A recently discovered green comet will soon zip by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. It was last visible in the night sky during the Stone Age.

Illustrations by Daniele Castellano

Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.

The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen.

The planetary-science community is extremely eager to get a robot over there and start exploring. No spacecraft has visited Titan since 2005—the farthest landing a robot had ever made from Earth—and that mission was short-lived: The lander sampled the atmosphere on its descent to the surface and ran out of power three hours after touching down. That was a glimpse of Titan; scientists want to bask in the landscape, and soon. Technicians are already testing some of Dragonfly’s hardware. The mission, if it launches on schedule, will reach Titan in … 2034.

2034! That’s the space biz for you. The solar system (not to mention the galaxy and the rest of the universe) is big, and getting around it can take years. When NASA announced the Dragonfly mission a few years ago, I imagined my future self, still employed as a space reporter, covering the triumphant landing. If the universe allows it, I realized, I’ll be 44 when the spacecraft lands on Titan. When I did that math, I experienced a twinge of something between surprise and discomfort.

The more I think about the space events of the future, the more existentially unmoored I feel—especially when those moments are far away. Consider Halley’s Comet, a celestial object that periodically whizzes past Earth on its loop around the sun. I was not yet born the last time the comet appeared in the night sky, delighting spectators in 1986. I know for a fact that the next sighting will come in 2061. But I don’t know if I’ll live to 71 to see it.

Contemplating that feels almost like motion sickness, as if I’m riding an emotional version of Space Mountain, with celestial events playing out overhead. I’ve come to think of this feeling as cosmic introspection. It can be unnerving and melancholy but also thought-provoking. “You’ve imagined that end point, but all the details in those intervening years are fuzzy,” Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University who focuses on space exploration, told me. “You can feel any way you want to about them.” So, let’s take a little trip into the future. How old will you be when a little helicopter soars through methane skies in an alien world, or when a familiar comet makes its return? And how, exactly, does that make you feel?

To understand why the future of space makes me feel some kind of way, I reached out to a few astronomers, who tend to perceive the passage of time differently than the rest of us do. These are people who think in light-years and obsess over starlight that took billions of years to reach Earth. What feels to me like a temporal abyss—11 years—is a wisp of time to Heidi Hammel, an astronomer at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Hammel told me that at a recent meeting about future space-based telescopes, she and her colleagues remarked, without a hint of irony, that the first observatory of this particular set could potentially launch in “only 12 years,” and that the entire suite could be in operation in “only 22.”

She knows, of course, how much can change, on a human scale, in two decades. Hammel spent that long working on the James Webb Space Telescope before it finally launched in 2021 and started observing the universe in unprecedented detail. In her science talks, she includes a picture of herself at the beginning of the project, with her youngest son in a baby carrier. Now her son is a graduate student who towers over her.

Before the Webb telescope, Hammel worked on the Voyager missions, NASA’s grand tour of the outer planets in the solar system. She was in the room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989. But back when the effort began, Hammel was in elementary school. Now thinking about those kids who will someday measure their life against space milestones is “an emotional thing,” she said. “I don’t know how to get my head around it.”

Humankind has long tried to put our experience of the cosmos into words, imbuing the stars with meaning and purpose. Cosmic introspection has been particularly well documented in the past half century, when space exploration really took off. Astronauts report strong responses to seeing Earth from space, including awe at our planet’s fragility and a sense of connectedness with their fellow humans. Anyone who’s seen the famous Pale Blue Dot photo, which captured Earth as a speck suspended in darkness, might have momentarily felt small and insignificant in the face of the universe. People have felt oddly proud of a drone flying for the first time on Mars, and melancholy when spacecraft run out of power or plunge onto another planet to die.

Adding another dimension—the passage of time—to our contemplation of space produces a uniquely strange sensation. Space and time are, of course, inextricably linked, as Einstein’s theories of relativity show. But when we contextualize these concepts in our own life, we tend to short-circuit—or at least I do. You’re suddenly setting your own life alongside forces that operate on an entirely different scale. You’re not just looking at a pretty picture of, say, the cliffs of the Carina Nebula—someplace you will almost certainly never go. You’re suddenly seeing sharp detail among the vague outlines of the future, and you don’t know how you’ll fit in.

“In a way, it’s horrifying,” David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute, told me. Grinspoon will be in his 70s when the NASA spacecraft he’s working on launches to Venus in 2029. “It sort of creeps up on you, and you feel like you’re a much younger age than the calendar would testify to,” he said. But the idea of still working on the project years from now thrills him too: “It’s something to look forward to at a time of life when you might otherwise be possibly filled with a little bit of dread.”

Like Hammel, Grinspoon contributed to the Voyager missions. Every time the machines flew past their targets, the team convened to take in the historic observations together, “almost like high-school reunions, except we were meeting at a different planet each time,” he said. As the mission coasted from Jupiter to Saturn, then to Uranus and Neptune, the people involved felt their own life flying by too. Some mission members retired in the in-between years, and others died. People got married and divorced. They had children. In the almost five years between the Saturn and Uranus flybys, Linda Spilker, a scientist on the mission, became a mother of two; she likes to tell her daughters that they were born when the planets aligned.

Space compels us to imagine ourselves in a future state, a cognitive process that psychologists call “mental time travel,” Dean Buonomano, a neurobiologist and researcher at UCLA who studies how our brains process time, told me. Mental time travel isn’t limited to space. Many earthly endeavors take years or decades to come to fruition—fomenting social change, for example, or even just building new subway lines. “This ability to plan for the long, long–term future, decades and even centuries ahead—it’s uniquely human,” Buonomano told me. But I’d argue that no other form of mental time travel gives rise to the distinct existential vertigo that pondering space exploration does. No human concerns unfold over the scale of billions of years, which is how long it took some of the earliest starlight in the universe to reach the Webb telescope. In forcing us to consider the longest possible arc of our future, space, more than any other domain, connects us with our most vulnerable, most essential qualities.

Not every space expert often stops to contemplate the more emotional aspects of their work. “A lot of academia is about just getting to the next stage—getting the next proposal, getting funding for the next thing, doing the next observation,” says Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies Uranus and Neptune. (The next missions to these planets won’t come around until the 2040s, or even later.) Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at MIT who is using the Webb telescope to characterize early galaxies, prefers to stay in the moment rather than worry about what new invention will come after the telescope is obsolete. Still, he feels excited about the space-future. “How can you not be optimistic?” Naidu told me. “A hundred years ago, we barely knew that there were other galaxies out there.”

For me, it’s like this: When I think about Dragonfly and 2034, I think about all of the things in my own life that haven’t happened yet, and which will happen—hopefully—by the time I’m 44. I feel optimism, dread, and tenderness for my future self, and that crystallizes, almost paradoxically, into nostalgia. It’s strange to long for a future that hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what space makes me do. A version of this sensation already exists in the literature; psychologists refer to it as “anticipatory nostalgia,” a longing for the present before it has disappeared. Space, I think, adds a certain cosmic sheen. Humanity can plan to put a spacecraft on a distant moon in a particular year, and despite the challenges of spaceflight, we can be fairly confident that the plan will work out. But none of us can predict our own trajectory with the same precision.

When I ran this nostalgia thing past astronomers, many of them got where I was coming from but didn’t quite feel the same way. Fine, so I’m the biggest sap! At least Lisa Messeri understood me. She’s an anthropologist at Yale who has written about how planetary scientists make the universe meaningful to the general public. Space doesn’t make her feel sappy, but she told me that my reaction is an attempt to transform a vast cosmic scale into a human one. “Everyone has to come up with a way to find meaning against these incomprehensible timescales,” Messeri said.

