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Mar 31 2026

Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones

After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week—saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey “organ sacks” as an alternative to animal testing.

In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, and life-extension investors LongGame Ventures.

But there is more to the story. And R3 doesn’t want that story told.

MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he’s called “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies.

Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.

Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.

The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.

And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”

A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.

And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”

But even Schloendorn and his cofounder, Alice Gilman, can’t seem to keep away from the topic. Just last September, the pair presented at Abundance Longevity, a $70,000-per-ticket event in Boston organized by the anti-aging promoter Peter Diamandis. Although the presentation to about 40 people was not recorded and was meant to be confidential, a copy of the agenda for the event shows that Schloendorn was there to outline his “final bid to defeat aging” in a session called “Full Body Replacement.”

According to a person who was there, both animal research and personal clones for spare organs were discussed. During the presentation, Gilman and Schloendorn even stood in front of an image of a cloning needle. Pressed on whether this was a talk about brainless clones, Gilman told us that while R3’s current business is replacing animal models, “the team reserves the right to hold hypothetical futuristic discussions.”

MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains.

light passing through an infant's skull — A child with hydranencephaly, a rare condition in which most of the brain is missing. Could a human clone also be created without much of a brain as an ethical source of spare organs?

A main purpose of the fundraising, investors say, was to support efforts to try these techniques in monkeys from a base in the Caribbean. That offered a path to a nearer-term business plan for more ethical medical experiments and toxicology testing—if the company could develop what it now calls monkey “organ sacks.” However, this work would clearly inform any possible human version.

Though he holds a PhD, Schloendorn is a biotech outsider who has published little and is best known for having once outfitted a DIY lab in his Bay Area garage. Still, his ties to the experimental fringe of longevity science have earned him a network in Silicon Valley and allies at a risk-taking US health innovation agency, ARPA-H. Together with his success at raising money from investors, this signals that the brainless-clone concept should be taken seriously by a wider community of scientists, doctors, and ethicists, some of whom expressed grave concerns.

“It sounds crazy, in my opinion,” said Jose Cibelli, a researcher at Michigan State University, after MIT Technology Review described R3’s brainless-clone idea to him. “How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an abnormal human?”

Twenty-five years ago, Cibelli was among the first scientists to try to clone human embryos, but he was trying to obtain matched stem cells, not make a baby. “There is no limit to human imagination and ways to make money, but there have to be boundaries,” he says. “And this is the boundary of making a human being who is not a human being.”

“Feasibility research”

Since Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, researchers have cloned dogs, cats, camels, horses, cattle, ferrets, and other species of mammal. Injecting a cell from an existing animal into an egg creates a carbon-copy embryo that can develop, although not always without problems. Defects, deformities, and stillbirths remain common.

Those grave risks are why we’ve never heard of a human clone, even though it’s theoretically possible to create one.

But brainless clones flip the script. That’s because the ultimate aim is to create not a healthy person but an unconscious body that would probably need life support, like a feeding tube, to stay alive. Because this body would share the DNA of the person being copied, its organs would be a near-perfect immunological match.

Backers of this broad concept argue that a nonsentient body would be ethically acceptable to harvest organs from. Some also believe that swapping in fresh, young body parts—known as “replacement”—is the likeliest path to life extension, since so far no drug can reverse aging.

And then there’s the idea of a complete body transplant. “Certainly, for the cryonics patients, that sounds like something really promising,” says Anders Sandberg, a prominent Swedish transhumanist and expert in the ethics of future technologies. He notes that many people who opt to be stored in cryonic chambers after death choose the less expensive “head only” option, so “there might be a market for having an extra cloned body.”

MIT Technology Review first approached Schloendorn two years ago after learning he’d led a confidential online seminar called the Body Replacement Mini Conference, in which he presented “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.”

According to a copy of the agenda, that 2023 session also included a presentation by a cloning expert, Young Gie Chung. And there was another from Jean Hébert, who was then a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is now a program manager at ARPA-H, where he oversees a project to use stem cells to restore damaged brain tissue. Hébert popularized the so-called replacement solution to avoiding death in a 2020 book called Replacing Aging.

In an interview prior to joining the government in 2024, Hébert described an informal but “very collaborative” relationship with Schloendorn. The overall idea was that to stop aging, one of them would determine how to repair a brain, while the other would figure out how to create a body without one. “It’s a perfect match, right? Body, brain,” Hébert told MIT Technology Review at the time.

Schloendorn, by working outside the mainstream, had the huge advantage of “not being bound by getting the next paper out, or the next grant,” Hébert said, adding, “It’s such a wonderful way of doing research. It’s just clean and pure.” R3 now appears on the ARPA-H website on a list of prospective partners for Hébert’s program.

In a LinkedIn message exchanged with Schloendorn that same year, he described his work as “feasibility research in body replacement.”

