what needs additional observations. It’s one thing to have spotted something that might be a new asteroid discovery, but if you don’t get enough information on it—enough positions to be able to calculate an orbit and figure out where it’s going to be in the future—then that doesn’t help you much.

Nyce: When you do identify something, could it also be falling space junk?

Fast: Or, really, space junk in orbit. Or operating satellites. But that gets weeded out to the extent possible based on what’s available in public catalogs. Plus, often, they move at different rates.

It’s for the Minor Planet Center to make that determination, because they take those observations and determine an orbit from it. And from that they can tell, Oh, this is in orbit around the sun. This isn’t an Earth-orbiting satellite.

Nyce: How close is “near Earth”?

Fast: The definition of a near-Earth asteroid is any asteroid with an orbit that brings it within about one-and-a-third of the distance from the sun to the Earth. But not all near-Earth asteroids actually come close to Earth’s orbit. And so there’s a subset of those that we’d really want to keep an eye on—that if it were to be in the same place at the same time as the Earth one day, we’d want to know well ahead of time.

NASA also funds the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They look at all those data at the Minor Planet Center, and do a precision orbit determination way out into the future to see if anything could pose a long-term impact threat to Earth. The goal is to find something that maybe poses a threat years or decades in advance.

Nyce: It sounds like we have a little bit of lead-up time to figure out where they’re going and where they might come into the Earth.

Fast: That is certainly the goal. But there is always the chance that something could be discovered maybe in the short term. But probably very small. You can see most of the large objects much farther away, maybe many orbits ahead of time. But it can happen. We actually had an impactor just a few weeks ago.

Nyce: Oh, really?

Fast: Well, we’re talking very small. The nice thing about our atmosphere is it does a good job of disintegrating small objects. You just see a pretty shooting star or fireball. That happens all the time.

Technically, an asteroid, as defined by the International Astronomical Union, is a natural object larger than a meter in size. Our atmosphere takes care of objects that are that size very easily. The one we had a few weeks ago, 2022 WJ1, was discovered in space before it impacted. And that’s only happened, like, six times before—where an object was discovered in space and linked to an actual fireball seen in Earth’s atmosphere. One of them, a number of years ago, was on New Year’s Day. The universe doesn’t care that we have holidays.

I know you were interested in who’s on the watch over the holidays. The nice thing is it’s not just one person; there are teams of people and a lot of automated systems that do orbit determination and then flag if there’s something that should be an alert.  

If you read about the object just a few weeks ago, that’s exactly what happened. A telescope reported the data. Minor Planet Center put it on the confirmation page. And then the Scout system, which was developed by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, flagged it and said this has a chance of impacting. And so then there were more observations taken, and the impact region was narrowed down. And then the fireball was seen—a nice exercise of the system.

Nyce: You said we’ve had only six that we’ve been able to connect from to the fireball actually in the atmosphere? Are there other ones that slip through?

Kelly: Well, these objects are very small—just a couple of meters in size—and they’re not the ones that NASA is tasked to try to discover, and certainly not ones that we need to warn people about. We end up treating it like an exercise. It’s not that others slip through. They are taken care of by the atmosphere anyway.

We’d certainly want to warn about something much larger. In the case of the Chelyabinsk impact in Russia back in 2013, that was a much larger object, probably about 20 meters in size. But it was coming from the direction of the sun, from the daytime sky. So it wasn’t something that could be warned about ahead of time. And it wasn’t one that was known many orbits ahead of time. And so that was one that did catch everyone, because there was no way to see it.

Nyce: So there are still surprises in your business?

Fast: Right. NASA is tasked by Congress to find these objects, specifically near-Earth asteroids 140 meters in size and larger—a size that can have regional consequences should one impact the Earth. Obviously, NASA wants to find objects of any size that could hit the Earth, but this is the task Congress has assigned.

[From the August 1898 issue: Reminiscences of an astronomer]

NASA’s been looking for ways to kind of speed up the discovery of near-Earth asteroids, because we keep finding objects of that size and larger. And people who do models of the asteroid population can tell that there are more out there that we haven’t found. So NASA is working on a mission to help speed up the discovery of near-Earth asteroids. And it’s called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor. It’s a space telescope that works in the infrared, and it’s very specifically designed to search for near-Earth asteroids. It would be able to look in parts of the sky closer to the direction of the sun, for instance, than what the telescopes on the ground can do.