Perhaps the person best qualified to talk about cosmic introspection is Ann Druyan. She’s not an astronomer, but she helped create the Golden Record, a sort of time capsule of humanity hurtling away from Earth on each of the Voyager probes. The records contain photographs of people, sound bites of weather and wildlife, greetings in dozens of languages, and music—all intended for any alien civilizations who may find them. Druyan herself is in the Golden Record, in the form of brain waves logged while she meditated on love—specifically, her developing love for Carl Sagan, her collaborator on the project. Druyan was 28 when the Voyager missions launched; she is 73 now, and she described her involvement as an exercise in approximating eternity. “I think it liberated me, actually, from my fear of death,” Druyan told me. “My own death feels like a postscript, really, to this event in my life that was so pivotal.”

Cosmic introspection can be an uplifting exercise, assuring us that we have monumental wonders to look forward to, two or 20 years from now. But it’s also a reminder of all the magnificence we won’t live to see. Druyan wishes that Sagan, who died in 1996, could have witnessed a mission like Dragonfly; he was one of the first scientists to hypothesize that Titan has bodies of water that could potentially be conducive to life, and he urged NASA to go there. As for herself, “I don’t even know if I’ll be here in 2034,” Druyan said. “But I know that in 2034, and 2534, and 3034, those Voyagers will still be moving.”

Like Druyan, I can’t know what I’ll be doing when Dragonfly lands, but I can imagine it. I’ll be sitting at my desk, typing up a story about the mission, my back aching more than it used to. And later that night, after I’m done, I’ll go outside. I’ll look up at the night sky, searching for the familiar, sparkling pinpricks of stars and planets, and wonder, Where did all the time go?

Space imagery: Getty

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Kaitlyn: What is life but a series of meals, some of which are given dramatic titles to imbue them with random significance?

I once received an email from the comms team at Reddit promoting the company’s end-of-year data that made the claim that the top post of the preceding 12 months had been a recipe for something called “Divorce Carrot Cake.” Of course you’ve heard of Engagement Chicken, the roast chicken that reportedly brought about the betrothal of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, as well as that of Howard Stern and his second wife, Beth.

There’s also something called “Breakup Chili,” invented by our friend Tamar, that is based on the Texas-Style Chili recipe by The New York Times’ Julia Moskin and further inspired by a seminal blog post that Tamar and I have texted back and forth, and to whoever else needs to see it, for the past several years called “February is Breakup Season in Cape Town.” The post, by the writer Rosa Lyster, is about a cluster of early-winter breakups she’d observed, generally of “relationships about a year and a half or less, where breaking up doesn’t involve too much paperwork.” The reason we return to this post so much is because it features a great email from Lyster’s mom, offered as comfort to devastated winter-breakup victims, in which she talks about rereading her own diaries from when she’d just turned 30 and concludes: “The level of introspection and self-analysis and vacillation is truly alarming. I had no idea that my life as I know it now had not even begun and that I would be fine. Isn’t that strange.”

This is the fifth year of the Breakup Chili. Tamar makes it for us all once per winter. The third year was outside; it was 20 degrees and we ate out of our own jars brought from home. Some of the other years I don’t specifically remember. Of course, the first year is a private story. Traditions become most real when you obscure their origins and rewrite their lore!

Lizzie: This was the Breakup Chili’s fifth year, but it was my first year attending the party. Sometimes you gotta work for that invite! Anyway, great name. I understood the gist of it right off the bat: We’d be eating chili. There would be a meat one and a vegetarian one. Maybe someone would break up.

I don’t really have any meaningful foods in my own life. Certainly nothing that has ever gotten me engaged or divorced. That’s not to say that I’m a “food is fuel” person either. It’s just that, unfortunately, the most memorable foods in my personal history are the ones that have given me food poisoning. Hard to forget a turkey sandwich that ruined your life for a week.

I brought Matt along to the party because he’s from Texas and has strong opinions about chili (mostly re: beans). We got to Tamar’s at about 4:30, rang the bell three times, and sat on the stoop for a while before giving up and calling Kaitlyn for help.

Kaitlyn: I hate that this happened. One of my least favorite feelings is waiting on a stoop thinking, If the buzzer doesn’t work, and my text isn’t being answered, what technologies are even left to me? What if I’m not found for another 30 minutes and by then I’m crying? But she made it.

Nathan and I had taken the S to Prospect Park at about 4:00 p.m.—just before dark on a school night. We were carrying some queso-flavored Tostitos, some Topo Chico, and a loaf of sourdough Nathan had made at 1 a.m. while I was on the couch reading the Associated Press’s introduction to its original edition of the Warren Report (“Will history be fully content with the answers?” Guess!!!).

When you enter Tamar’s apartment, you have to go down a long hall that curves in such a way as to conceal the entire living area from view. You get to call out, “Helloooooo,” as if you were in the foyer of a mansion. When Tamar hustled around the corner to greet us, she was wearing a perfect linen apron that went down to her shins—a Christmas present from Alex who’d asked, “Do you think you’ll wear it on Breakup Chili day?” It had dark blue ties on either side and a scooped back. She could leave the house in it!

The apartment was in a state of stunning beauty and warmth. The living room was lined with cream taper candles and espresso cups of Swedish Fish, spicy pistachios, and cornichons. On the bar, Tamar had set up a row of glasses of premixed “ranch water,” which is what Kourtney Kardashian (among others) calls lime seltzer with tequila. She’d had another adventure at Best Meats on Flatbush, she told us. The boys there had cubed the chuck steak for her, and at first she wasn’t sure it was “cube-y” enough. Over FaceTime, her dad had said that the cubes were alright.

Perfectly cubed chuck steak (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Tamar showed us a photo of the raw cubed meat. Looked good to me! Nicely marbled, red, etc.

Really, you have to try and be a deserving guest at a dinner party these days, because hosting one comes with so many pitfalls that only a few brave souls attempt to do it, and even fewer invite more than 10 people. Do you know how expensive it is to buy meat for 20 people? We showed up with some nonalcoholic beer and a bag of Fritos. A bag of Fritos ran me back almost $6! I applaud Tamar for providing us with beef at a time like this, instead of telling us to just go home and chew some cardboard.

Kaitlyn: Though I hoped that the theme of the party would inspire juicy disclosure of romantic failures past, approximately 80 percent of the guests, including myself, were participating in Dry January. So the first 30 minutes were spent gossiping about how “they really have made advances” in nonalcoholic aperitifs and imaginary gin.

This reminded Sonia that her dad had recently learned that there are calories in alcohol, a life-changing revelation that prompted him to begin a somewhat extreme diet. From there, we got on the topic of the OMAD—“one meal a day”—lifestyle, which my dad is currently messing with, God knows why. Nathan said he wouldn’t be impressed until dads started doing GOMAD, which stands for “gallon of milk a day.” I thought he had just come up with that on the spot and was riffing, but I guess he knew someone in college who did it. They actually drank a gallon of milk every day.

Lizzie: He did mention that the GOMAD guy got sick pretty immediately. That’s like, what? 16 cups of milk? You probably shouldn’t be drinking 16 cups of any one thing in a day, except maybe water if you’re obsessed with peeing. (This isn’t medical advice, by the way; maybe you shouldn’t be drinking 16 cups of water a day.)

Kait’s razzing her dad for his recently acquired OMAD lifestyle, but she failed to mention that she herself is in the throes of some kind of 12-week juice-and-salad-eating commitment designed by Kate Upton, or maybe just approved of by Kate Upton. I was like, “Oh, is that enough food for a human adult?” and Kaitlyn was like, “Well, the morning juice is actually a shake.”