“We will try to do it in a way that produces defined societal benefits early on, and we need to be prepared to take no for an answer, if it turns out that this cannot be done safely,” Schloendorn wrote at the time. He declined an interview then, saying that before exiting stealth mode, he wants to be sure the benefits are “reasonably grounded in reality.”

That could prove challenging. While body-part replacement sounds logical, like swapping the timing belt on an old car, in reality there’s scant evidence that receiving organs from a younger twin would make you live any longer.

A complete body transplant, meanwhile, would probably be fatal, at least with current techniques. In the latest test of the concept, published last July, Russian surgeons removed a pig’s head and then sewed it back on. The animal did live—breathing weakly and lapping water from a syringe. But because its spinal cord had been cut, it was otherwise totally paralyzed. (As yet, there’s no proven method to rejoin a severed spinal cord.) In an act of mercy, the doctors ended the pig’s life after about 12 hours.

Even some of R3’s investors say the endeavor is a risky, low-odds project, on par with colonizing Mars. Boyang Wang, head of Immortal Dragons, has spoken at longevity conferences about body-swapping technology, referring to the chance that “when the time comes, you can transplant your brain into a new body.” Wang confirmed in a January Zoom call that he’d been referring to R3 and that he invested $500,000 in the company during a 2024 fundraising round.

But since making his investment, Wang says, he’s become less bullish. He now views whole-body transplant as “very infeasible, not even very scientific” and “far away from hope for any realistic application.”

Still, he says, the investment in R3 fits with his philosophy of making unorthodox bets that could be breakthroughs against aging. “What can really move the needle?” he asks. “Because time is running out.”

Stealth mode

Clonal bodies sit at the extreme frontier of an advancing cluster of technologies all aimed at growing spare parts. Researchers are exploring stem cells, synthetic embryos, and blob-like organoids, and some companies are cloning genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys and hearts have already been transplanted into a few patients. Each of these methods seeks to harness development—the process by which animal bodies naturally form in the womb—to grow fully functional organs.

There’s even a growing cadre of mainstream scientists who say nonsentient bodies could solve the organ shortage, if they could be grown through artificial means. Two Stanford University professors, calling these structures “bodyoids,” published an editorial in favor of manufacturing spare human bodies in MIT Technology Review last year. While that editorial left many details to the imagination, they called the idea “at least plausible—and possibly revolutionary.”

“There are a lot of variations on this where they’re trying to find a socially acceptable form,” says George Church, a Harvard University professor who advises startups in the field. But Church says gestating an entire body is probably taking things too far, especially since nearly all patients on transplant lists are waiting for just a single organ, like a heart or kidney.

“There’s almost no scenario where you need a whole body,” he says. “I just think even if it’s someday acceptable, it’s not a good place to start.” For the moment, Church says, brainless human bodies are “not very useful, in addition to being repulsive.”

That’s arguably why body replacement technology still feels risky to talk about, even among life-extension enthusiasts who are otherwise ready to inject Chinese peptides or have their bodies cryogenically frozen. “I think it’s exciting or interesting from a scientific perspective, but I think the world is not fully ready for it yet,” says Emil Kendziorra, CEO of Tomorrow Bio, a company in Berlin that stores bodies at -196 °C in the hope they can be restored to life in the future.

“Everybody’s like, yeah, you know, cryopreservation makes total sense,” he says. “And then you talk about total body replacement. And then everybody’s like, Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

Even so, “replacement” technology has found a fervent base of support among a group of self-described “hardcore” longevity adherents who follow a philosophy called Vitalism, which holds that society should redirect resources toward achieving unlimited lifespans. The growing influence of this movement, achieved through lobbying, investment, recruiting, and public messaging, was detailed earlier this year in MIT Technology Review.

Last spring, during a meetup for this community, Kendziorra was among the attendees at an invite-only “Replacement Day” gathering that took place off the public schedule. It was where more radical ideas could be discussed freely, since to some in the Vitalist circle, replacing body parts has emerged as the most plausible, least expensive way to beat death.

At least that was the conclusion of a road map for anti-aging technology produced by one Vitalist group, the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which reckoned that a proof-of-concept human clone lacking a neocortex would cost $40 million to create—a tiny amount, relatively speaking.

Its report cited the existence of two stealth companies working on cloning whole nonsentient bodies, although it took care not to name them. If these companies’ activities become public, “there will be a huge backlash—people will hate it,” the entrepreneur Kris Borer said while presenting the road map at a French resort last August.

“There are a ton of dystopian movies and novels about this kind of stuff. That is why I didn’t talk about any of the companies working on it. They are trying to hide from public attention,” he said. “We have to have the angel investors and other people invest kind of in secret until things are ready.”