It’s going to be a very powerful way to speed up the discovery of these objects. Maybe we’ll find none of them pose an impact threat. And that would be fabulous. And maybe we find that one could pose a threat, and it’s years in the future, and that would give time to learn more about it—maybe plan, if needed, a deflection mission. The goal is to not be in a scrambling situation but to have the luxury of time.

Nyce: How much can be done by humans? Are asteroids a solvable problem by mankind?

Fast: An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that could be avoided because mankind can do something.

The DART [Double Asteroid Redirection Test] mission [during which NASA flew a spacecraft into an asteroid and changed its orbit] was fabulous, because that was just a test just to try it out. It’s physics. If you want to deflect an asteroid, the simplest way is to impact it and change its velocity so that its orbit changes. This was very small scale, and it was done in a test situation with a binary asteroid, because it was just changing the orbit of one asteroid around another. It was very successful. We can use these data to help inform, should we ever have to design a larger mission. That was a big milestone, to have gone from just doing calculations for how you could deflect an asteroid to an actual mission test.

As for the large or multi-kilometer-sized near-Earth asteroids that would pose global consequences, we’re not as concerned about those, because most of that population has been discovered. And so that population is a lot better understood. At the other end of the spectrum, as I mentioned, there are these small, couple-of-meter-sized asteroids that don’t make it to the ground intact.

It’s that intermediate range that wouldn’t have global consequences but could still do some serious regional damage. And so, we’re working on that population. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Illustrations by Miki Lowe

Not everyone appreciated Richard Wilbur. The second poet laureate of the United States, he was the recipient of multiple Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award. Still, plenty of readers thought he was … a little meh. One New York Times reviewer said that reading Wilbur’s collection The Mind-Reader was like conversing with “an old friend whose talk is genial but familiar—and occasionally dull.” Another critic argued that Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.” He often wrote of the natural world with earnest appreciation—a style that became particularly unchic in the ’60s, when the dark, personal “confessional poetry” of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton was peaking.

Wilbur conceded that yes, he tended to see the world with a positive glow. He once said he believed “that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.” And yet, his optimism wasn’t hollow of intellect. “A Black Birch in Winter” exemplifies this: The Times reviewer referenced the poem to say that Wilbur, at best, is “a fine amateur natural historian,” able to paint pretty portraits of birches and other fauna. But the work isn’t really about trees at all. It’s about the ways in which our passing years can give us new perspectives, like fresh wood on an ancient trunk—and how time, in that sense, can make us open and wide-eyed rather than “finished” and deadened.

Wilbur is also clearly gesturing to his mentor Robert Frost’s poem “Birches.” In it, Frost imagines a young boy climbing a birch tree, scrambling up toward the sky. How tempting to keep going forever, he implies, to transcend everyday life altogether. But eventually, one needs to come back down. “Earth’s the right place for love,” Frost writes. You could see “A Black Birch,” then, as a response to those who felt that Wibur’s work was unambitious. Certainly, reaching for big ideas—questions of life, death, human limitation—is essential to poetry. But Wilbur seemed to think you could do that from Earth, looking up.

As we approach 2023, the old birch really does feel like a good metaphor. This year’s been tough; I feel haggard, “roughened” like the bark that used to be “smooth, and glossy-dark.” But I’ll be thinking of New Year’s as an “annual rebirth,” and attempting to mimic what the birch has mastered: “To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.”

— Faith Hill

You can zoom in on the page here.

This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.

Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun. And there are unfamiliar characters to get to know, including the children of Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), the protagonists whose romance was chronicled in 2009’s Avatar.

[Read: The 10 best films of 2022]

But one fresh face has induced more cringes than cheers. Miles Socorro (Jack Champion), a white kid who sports dreadlocks and goes by the nickname “Spider,” isn’t a Sully by blood, but he tries quite hard to be. Left behind as a baby on Pandora, he was unable to return to Earth because he was too small to survive the journey. Now a teenager, he wears only a loincloth and paints blue stripes on his skin to look more like the native Na’vi. He speaks the language, growls a lot, and indulges in juvenile antics, scampering onto lab equipment and annoying as many characters—alien and human alike—as he can. Jake considers him a “stray cat”; Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter with a mysterious origin, calls him “monkey boy.” He’s basically Pandora’s Chet Hanks—or a pint-size Tarzan, if you want to be more charitable.