This will be relevant soon, as the sun sets and Kaitlyn gets hungrier by the minute. For now, she’s still holding it together in our ever-expanding conversation circle …

Kaitlyn: Amy was going to a date at a nearby bar called Fiona’s after the party, which prompted a discussion of Fiona the Hippo. Annie, a Cincinnati celebrity, explained that Fiona is currently “mating” with her mother’s boyfriend, who is the father of her tiny half-brother, Fritz. Lizzie was trying to understand and recited it back to her: “Her brother’s dad is also the man she’s having sex with?” When she heard herself, she didn’t like that she’d said “man.” She frowned and paused. “I mean hippo,” she said, very quietly.

Lizzie: Yes, a hippo! That’s what I meant. I don’t really know that much about famous zoo inhabitants in general, or about hippos specifically, but this sexual proclivity was news to me. An interesting conversation topic for a first date, perhaps.

Meanwhile, probably totally unrelated to the fact that she’d only eaten beet juice and romaine for the past two weeks, Kaitlyn started craning her head around every few minutes to glare toward the kitchen, where the chili was sitting on the stove. The chili was available for consumption, but inaccessible to us due to the crowd of people lingering in front of it. Kaitlyn watched enviously as they ate, blocking her path to non-juice dinner. It’s as if they were completely unaware that there were people in the next room positively starving!

Tamar’s Santa Fe chilis and her goose with moving legs (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: “If it were me, I would go into the kitchen and get some chili and then leave the kitchen,” I said. “I would probably not stand in front of the chili for more than a minute or so.” I was joking but …  

Once I was finally in there I had to eat my words because I did not want to leave. It smelled so good—spicy, smoky, etc.—and Tamar has a Tiffany lamp on the butcher’s block and a big bundle of Santa Fe chilis on the wall. It’s the most wonderful kitchen in New York. The chili was amazing and there were no leaves or E3Live in it, which was absolutely thrilling for me given my current commitment to the lifestyle of the new First Lady of the New York Mets. Plus, Milena was standing off to one side telling one amazing story after another—about her brother staying at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment (near Hudson Yards?) in an “amethyst bed,” then about a “celebrity encounter” she’d had with a Brooklyn 8-year-old who is the namesake of a coffee shop that seriously everyone hates.

Lizzie: The same person who has the amethyst bed (it “looks like a regular bed,” if you were wondering) believes that one should have as many children as possible, apparently because with each additional child you have, the likelihood that one of them will solve climate change increases exponentially. Or something like that.

Milena also told us that a man in London once said to her, upon learning that she’s from New York, “Rice to Riches is the best restaurant in the entire world.” Anyone who knows what Rice to Riches is will recognize the charming absurdity of this statement. For those who don’t know, Rice to Riches is a counter-service restaurant that serves nothing but different flavors of rice pudding out of big plastic saucers. The place looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with the Jetsons, and features a veritable solar system of baffling signs that say things like “No Skinny Bitches!!!,” “Kiss My Fat Free Ass!!!” and “Man Discovered Farming … Invented Food. Woman Discovered Food … Invented Diet.” It’s been open since 2003, which is impressive for a restaurant in Soho that sells a single type of (apparently fat-free) dessert. The owner was arrested in 2005 for running a gambling ring, which adds to the establishment’s rice-y and dicey mythology. To call Rice to Riches the “best restaurant in the world,” apparently sincerely, is both inspiring and confounding.

Eventually, we got tired of standing in the kitchen, realized we were the new wave of chili-loiterers, and sat down at the table in the main room, waiting for other people to join us, like newlyweds situated in the middle of a banquet hall, anticipating visitors and gifts.

Kaitlyn: Tamar came to us with a pile of “freezer cookies”—oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies she’d baked on impulse for a mid-party dessert after remembering that she keeps cookie dough in her freezer just in case. She also keeps a glass bottle of premade Manhattans in her fridge. I’m sure you’d like to marry her!

When Neil stopped by the table for a mandarin and a bit of sourdough, I told him I’d seen him in our backyard setting up his new exercise equipment and asked what his workout regimen was. He didn’t want to get into specifics but he did have a point to make: He’d spent 15 years of his life going to the gym and doing stuff for hours, and it had all been a waste of time. “You don’t have to be that strong,” he said. “It’s so stupid.” He now does 30 minutes in the yard at 4 p.m. Squats and whatever he thinks of.

Lizzie: “Working out is for idiots,” he said.

We also talked about “buffet rules,” and how Nathan’s friend once got kicked out of a CiCi’s Pizza because he ate something off another friend’s plate without paying the required fee. I honestly didn’t know that buffet rules prohibited sharing, but I guess it makes sense, because otherwise you could buy one plate for 12 people. It was agreed that in this instance—a single, sneaky bite off a friend’s plate—Nathan’s rule-breaking friend should have been given a warning first, instead of being forced to stand out in the parking lot while the rest of his friends finished eating.

From there it was on to the topic of the Jimmy Fallon ride at Universal, which I thought was a joke that Nathan made up but is apparently real. We talked about how it’d be funny if Jimmy Fallon were the main guy in Taxi Driver instead of the 2004 flop Taxi. And what if it were Jimmy Carter who hosted a late-night show?

Kaitlyn: We were also suspicious of Nathan’s claim that Adam Driver is going to be in a new movie in which his spaceship crash-lands on “prehistoric Earth” and he has to fight dinosaurs with guns. Nathan pulled up a poster to prove it to us, but it honestly looked like something he could have made himself. (Having since watched the trailer for the real movie, 65, I’m still foggy on the premise. Is Adam Driver from Earth? And he stumbles across another planet similar to Earth, which happens to be in the same ecological state that Earth was in 65 million years ago? Or is Adam Driver from an Earth-like planet that is 65 million years ahead of Earth-Earth, and he stumbles across Earth?)

Anyway, there’s no knowing how these things happen, but more than once the topic of conversation turned to Jimmy Carter and how he is still alive despite the odds. (“He’s had many fatal diseases,” Katie said cheerfully, just as if she were saying something like, “He’s from Georgia.”) I bring this up because I think it’s a nice way to take things full circle …

If I understand correctly, when Jimmy Carter was a younger man and was president, many people considered him to be pretty ineffectual, and his own staff gaslighted him when he reported being menaced by a swimming “swamp rabbit.” But now he’s old and people remember that ineffectiveness fondly, believing it indicated that he was always too good for the disgusting task of wielding power. They now love him.

This is not to say that he has been “vindicated” or to encourage attitudes of waiting years or decades to say, “Look at me now” (toxic). I just bet that Jimmy Carter would enjoy a Breakup Chili and an annual reminder that life does go on and on and on until you can barely remember what it used to be like.

Lizzie: Honestly, sometimes life goes on so quickly that I forget everything that happens to us at these parties we go to!

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If a person is said to be grounded, it means that they are sensible and stable -- solid individuals who can be relied upon to give a careful and considered opinion. The very meaning of the term comes from the solidity and stability of the ground on which we walk. However, recent reports in the media have painted a different picture of what goes on beneath the ground -- one in which the core of the Earth is doing some very surprising and unexpected things.

A couple of newly discovered asteroids whizzed past our planet earlier this month, tracing their own loop around the sun. These two aren’t any more special than the thousands of other asteroids in the ever-growing catalog of near-Earth objects. But a recent news article in The Jerusalem Post described them in a rather eye-catching, even startling, way: Each rock, the story said, is “around the size of 22 emperor penguins stacked nose to toes.”