Borer did say what he sees as the best way to go public: first, to slowly ease body replacement into society’s awareness by disclosing more limited aims, which will be palatable. “We are not going to start with Let’s clone you and give you a body. We are going to start with Let’s solve the organ shortage,” he said. “Eventually people will warm up to it, and then we can go to the more hardcore stuff.”

In an interview earlier this month, Borer declined to name the companies involved in his immortality road map, or to say if R3 is one of them. But we did identify one additional stealthy startup, this one focused on replacing a person’s internal organs, not the whole body. Called Kind Biotechnology, it is a New Hampshire–based company headed by the anti-aging researcher Justin Rebo, a sometime collaborator of Schloendorn’s.

Fig 13 from a patent application — A patent image from Kind Biotechnology shows a mouse pup engineered to lack anatomical features (left) next to a normal animal. The company’s goal is to grow organ “sacks” with a “complete lack of ability to feel, think, or sense.”

According to patent applications filed by the company, Rebo’s team is working to create animals with a “complete lack of ability to feel, think, or sense the environment.” Images included in the patents show mice the company produced that lack a complete brain, and others that don’t have faces or limbs. They did that by deleting genes in embryos using the gene-editing technology CRISPR with the goal of creating a “sack of organs that grows mostly on its own,” with only a minimal nervous system. A cartoon rendering submitted to the patent office shows what looks like a fleshy duffel bag connected to life support tubes.

In an email, Rebo said his company is working on an “ethical and scalable” way to create animal organs for experimental transplant to humans. He notes that “thousands die while waiting” for an organ.

Some of Kind’s patent applications do cover the possibility of producing these organ sacks from human cells. Rebo says that’s more of a speculative possibility. But he does see his work as part of the “replacement” approach to longevity. Firstly, that’s because a “scalable production of young, high-quality organs” would let surgeons try transplants in more types of patients, including many with heart disease in old age who aren’t candidates for a transplant now.

“With abundant high-quality organs, replacement could become a direct form of rejuvenation by replacement of failing parts,” he says.

And Rebo imagines that simultaneously replacing multiple internal organs (grown together in the sack) could have even broader rejuvenating effects. “Ultimately, replacing failing parts is a direct path to extending healthy human lifespan,” he says.

Church, who agreed earlier this year to advise Kind Bio, sees this work as part of an effort to “nudge” these technologies “toward something that is more useful and more acceptable from the get-go,” he says. “And then let’s see how society responds to that—rather than jumping to the most repulsive and most useless form, which some of them seem to be aiming for.”

“There’s one way to find out”

People who know Schloendorn describe a dynamo-like presence who is “100% dedicated” to the goal of extreme life extension. In 2006, he penned a paper in a bioethics journal outlining why the “desire to live forever” is rational, and his doctoral research at the University of Arizona was sponsored by a longevity research organization called the SENS Foundation.

He’s also well connected. In an interview, Aubrey de Grey, the influential and controversial fundraiser and prognosticator who cofounded SENS, called Schloendorn “one of my protégés.” And around 2010, Peter Thiel reportedly invested $1.5 million in ImmunePath, a company started by Schloendorn to develop stem-cell treatments, though it soon failed. (A representative for Thiel did not respond to a request to confirm the figure.)

By 2021, Schloendorn had moved on, founding R3 Biotechnologies. He began to circulate the body replacement idea and discuss a step-by-step scheme to get there: assess techniques in the lab first, then in monkeys, and maybe eventually in humans.

A 2023 “letter to stakeholders” signed by Schloendorn begins by saying that “body replacement cloning will require multicomponent genetic engineering on a scale that has never been attempted in primates.” Fortunately, it adds, molecular techniques for “brain knockout” are well known in mice and should also be expected to function in “birthing whole primates,” a class that includes both monkeys and humans.

Would it work? “There’s one way to find out,” the letter says.

Wang, the investor at Immortal Dragons, says he put money into R3 after it showed him it is possible to create mice without complete brains. “There were imperfections, but the resulting mice survived, grew up, and to me, that is a pretty strong experiment,” he says; it was evidence enough for him to fund R3’s attempt to “replicate the result in primates.”

(In its emailed statement, R3 said the company and its founders “never produced any degree of brain alterations in any species, did not attempt to do so, did not hire another party to do so, and have no specific plans to do so in the future.” It added: “We do not work with live non-human primates.”)

The bigger technical obstacle, though, remains the cloning. Out of 100 attempts to clone an animal, only a few typically succeed. That fact alone makes cloning a human—or a monkey—almost infeasible.

But R3 does seem to have made an effort to tackle the efficiency problem. In one document reviewed by MIT Technology Review, it claims to have implemented improvements to the basic procedure in rodents, referencing a protein, called a histone demethylase, that helps erase a cell’s genetic memory. Adding it can greatly increase the chance that the cell will form a cloned embryo after being injected into an egg in the lab.