Yet, as goofy as he may be, Spider is an essential addition to the franchise. Really. In some ways, he’s the new Jake, a human caught up in the Na’vi world. But Spider has no avatar—a genetically engineered hybrid body used to freely roam Pandora—so he must navigate his habitat with an oxygen mask, always at a disadvantage compared with his blue friends. He’s also revealed to be the biological son of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the hateful villain from the first film who sought to destroy Pandora and who is resurrected for the sequel in a new, upgraded avatar form. Spider thus exists in a nebulous space when it comes to his identity. He’s the offspring of the worst of mankind and wishes to resist his background, yet he cannot completely participate in the culture he admires and, in the case of his crush on Kiri, adores. He’s unlike anybody else in The Way of Water, and, as such, he makes the film’s story as interesting to watch as the spectacle the director James Cameron spent so long fine-tuning.

[Read: Hollywood learned all the wrong lessons from Avatar]

Consider what Spider does in the final hour of the film, when he saves Quaritch’s life—and then rejects the man’s offer to join him. The first decision has probably contributed to Spider’s unpopularity, but both choices deepen the emotional stakes. Like the first Avatar, The Way of Water is in part about how humans can’t help but lay waste to natural wonders; unlike its predecessor, however, it’s also interested in observing the dynamics of found families. Although he feels a pull to rescue his biological father, Spider refuses to leave the Sullys behind. His presence makes both Quaritch and the Sullys more fascinating to follow: Quaritch is gutted when Spider turns him down, and the Sullys will eventually have to process what Spider did. Besides, Spider seems unsure of his own motives. Perhaps he recovered Quaritch out of pity. Perhaps his upbringing with the Na’vi taught him to value life at all costs.

Or perhaps he’s beginning to see that Pandora is not paradise, no matter who’s in control. Spider is a naive teenager enamored with a culture he only thinks he understands, and who’s in desperate need of growing up. In the final showdown between Quaritch and the Sullys, he seems to do just that. During the fight, Spider becomes an observer—too small to deal much damage, but close enough to pick up on how dangerous the Sullys can be, most of all Neytiri. In one scene, Cameron trains the camera on Spider’s face, allowing us to watch how Spider’s perspective of her shifts: He goes from being in awe of her ability to being scared by her intensity. When she threatens his life so that Quaritch will let go of her child, something in Spider’s regard for her breaks.

That doesn’t mean his attitude toward the Na’vi changes entirely. The Way of Water ends before it can explore the aftermath of Jake and Quaritch’s battle, but the film offers hints of the personal stakes to come for these characters. The first Avatar worked so well because its eye-popping visuals were paired with familiar, even predictable storytelling beats. In Spider, Cameron has created someone with the potential to help maintain that balance through the sequels. His growth could yield either a hero’s journey or a turn toward darkness—or maybe something in between, especially if his interest in Kiri blossoms into something more.

Of course, I can’t in good conscience fully defend a character whose vibe is, as my colleague David Sims put it in his review, “a little questionable.” But as grating as Spider can be, and as repetitive and petulant as his dialogue gets, I saw him as a secret weapon—at the very least for showing off the film’s effects. Scenes involving him, a character performed without the use of motion-capture technology, look seamless despite how much he interacts with the Na’vi. In the end, Spider is perhaps the perfect supporting character for a movie like The Way of Water. Like the waves lapping the Metkayina’s shores, he’s able to subtly polish the story and the sights.

Scientists have identified two minerals never before seen on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tons (33,510 pounds).

From a spacecraft the size of a refrigerator plowing into an asteroid (deliberately) to a helicopter trying to catch a rocket plummeting back to Earth, 2022 offered surreal moments in space that could have been ripped from the pages of a science fiction movie script.

Maybe you have not had the best year. But take some consolation from the fact that you did not YOLO yourself into overpaying for an unprofitable social-media platform, publicly try to wriggle out of the deal, get lawyered into ponying up, liquidate billions of dollars of stock in a down market to do so, take over a company you did not really want, shitpost your way into a revenue crisis, quit paying your bills, antagonize your super-users, wink-wink at Nazis, and decimate your staff, all the while damaging your other, more lucrative businesses. Or at least probably not, unless you are Elon Musk. Twitter’s new owner might have fared better than Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate who improbably saved Musk from winning the title of Tech Fortune–Craterer of the Year. But Musk nevertheless spent 2022 lighting billions of dollars and his reputation on fire.

Musk’s behavior raises many questions, such as Why?, Why?, and Why?! And Is he going to bankrupt this thing? He looks like he is trying to: On Tuesday evening, Musk vowed to resign as CEO of Twitter “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” He and whoever is foolish enough to succeed him certainly face a challenging year ahead. The once–richest man on Earth took over a company losing $220 million a year and multiplied its losses by 10, if not more, according to one analyst’s estimate. Twitter looks likely to bleed users, advertisers, and money for the foreseeable future. But the social network is Musk’s to fund, not just run. And he’s one of the few people on the planet with essentially limitless amounts of money to lose.