Now, if someone asked me to describe the size of an asteroid (or anything, for that matter), penguins wouldn’t be the first unit that comes to mind. But the penguin asteroid is only the latest example of a common strategy in science communication: evoking images of familiar, earthly objects to convey the scope of mysterious, celestial ones. Usually, small asteroids are said to be the size of buses, skyscrapers, football fields, tennis courts, cars—mundane, inanimate things. Lately, though, the convention seems to be veering toward the weird.

Also this month, the same Jerusalem Post reporter, Aaron Reich, described another pair of asteroids as “approximately the size of 100 adult pugs.” Last year, a Daily Mail article wrote that an asteroid that had recently disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere was “about half the size of a giraffe.” A scientific magazine, capitalizing on that article’s popularity, announced that astronomers would launch a “new asteroid-classification system based on animal sizes”—then revealed that it was only joking, dismissing the idea as “nonsense.” But maybe we shouldn’t scoff at the practice of comparing asteroids to penguins or other delightfully odd things. Asteroids, like other space objects and phenomena, can be tricky to contextualize. Maybe there’s room for whimsy. A new era of asteroid communication may be upon us.

Scientists don’t have formal guidelines for describing the nature of asteroids on a human scale. “It’s a real challenge to try and communicate physical properties of something that people aren’t going to actually lay eyes on or have any personal experience with,” Eric Christensen, a University of Arizona astronomer who oversees a program that detects near-Earth objects, told me. “Nobody’s ever visited an asteroid, so not even astronauts have firsthand experience of what it’s like.” And if they did, they probably wouldn’t think, Ah, yes, just as I expected—it’s as tall as 40 sea turtles stacked like a sleeve of crackers.

[Read: The best-ever photos of an asteroid’s rugged terrain]

So when astronomers talk about asteroids, they reach for the familiar. (As for the journalists who write about asteroids, I tried to contact the authors of the Jerusalem Post and Daily Mail stories, but they haven’t responded). Consider last year’s marquee space-rock event, when NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid as practice for deflecting any future, actually hazardous visitors. Some scientists likened the size of that asteroid, named Dimorphos, to a football stadium; others compared it to an Egyptian pyramid.

These can be helpful images, but the approach has its limitations. “You can be into sports, but if you’re not into U.S. football, these football fields make no sense,” Carrie Nugent, a planetary scientist at Olin College who studies asteroids, told me. And the pyramids of Egypt sound cooler than a stadium, but the analogy is certainly less effective if you’ve never been to Cairo. The same goes for the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York City, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—all of which have been used as units of measure in asteroid comparisons.

Penguins, cute as they are, have the same shortcoming. (Sorry, penguins!) “I don’t know how many people actually have a good sense of scale for penguins,” Daniella DellaGiustina, a scientist at the University of Arizona who works on a NASA asteroid mission, told me. “I remember seeing some penguins at the zoo when I was in the Southern Hemisphere, and they were bigger than I thought they would be.” Even if people can fairly accurately picture a penguin, comparing something to 22 of them “requires the reader to imagine 22 (cute!) penguins standing on each other’s shoulders—something no one has ever seen before,” David Polishook, an astronomer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told me in an email. “A comparison with one train car, for example, is much simpler.”

[Read: A handful of asteroid could help decipher our entire existence]

Then there’s the problem of shape. A stadium, a pyramid, the Eiffel Tower—these objects all have very different outlines. The asteroids that orbit near Earth are, for the most part, lumps. They are not long and narrow like skyscrapers or cruise ships, another common unit of comparison. A stack of emperor penguins might convey the length of an asteroid from one end to the other, but it doesn’t really tell you how big the asteroid is. Using penguins may even be “a bit misleading,” Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who works on NASA’s asteroid-deflection mission, told me. “If you think about the volume of that body, it’s more like—boy, I don’t know, hundreds of penguins?”

Without a convention to guide them, scientists follow their own preferences (and so, it seems, do journalists). DellaGiustina likes to invoke landforms, such as mountains and ridges. “These asteroids are little worlds,” she said. Not only can we picture a mountain, but we can also probably imagine ourselves hiking on a trail and feeling the craggy ground beneath us—a thought exercise that could make a faraway cosmic object less inscrutable. Nugent likes to tackle as many dimensions as possible. The asteroid that led to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to have been about 10 kilometers (32,000 feet) wide—which, she notes, is close to the cruising altitude of an airplane. So “imagine yourself in a plane, and imagine a giant, round rock that goes from your wing tip all the way to the ground, and which takes you over a minute to fly over,” she said. Adding a pile of penguins to this scenario would likely make it more confusing.

Animal parallels have one clear advantage over buses and the like: They’re guaranteed to draw more attention. Christensen said he isn’t very amused by the trend, calling it clickbait. Asteroids are already easy targets for sensationalist coverage; some publications treat close approaches to Earth as panic-worthy near misses. Exhibit A, from The Daily Mirror in 2019: “Asteroid the Size of BIG BEN Is Hurtling Towards Earth, NASA Warns.” In reality, no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth in this century, and we’ll probably be safe for even longer than that.

[Read: Maybe we won’t end up like the dinosaurs]

When you’re picking an unconventional unit of measurement, context counts. People have a tendency to anthropomorphize just about anything space-related, whether it’s a robot or a comet. Some of the public reaction to NASA’s asteroid “redirection” last year carried a tone of “Oh no, poor asteroid”; indeed, Dimorphos was just minding its own business when NASA came along and smashed into it. Imagine how much more violent that would have felt if scientists and journalists had compared the asteroid to something squishier than a stadium. Rivkin suspects that if astronomers had compared it to, say, a blue whale, “you’d have these cartoons about us beating up a blue whale.”

Lighthearted comparisons would also be the wrong choice in the hypothetical event of a large space rock hurtling straight toward Earth. If a truly dangerous asteroid were ever approaching, the most important thing for the public to understand would be not its size, but the extent of the potential destruction it could cause. Scientists would have to consider darker metaphors, perhaps tallying the energy of the impact in nuclear detonations.

But for garden-variety asteroids, the ones that pass right by us or burn up in the atmosphere, animal comparisons might not be so bad. Nugent is delighted by the development. Sure, a reader might be disappointed to discover that the asteroid in question isn’t shaped exactly like an alligator, but they might also learn something illuminating about asteroids that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Still, let’s take some extra care with certain comparisons. After all, describing an asteroid as “half the size of a giraffe” prompts readers to consider a rather horrifying question: Which half?

The rotation of Earth's inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse. Professor of theoretical physics, Michio Kaku, explains the new discovery with "CNN This Morning."

Scientists say a truck-sized asteroid is expected to pass Earth on Thursday, within the orbit of broadcast satellites.

An asteroid the size of a box truck is about to make one of the closest passes of planet Earth ever recorded.

The rotation of Earth's inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.

Photographs by Lenard Smith

On an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe. Here on a sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a promising desert extraction project.

But he’s not looking for oil or gas. Crouching under the shade of a 10-foot lemon tree, at the edge of a citrus orchard that spans hundreds of acres, Wicks is here for water.

A fine stream bursts from the plastic pipe, forming a rainbow-crested arc before hitting the hot sand. Wicks pushes his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head, rubs the short dark bristles on his upper lip, and smiles.

“There’s a hell of a lot more where that came from,” he says, nodding at the spray.

In fact, there might be as much as 34 million acre-feet, or enough to flood 34 million acres one foot deep. Wicks and his colleagues work on behalf of Cadiz, Inc., which has drilled 300 feet below the desert’s surface to reach the massive Fenner aquifer. Today, the nine water wells on Cadiz Ranch support a 3,500-acre oasis of lemons, hemp, and other crops. But the company’s ranch taps only a tiny fraction of the aquifer, which extends 700 square miles between two of California’s mountain ranges, the New York Mountains and the Old Woman Mountains.

If it seems improbable that so much water lies under the desert, it is. Just 20 miles from Cadiz Ranch, the ghost town of Bagdad still holds the record for the driest spell in American history: between 1912 and 1914, this town went 767 consecutive days without rain. The wetter climate that filled the Fenner aquifer ended about 10,000 years ago.

Cadiz, Inc., is drilling for what some call “fossil water”—water that has been buried deep in the Earth for millennia. According to new radiocarbon and other isotopic age-dating tools, the water in this aquifer hit the surface as rain during the last Ice Age, when mammoths still lived here. In the current desert climate, this groundwater will never replenish itself, at least not on a human time scale. Once we use it, it’s never coming back. And unless the aquifer is actively refilled, its depletion could have serious consequences for ecosystems aboveground.

Logan Wicks at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

Fossil water, also called paleowater, is the largest nonfrozen freshwater resource on the planet. But for most of human history, few knew it existed. In the 1950s, oil prospectors began turning up vast, untouched supplies of water, often hidden under deserts. Like oil deposits, the buried water inspired opportunists: In Libya, the dictator Muammar Qaddafi tapped the Nubian sandstone aquifer to power his Great Man-Made River, one of the world’s largest irrigation projects. In India, desert aquifers fed the Green Revolution, transforming the country into the world’s second-largest producer of wheat. In California in 1983, NASA imagery revealing the size of the Fenner aquifer attracted the British entrepreneur Keith Brackpool, who bought the land, co-founded Cadiz, Inc., and started digging wells.

The company’s plan for the aquifer goes far beyond lemons and hemp: Cadiz intends to channel ancient water through two pipelines that would cross hundreds of miles of desert to deliver water to Southern California water districts. The plan has persisted through a decade of political and legal challenges.

That doesn’t mean the Cadiz project and others like it are justified, argue a coalition of anthropologists, philosophers, lawyers, and hydrologists. They say existing laws and regulations don’t address the ethics of water use, and that water management in the age of climate change requires not just new pipes, but also new paradigms.

The Fenner aquifer is “an emergency supply,” the University of New Mexico anthropologist David Groenfeldt says. “How can we possibly justify using it now?”

The rainstorms that pounded the California coast this month don’t change the fact that the region’s climate is drying and warming, and that as a consequence, the state is running out of water––not just for lawns and crops and households, but to protect homes and lives from the region’s ever-larger wildfires. With their communities facing disaster, many western water managers ask: How can we not?

Cadiz Farm (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic) Passageway between flourishing plants and trees at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

When you turn on your tap to brush your teeth in the morning, do you know where that water comes from? Do you feel good about using it? What would change your mind?

These are the kinds of questions that interest David Groenfeldt. But when he began consulting on water projects in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, nobody else seemed to be asking them. No matter where he worked, from the World Bank to his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he saw that many decisions with enormous consequences—about who should get water, when, and for what––were stripped of moral context.

In most modern states, we pretend that water is an abstract utility, and that our relationship to it is primarily economic. But economic decisions have human consequences: While infrastructure investments have enabled people in most wealthy societies to use far more water than they need, a third of the globe’s population lacks access to clean drinking water. In 2020, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange created the first futures market for water, allowing investors to gamble on future scarcity.

“A commodity entered into a capitalist system always creates winners and losers,” Groenfeldt says. “When it comes to water, the losers are the ones who can’t self-advocate: ecosystems, the marginalized, and future generations.”

Groenfeldt wasn’t alone in wanting to introduce moral considerations into water decision making. At the 2003 World Water Forum, the Indigenous Peoples Kyoto Water Declaration challenged the “dominant paradigm, policies, and programs on water development,” including the commodification of water. At the same conference, scholars from a UNESCO working group established in 1998 presented their first examination of water ethics. In 2010, the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water to be a universal human right.

When Groenfeldt endeavored to apply moral principles to water management in Santa Fe, local policy makers dismissed his ideas as impractical. So he secured funding from the California-based Kalliopeia Foundation (“dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality”) to start the Water-Culture Institute. Soon, like-minded colleagues found him. Neelke Doorn, a Dutch professor of philosophy, had started her career as a hydraulic engineer but had grown frustrated by the self-proclaimed objectivity of her colleagues, and switched fields. The Oregon-based water lawyer Susan Smith had begun working on water issues with the World Council of Churches because “religious institutions were the only ones taking water justice seriously.” Indigenous leaders from the United States and Canada who had long championed water protection for spiritual reasons joined the ranks. At the 2015 World Water Forum in South Korea, some of these thinkers presented the “Water Ethics Charter,” a set of open-ended guidelines meant to help communities bring environmental, social, and spiritual values into their choices—to “provide a moral basis for water management decisions which cannot be accurately valued in financial terms and are not mandated legally.”

Though the guidelines stop short of offering clear dos and don’ts, they can alter the discussion, Groenfeldt says. For example, a corn farm in arid Kansas might be just as profitable as one in comparatively wet Iowa. But the Kansas farm might require 45 times more irrigated water, depleting groundwater that local communities depend on. Similarly, citizens voting on a new river-diversion project might initially favor cheaper water. But consideration of the recreational, aesthetic, and environmental benefits of the undepleted river might change their vote.

“We take implicit consequences and make them explicit,” Groenfeldt says.

The authors of the Water Ethics Charter also stressed that water experts have their own moral obligation: “to generate knowledge about water in all its aspects and attend to the governance of that water knowledge.” In other words, experts must provide us with the best available information, including where our water comes from and how much is left. Which means that now, they are asking us to consider the consequences of sipping on ancient water.

More than 10,000 years ago, a winter storm gathered over the icy shoulders of the Eastern Mojave’s New York Mountains. The falling snow might have landed on pine needles, or the bristly backs of giant ground sloths. When these crystals melted, some of the resulting water joined the roaring Mojave River and sped north to fill Death Valley’s lake. Some of the lake water seeped into the rich soil, then trickled through the pores of the sedimentary rock. Eventually, it stopped exchanging gases with the atmosphere. In a sense, it became a fossil, storing traces of the Pleistocene climate for the next hundred centuries.

At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, the doctoral candidate Jessica Ng is working to decode these ancient molecules. Down an open-air, salt-scented concrete walkway, inside a cramped lab filled with whirring metal instruments, Ng practices cutting-edge groundwater paleoclimatology.

“I guess most people aren’t thinking about the last Ice Age every day,” Ng says, adjusting her blocky, clear-rimmed glasses.

In the decades after World War II, scientists realized that the detonation of atomic bombs had left detectable levels of the hydrogen isotope tritium in the planet’s atmosphere—and in its rainfall. In the 1970s, researchers found that some very deep groundwater was missing this isotope, because it had never been exposed to the modern atmosphere. In subsequent decades, scientists refined their water-dating techniques, identifying isotopes that decay at different rates in water. Traces of argon-39 in groundwater suggest that the water fell from the sky between 50 and 1,000 years ago. Carbon-14 indicates ages between 1,000 years and 30,000 years. In the past five years or so, krypton-81 has shown that some water—such as that in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin—is an astonishing 200,000 years old. Since the majority of the world’s groundwater hasn’t been tested for all of these isotopes, new data are constantly emerging.

In Ng’s lab and others like it, these ancient water molecules can provide snapshots of past climates—their land temperatures, their precipitation type, and the depth of their water tables. They also demonstrate that not all groundwater is created equal. Water that is one year old is typically close to the surface, and if it’s extracted it will likely be replenished by the following year’s rainfall. Water that’s hundreds or thousands of years old is still moving through a hydrological cycle, but it’s not a cycle that you—or your kids, or your grandkids—will live to see completed. From a human perspective, this groundwater isn’t renewable; if you’re extracting it without restoring what you took, you’re mining it.