[Caroline Mimbs-Nyce: This is what it looks like when Twitter falls apart]

Musk’s Twitter purchase never made much financial sense. The company’s core microblogging product has scarcely changed since its debut in the mid-aughts. Its user base has stopped expanding in the United States. Its engagement levels are declining. And the company—less than one-third the size of TikTok and one-tenth the size of Facebook, as measured by monthly active users—has turned a profit in just two of the past 10 years.

But Musk bought the platform for personal and ideological reasons, not financial ones. In the spring, he bought a large chunk of the site’s shares, promising to push Twitter to be friendlier to the political right. Shortly after that, he offered to take the company private, to turn it into “the platform for free speech around the globe,” he wrote in a letter to its then-chair, by which he seems to have meant the platform for anti-Semitism, racism, and white-nationalist incitement. Plus, Musk is an impulsive rich dude who just really, really loves to post: suggesting we nuke Mars, defaming a hero who saved a bunch of schoolkids, making “boner” jokes at Bill Gates’s expense, getting in a fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission by falsely claiming he had “secured” funding to take Tesla private at—deep breath—$420 a share.

In Musk, idiosyncratic ends had endless means. And in April, he offered to buy Twitter at—inhale again—$54.20 a share, significantly higher than its share price at the time. Twitter’s executives naturally took the offer. The price tag might have been hefty, but the plan was a straightforward one: Get control of Twitter. Narrow its losses. Expand its revenue base. Make the company profitable. Hold it, sell it, or, most likely, have it go public again. Make bank.

On the cost side, Musk did trim the budget, if as erratically as possible. He purged more than half of the company’s workforce, firing many employees outright and asking those remaining to sign up for an “extremely hardcore” cultural reset. This produced “significant savings,” Drew Pascarella, who teaches corporate finance to M.B.A. students at Cornell, told me, adding that Musk also seems to have positioned the company to renegotiate its rent and other contracts.

But Musk has slashed Twitter’s income as erratically as possible too. Nearly all of the social network’s revenue comes from advertisements. Numerous deep-pocketed companies—Chevrolet, Ford, Jeep, BlackRock, Citigroup, Chanel, Nestl​​é, Coca-Cola, Merck, Verizon, Wells Fargo, the list goes on and on—have pulled or paused advertising in the past two months. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told me he estimated that Musk’s takeover has cost the company as much as $4 billion. “That’s a gut punch,” Ives said.

Those companies have stopped putting ads on the site, I would note, because of Musk. “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers,” Musk himself wrote on Twitter. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” He also insisted that hate speech has declined during his tenure. But independent researchers have found the opposite. After his takeover, use of the N-word increased by 202 percent; the use of homophobic, misogynist, and transphobic slurs went up at double-digit rates; the use of the slur groomer has increased exponentially. Coca-Cola does not want to put its ads next to vile terminology and anti-Semitic Pepe memes, including ones Musk himself is posting.

[Tom Nichols: The childish drama of Elon Musk]

Plus, Musk loaded Twitter up with debt—some $13 billion of it—when he acquired it via a leveraged buyout. The company is going to need to make loan payments, roughly $1 billion a year, even if it is running in the red. It has options. Musk could write the checks; he is “unfathomably wealthy,” Pascarella told me. “While most of his wealth is not liquid, I have no reason to believe he won’t be able to come up with several billion dollars of cash if need be.” Musk could buy the debt from the company’s creditors. He could raise new equity investment, something he seems to be trying to do already. Or, in an extreme case, Twitter could go bankrupt.

Right now Musk is using “Tesla stock as his personal ATM machine to fund the losses from Twitter,” Ives noted. But his behavior has cratered Tesla’s stock, which has dropped 42 percent in the past six months. (By comparison, shares in Toyota are down 13 percent and Ford’s stock is flat.) If Tesla becomes even more distressed, that could be a problem; the company’s shareholders are uneasy and rightly angry. A broader economic downturn could hurt the carmaker and the social network alike. Perhaps the most personally salient risk for Musk is that he could end up losing control of Tesla.  

Musk keeps personally funding this thing that he bought, hates, and is ruining is not exactly a happy financial equilibrium. Some adult needs to come in to return the social network to that general plan: keep it running, cut losses, and get it ready to go public again several years down the road. Good luck to whoever is foolish enough to want to do that.