In 2019, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and California State University at East Bay published the first comprehensive age study of California groundwater, surveying more than 2,000 wells, and found that approximately 7 percent of the samples contained isotopes associated with water that is at least 10,000 years old. In the Central Valley, where worsening droughts have led many large-scale farms to invest in deeper wells, renewable groundwater appears to be especially scarce.

Standing at the lab’s wide sink, Ng hefts a stainless-steel bulb-shaped flask containing ancient water from a municipal well in Tucson, Arizona. With a practiced swoop, she overturns the flask and opens a valve protruding from its side. A thin stream shoots out, hitting the rusted sink rim. I run my fingers under the stream, feeling the familiar pressure against my skin. It looks, and feels, like regular water. Without a mass spectrometer, it’s impossible to tell it’s a fossil.

In March 1977, amid a record-setting drought, the economic approach to water management faced a critic from within the system. On a balmy day in Los Angeles, the hydrologist Luna Leopold—the son of the famed American conservationist Aldo Leopold—stood before California Governor Jerry Brown and made an impassioned case for a radical reduction in water use.

Luna Leopold had been appointed as the first chief hydrologist of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1963, and had come to realize that the country faced a failure in water governance. Since President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Reclamation at the beginning of the 20th century, the American West’s lack of rainfall had been treated as an engineering problem, and dams, reservoirs, and canals as the solutions. Any water not put to “beneficial use” in homes, farms, or factories was considered wasted. To this day, the bureau remains the nation’s largest water wholesaler, irrigating 140,000 farms.

In his Los Angeles speech, Leopold described the attempts by the United States to “improve” rivers and hydrologic systems as “deranged,” and called for a gentler approach to management. He acknowledged that his “philosophic view,” which characterized a river as an “organism,” would strike some as “impractical idealism.” But he pleaded with the governor to plan for scarcity and to protect “especially those remnants of the ice-age groundwater bodies not being recharged now.” The young governor ignored Leopold’s entreaties, and took no action to protect these ancient aquifers. Five years later, Cadiz, Inc., bought thousands of acres in the Mojave Desert—along with their accompanying groundwater rights.

In 2017, 40 years after Leopold’s speech, Jerry Brown had returned to the governor’s office during another record-setting drought, and the ethics of western hydrology seemed even more deeply entrenched. Farmers whose shares of the Colorado River depended on demonstrating “beneficial use” flooded their fields with the precious resource. It had also become clear that the century-old measurements used to divide the Colorado River among seven states and Mexico had been taken in an unusually wet period. A 2015 ProPublica analysis found that, since 2001, the average annual legal claim to Colorado River water had exceeded the existing supply by 1.4 trillion gallons. In 2021, for the first time, the federal government cut allocations from Lake Mead, the largest reservoir on the Colorado River; this past July, the reservoir dropped to 27 percent of its capacity—its lowest level since 1937, when it was still being filled. In the current climate, communities hold rights to water that amounts to little more than myth.

Like today’s water ethicists, Leopold knew that nobody has a purely economic relationship with water. Even as supplies shrink, our biological demand endures, and will accept no substitutes.

We’re thirsty, we might say. We need it.

Left: Dry vegetation in Bonanza Springs Right: A duck in Rancho Santa Margarita (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

In the Orange County suburb of Rancho Santa Margarita, the path around its 31-million-gallon man-made lake is often crowded with mothers pushing strollers and joggers being pulled by dogs. In this arid landscape, wealth is often expressed in water, and it spills from fountains, soaks lawns, and fills private swimming pools. If Cadiz, Inc., obtains final federal approvals for the shorter of its two proposed pipelines, 1.6 billion additional gallons of water will arrive here each year for the next 50 years, pumped from the depths of the Mojave Desert.

“We look at a water supply like an investment portfolio,” Dan Ferons, the general manager of the Santa Margarita Water District, says. “We need to diversify.”

Ferons feels an acute responsibility to invest wisely, because more than 165,000 people in eight communities, including Rancho Santa Margarita, rely on his district’s water. Though the district buys water from the Colorado River via the Municipal Water District of Orange County, it is “paper water”—an abstraction delineated in a legal document. As the Colorado River Basin gets drier, the paper water represents less and less real water, and the water it does represent is getting more expensive: Since Ferons started working for the district in the 1980s, scarcity has increased the price of Colorado River water fivefold. In response to these mounting costs, Santa Margarita has become a leader in water recycling; now, a quarter of all irrigated water in the district is recycled wastewater, and the district wants to recycle 100 percent of its wastewater by 2030. With each successive drought, however, the appeal of the Cadiz project grows, too.

“There’s more in this whole desert valley than in all of Lake Mead,” Ferons says. “It’s out there going to waste.”

Preventing waste is central to Cadiz’s moral case for its project. Susan Kennedy, who replaced Brackpool as executive chair in February 2022, argues that the project will conserve water that would otherwise evaporate from dry salt beds. She says the project’s two pipelines—one running 43 miles south from the Fenner aquifer to the Colorado River aqueduct and one 220 miles north to the California aqueduct—will allow water to be “traded and transferred between the state’s major water systems,” benefiting Californians who currently lack access to water. To her, the project represents nothing less than the future of California’s water infrastructure.

Dan Ferons, the general manager of the Santa Margarita Water District (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

In 2011, the Santa Margarita Water District led the project’s environmental review, which, Kennedy says, along with more than a decade of other reviews, proved that the project will cause “zero harm.” During the 2011 review, however, the National Park Service expressed concern about the draft report’s use of a 2010 Cadiz-funded “recharge estimate”—the rate at which precipitation, snowmelt, and other natural water sources refill the aquifer—was between three and 16 times higher than a range estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2000. In fact, nearly 20 estimates over almost three decades have produced different results, each of which tells its own story about the regional water cycle. The company-funded studies have consistently estimated recharge rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those produced by independent and USGS research.

Kennedy maintains that the figures produced for the environmental review represent the most recent and thorough analysis of the region. The environmental firm CH2M Hill (now called CH2M), which produced the 2010 estimates for the company, has noted that they used freshly collected field data and a new model created by the USGS itself. Kennedy points out that many previous models didn’t collect local data; they based their projections on data from similar watersheds. “The difference in estimates comes down to actual data versus no data and updated versus older modeling tools,” she says.

Still, the USGS hydrogeologist John Izbicki, who contributed to the 2000 estimates, says the specificity of some of the new data likely led to overestimations—when, for example, a single high measurement was projected over an entire region. He maintains that the company-supported numbers are “unrealistic” when compared to studies of similar watersheds, and do not reflect “accepted scientific values in the published literature.”

The 2000 and 2010 recharge estimates “are far, far too greatly different to be reasonable,” Izbicki says. (On a more basic level, he points out that evaporation is part of the hydrological cycle, and that water “going to waste” in the salt beds likely benefits the ecosystem and public health by helping to lock dust in place.)

Kennedy is, of course, familiar with the arguments that this particular source of water should be left untouched, and the criticisms that even the highest recharge estimates would not balance the company’s planned extraction rate. But she says the company will not be “mining” water, which is withdrawing groundwater “in excess of natural recharge.” Instead, Kennedy says, Cadiz will largely be pumping “surplus” water flowing into dry surface-lake beds that would “otherwise evaporate.” In fact, she says, the ultimate goal of the project is “groundwater storage,” because drawing down the aquifer will create space that they expect to sell. Aquifers and other underground locations can serve as evaporation-safe “banks” for surplus water; with water evaporating from California’s reservoirs at record rates, the state has increased investments in water banks.

“We’re not going to build any more dams,” Kennedy says. “What the state is missing is storage.”

But Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, says that while the state does need to invest in water-storage infrastructure, it already has plenty of underground storage space. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, groundwater pumping has made room for more than 100 million acre-feet, enough to accommodate all of California’s runoff for three consecutive years. Given that context, Mount says, Cadiz’s strategy looks like an expensive, resource-heavy way to create unnecessary space.

So far, the company has only sold rights to “store” water from the aquifer itself—essentially, contract holders will pay an extra $1,500 per acre-foot to hold on to any aquifer water that they purchased but didn’t use in a given year. Eventually, the company hopes to attract business from water wholesalers, which would then sell space to agencies that need to store surplus Colorado River water. (Ironically, a project designed to fill a river’s chronic shortfall is counting on its future abundance.)

In 2014, after six separate legal challenges from the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the salt-production company Tetra Technologies, a state superior court upheld the environmental approvals. Still, the Cadiz project continues to be a political flashpoint. In 2017, President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of the Interior, David Bernhardt, reversed an Obama-era policy and affirmed the legality of the southern pipeline’s path on a railroad right of way. In 2019, encouraged by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a longtime project opponent, the California state senate passed a bill requiring all desert groundwater-extraction projects to undergo separate review by the State Lands Commission, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. In 2020, weeks before Joe Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management approved and transferred crucial rights of way for the northern pipeline, rights that the company finished acquiring in 2021.

In the meantime, plenty of Californians—and not just rich ones, Kennedy says—are thirsting for the water the company promises to provide. Though the Santa Margarita Water District was the project’s first contract, 11 other utilities now hold contracts or options on a substantial share of the water, including some that serve low-income areas. The company’s northern pipeline would pass through 23 low-income communities in the San Joaquin Valley, where local aquifers are already critically overdrafted and existing water infrastructure is scarce.

The environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez argues that Cadiz could help remedy historic inequities in California’s water infrastructure. In March 2022, her firm filed an amicus brief on behalf of several Southern California housing, civil-rights, and community-development organizations, opposing lawsuits that have delayed the project. Each company contract contains an “escalator clause” that allows for a 5 percent annual price increase over the 50 years of the contract. If the company started delivering water today, it would cost about $1,400 per acre-foot. (For comparison, this year the Metropolitan Water District charged $1,143 per acre-foot for imported Colorado River water.) Every month of delay, the authors of the brief wrote, “results in the cost of water to disadvantaged communities increasing.”

Kennedy says the company will deliver some of its water at cost, in amounts calculated using the percentage of “disadvantaged communities”—those whose median incomes are 80 percent or less of the statewide median—served by each of its contractors. Mount, however, is skeptical that any version of the project could produce affordable water. Pumping from deep wells is extremely energy intensive, as is moving water uphill over long distances. “It’s disingenuous to say you’ll deliver water ‘at cost’ when that cost is prohibitively high,” Mount says. “I’d be surprised if this water is cheaper than other options.”

One alternative, Mount says, is consolidation: In 2015, the state offered financial incentives to large water suppliers to absorb small ones in disadvantaged areas, since larger suppliers have the resources to invest in reuse and recycling and can divide costs among more ratepayers. A second option is demand reduction: A 2022 study from the Pacific Institute found that for the past 40 years, the state has used less water overall even as its population has grown. The same study found that more investments in efficient showers, toilets, and pipes could reduce water use by a further 30 to 48 percent statewide. Finally, in districts that are dependent on groundwater and lacking in infrastructure, Mount says, new management laws are kickstarting aquifer-recharge projects and helping to restore groundwater supplies. With these alternatives, he says, California could increase water access and affordability without digging a single new well.

​​The Fenner aquifer’s relative isolation, Mount says, is key to the project’s political survival. The draining of the Owens Valley aquifer in the early 1900s to benefit the city of Los Angeles, 250 miles away, is remembered as an act of water theft. “We just don’t, on a large scale, mine groundwater and pump it somewhere else anymore,” Mount says. “Even if everyone is paid for it.” With no obvious human communities dependent on the Fenner aquifer for survival, he says, it feels more acceptable to take it.

Lago Santa Margarita (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

But what counts as dependence? What kind of survival? The leaders of the Chemehuevi, or Nuwu, tribe oppose Cadiz, Inc.’s project in part because of the aquifer’s possible connection to Bonanza Spring, a rare groundwater source supporting a wetland on a ridge above Cadiz Valley. The spring provides water to many protected species, including the desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, and is a sacred site for the Chemehuevi and other desert tribes—in part because it is a focal point of the Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) Salt Song Trail, an ancient ceremonial loop through the desert.

The trail covers roughly 1,000 miles, and its 142 songs, each sung at a specific location, form a sacred cultural map. In 2016, President Barack Obama described the tradition in his proclamation of the Mojave Trails National Monument. Matthew Leivas Sr., the Chemehuevi chief and a Salt Song singer, keeps a worn printout of that proclamation folded in his backpack. “Our people always knew water, we talked to it,” Leivas says. “And we know that spring is sacred, holy—if anything, last-resort water.”

Bonanza Springs Desert Wash (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

For those morally opposed to extracting what they call fossil water, the potential impact on Bonanza Spring offers the strongest legal case against the project. For those in support of the project, disproving this connection provides both a moral and legal defense. Cadiz’s environmental-impact report concluded that “the Project will not likely have any impact on springs,” linking their flow to rainfall at higher elevations. In comments, the National Park Service called this an “a priori” assumption unsupported by sufficient data. Since then, a company-funded study, reviewed by other scientists but not published in a peer-reviewed journal, identified fault zones establishing “no hydraulic connection” between the bodies of water. Soon after, an analysis funded by the Mojave Desert Land Trust and published in the peer-reviewed journal Hydrology concluded that a connection to the aquifer was likely. Two other studies (also supported in part by the Mojave Desert Land Trust), published in 2018 and 2020 in the journal Environmental Forensics, suggested that drawing down the aquifer could significantly harm the spring.

While Susan Kennedy, Cadiz’s executive chair, calls the studies “opponent funded” and “refuted science”—pointing to several researchers who have disputed their conclusions—John Izbicki of the USGS describes the findings as “reasonable.” He points out that the Hydrology analysis, which was based in part on regional data collected by his agency, confirmed the existence of a unique, ancient spring source dating back 15,500 years, and while it did not pinpoint that source precisely, he says, that could be accomplished with a little more data collection. But his agency has limited research funds, and other projects have taken priority. Plus, data are unlikely to settle the larger question of when it is ethically permissible to extract extremely old water, if it ever is.

Matthew Leivas, Senior Chief of the Chemehuevi Tribe, at Lake Havasu on the Chemehuevi Reservation. (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

Long before scientists came up with isotopic dating, the Chemehuevi described Bonanza Spring as ancient. To the Chemehuevi, Leivas says, it makes intuitive sense: Any water flowing in that section of the desert must come from very old layers of the Earth. For this reason, tribal members have always drunk it sparingly.

Since 2021, Leivas and other tribe members, the Native American Land Conservancy, and the National Parks Conservation Association have waged a legal battle against the Cadiz project. (The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, to whom the company has pledged an annual donation of close to 500 million gallons of water, support the project.) People tend to talk about colonialism in terms of land, Leivas says. But his tribe’s story of displacement and decimation is hydrological. In 1853, the federal government declared Chemehuevi land to be public domain; more than six decades later, it granted the tribe 36,000 acres alongside the Colorado River. But within 30 years, the Bureau of Reclamation had seized more than a fifth of that land to build Parker Dam, the dam that created Lake Havasu. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California both lobbied for and funded the dam, and still holds the rights to most of the lake’s water. The Chemehuevi word for water is pa. For the white man, Leivas says, water means money. And that can lead to short-sightedness.

“Our tribe knows that the Cadiz project is not a conservation project,” James F. Wood, the Chemehuevi tribal chair, wrote in a 2018 statement. “Its aggressive pumping of water fails to save water for our children, grandchildren up to the Seventh Generation.”

In 2004, the authors of the UNESCO water-ethics report took up the issue of what they called “the development of non-renewable groundwater resources.” They acknowledged that “some specialists” believed that the extraction of very old water should be “socially rejected, if not legally prohibited.” They proposed, however, that an arid society could ethically use this water if the social benefits outweighed environmental costs, the water would last at least 50 years, and the community had “envisaged” a future technological alternative.

More recently, ethicists in anthropologist David Groenfeldt’s circle have taken a harder line. The Oregon water-law professor Susan Smith points out that new technologies tend to create new environmental problems. For instance, water desalination consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels, and its effect on marine environments is unclear. To Smith and others, depleting current resources to maintain the status quo fails to recognize the inherent unsustainability of existing systems.

“Tech optimists tend to be Pollyanna-ish about this stuff,” she said. “They don’t have the right humility about human limitations.”

The science of water dating is young, but it is starting to introduce ethical considerations into California water decisions. In the high desert city of Victorville, where years of overpumping have left groundwater supplies dangerously low, Izbicki has provided his age data to water managers. “When you tell people their water is 10,000 years old, that changes the conversation,” he says. The community focused on conserving that supply, and began recharging the aquifer to sustain it—one of the three alternatives to the Cadiz project noted by the water-policy expert Jeffrey Mount. Since Izbicki’s first studies of Victorville water in 1995, Mount says, the water table has stabilized. Izbicki has since provided data to three other high-desert communities to help them manage their groundwater.

But any real ethical shift must be supported by changes in policy. And until recently, California lawmakers chose not to regulate groundwater at all, instead leaving it up to property owners to adjudicate. (The Cadiz project triggered a state environmental review because it needed local permits for pipelines located outside its property.) Not until 2020 did the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act mandate that communities with competing rights to an aquifer work together to come up with a plan for its sustainable use—which means they must prove that any extraction won’t outpace the aquifer’s replenishment, natural or otherwise.

Age dating can help water managers provide that proof. In 2019, Jean Moran, a hydrologist at Cal State East Bay, co-authored the state’s first groundwater-age analysis, based on samples from more than 4,000 municipal and private wells statewide. Since that study, age data have contributed to new, better-informed management plans in areas like Orange, Santa Clara, and Alameda Counties. Now, with support from the California State Water Board under the new law, Moran and her colleagues are developing a “decision support tool” that walks water managers through the likely long-term impacts of their choices. Earlier this year, the board expanded the pilot project statewide.

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which prioritizes the restoration of highly stressed aquifers, does not extend to the comparatively untouched Fenner Basin. In cases like the Cadiz project, Mount says, the consequences of extraction may lie far in the future—too far for our existing legal system to mitigate. Debates over climate policy have raised similar questions of intergenerational responsibility; in 2021, the German Supreme Court ruled that the nation’s climate policy violated the constitutional rights of future generations and ordered legislators to amend it. In the world’s most arid regions, it’s possible to imagine similar mandates for water.

The long failure to seriously consider the ethics of groundwater management, Groenfeldt says, is a symptom of a larger misunderstanding. When we think about water scarcity, it’s easier to picture a dry lake bed than a drained aquifer. Although groundwater constitutes the vast majority of the planet’s nonfrozen freshwater resources, most people know little about it, perhaps imagining that it collects in underground caverns or lakes. In truth, an aquifer is more like a porous sponge, a network of geologic and chemical interactions that defies reduction to simple formulas. Mount says the current crisis will force us to confront this collective ignorance.

“We’re at this once-a-century transition in water management,” Mount says. “The next generation after me is going to be obsessed with groundwater.”

To convey groundwater’s complexities, future water managers might need to restore “paper water” to its terrestrial context. In studies of aquifer management in her home country of Costa Rica, the University of Southern California anthropologist Andrea Ballestero has seen how detailed conversations about the geology—and vulnerability—of local aquifers can anchor otherwise abstract decisions in a unique and familiar place. Add age data, she says, and decisions begin to be anchored in time as well.

Tree and water on the surface  at Bonanza Springs (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic) California Mojave Desert Wilderness (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

On the day I’m scheduled to go to Bonanza Spring, Matthew Leivas isn’t feeling well, so I go with his good friend Chris Clarke, a member of the National Parks Conservation Association staff. On our way there, Clarke points to a group of brown, spiky-crowned yucca stalks, 40 feet across with a dozen lolling heads.

“That’s probably around 4,000 years old,” he says. Yucca grow in clonal clusters, Clarke explains, and the bigger the cluster, the older the plant roots. I stick my head out the window for a closer look. When that yucca germinated, I think, humans were still hunting big game across the desert, but Ice Age rainfall flowing below the ground had barely completed half its journey through the Fenner aquifer.

About 45 minutes later, after bumping up a steep slope at a 45-degree angle, I step out of the car and hear the spring: the buzz of insects, the chatter of birds, and the distant, unmistakable trill of moving water. After the long stretch of sand and cracked earth, I blink in surprise like a cartoon character. Below us is a small valley filled with reedy green cattails, bare-limbed black cottonwoods, and red and yellow willows.

We tramp downward through slick grasses and mud, skirting coyote scat and bighorn-sheep tracks. Pushing through a stand of cattails, we reach a split rock spilling water like an open mouth. I squat down and stick my hand in the flow. It is surprisingly warm. This spring is the largest natural water source for 1,000 square miles.

“In the equation of Southern California water, Cadiz is really a drop in the bucket,” Clarke says. “But for the desert, this water is everything.”

If Cadiz begins pumping 16.3 billion gallons of water from the Fenner Basin every year for 50 years, the 2018 Environmental Forensics study predicts, this spring might eventually run dry. But because geologic predictions are complex––remember the sponge metaphor––it’s not clear how soon that could happen. Cadiz’s environmental-impact report states that, in keeping with San Bernardino County regulations, the company will closely monitor the spring and surrounding vegetation, and the county can stop the project should they detect sufficient harm. The problem, hydrogeologists tell me, is that once a spring has been measurably depleted, it’s already centuries deep in disrepair. If you stop pumping when the flow turns to a trickle, maybe your grandchildren’s grandchildren will see the spring at full gush again.

In the Chemehuevi tradition, Leivas says, the Salt Songs were a storytelling device, a ritualized memory. People traveled hundreds of miles across the desert to this place, where they drew pictographs, held funerals, and otherwise honored the water they knew was ancient.

That tradition might keep the water here. In December 2021, in part due to the lawsuit filed by the Native American Land Conservancy and other plaintiffs, the Biden administration petitioned a federal judge to invalidate a key permit for Cadiz’s planned 220-mile pipeline, which would cross parts of the protected Mojave Trails National Monument. On September 13, 2022, the same judge agreed to send the project back to the Bureau of Land Management for environmental review. If blocked, the company will likely bide its time, as it has for more than 30 years, until the political winds change again. Susan Kennedy believes that it won’t be long before construction begins on the remaining infrastructure: The company, she says, is “shovel ready.”

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.