Those molecules were used in the first successful cloning of a monkey, which occurred in 2018 in China. But it still wasn’t easy—in fact, it was a huge and costly effort to handle a crowd of monkeys in estrus and perform IVF on them. According to Michigan State’s Cibelli, monkey cloning remains nearly impossible, at least on US territory, just because it’s “unaffordable.”

Nevertheless, success in monkeys did help prove, at least biologically, that human reproductive cloning could be possible.

The company may also have tried to tackle a second long-standing obstacle to cloning: defects in how the placenta works. Because of such problems, some cloned animals die quickly after birth.

The R3 document refers to a “birthing fix” it developed to further improve the cloning success rate. While MIT Technology Review didn’t learn what R3’s process entails, we found a reference to it on the LinkedIn page of Maitriyee Mahanta, a scientist who cosigned the 2023 letter to R3 stakeholders and is a former research assistant to Hébert. (We were unable to reach Mahanta for comment.)

Her page described her current role as “molecular lead” studying cloning, “birth rate fixing,” and cortical development using cells from nonhuman primates. Her job affiliation is given as the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, a nonprofit where de Grey is the president and chief science officer. But de Grey says his foundation only arranged a work visa for Mahanta as part of a partnership “with the company she actually spends her time at.”

Like several other people interviewed for this article, de Grey made a resourceful effort to avoid directly confirming the existence of R3 when we spoke, while at the same time freely discussing theoretical aspects of body cloning technology. For instance, he talked about ways to shorten the wait for your double to grow up to a size suitable for organ harvesting; a further genetic mutation could be added to cause “central precocious puberty” in the clone, he said. This condition causes a growth spurt, even pubic hair, in a toddler.

Cloning dictators

Who would clone a body and pay to keep it alive for years, until it’s needed? The first customers for this costly technology (if it ever proves feasible) would likely be the ultra-rich or the ultra-powerful.

Indeed, somehow the world’s top dictators seem to have gotten the memo about replacement parts. In September, a hot mic picked up a conversation between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping as they walked through Beijing with North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un; in the exchange, the Russian speculated on life extension.

“Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality,” Putin said through an interpreter.

“Some predict that in this century, humans will live to 150 years old,” Xi responded agreeably.

How the leaders learned of these possibilities is unknown. But scenarios involving dictators are a constant topic among body replacement enthusiasts.

“There are companies working on this. They are in stealth—we can’t reveal too much about them—but the general concept on this is if you didn’t have any ethical qualms, you could do most of it today,” Will Harborne, the chief investment officer of LongGame Advisors, said last year, during an interview with the podcaster Julian Issa. “If you were the dictator of some country and wanted a clone of yourself, you can already go grow one. You can create a cloned embryo of yourself, you can get a surrogate to carry it to term, and you can grow [a] body until age 18 with a brain, and eventually, if you were a dictator, you could kill them and try to transplant your head on their body.”

“And now no one is suggesting you do that—it’s very unethical—but most of the technology is there,” he said. He noted that the reason for removing the cortex of a clone created for such a purpose is that “we don’t want to kill other people to live forever.”

Harborne subsequently confirmed to MIT Technology Review that the fund invested $1 million in R3 about a year and a half ago.

In order to make the body replacement process ethical, the clone’s brain needs to be stunted so it lacks consciousness. That is where the interest in birth defects comes in. Remarkable medical scans of kids with a rare condition, hydranencephaly, show a total absence of the cerebral hemispheres. Yet if they are cared for, they may be able to live into their 20s, even though they cannot speak or engage in purposeful movement.

The technical question, then, is how to intentionally produce such a condition in a clone. Sandberg, the futurist, says he’s visited R3’s lab, talked to Gilman, and sat through a presentation about how genetic engineering can be used to shape brain growth. Previous work has shown that by adding a toxic gene, it is possible to kill specific cell types in a growing embryo but spare others, leading to a mouse without a neocortex.

While Sandberg isn’t an expert in biotechnology, he says R3’s theory looked sensible to him. “I think it’s possible to actually prevent the development of the brain well enough that you can say ‘Yeah, there is almost certainly no consciousness here,’” Sandberg says. “Hence, there can’t be any suffering, or any individual, in a practical sense.”

“I think the overall aim—actually, it looks ethically pretty good,” he says.

Two monkeys with stuffed animals in a plastic research container — Monkeys were successfully cloned in China for the first time in 2018. Although it was was a costly and difficult undertaking, the feat suggested human cloning is biologically possible.

Yet it could be difficult to really determine where consciousness starts and ends. Under current medical standards, taking the organs of people with hydranencephaly isn’t allowed because they don’t meet the standard of brain death: They have a functioning brain stem. An even more serious problem is evidence that the brain stem alone produces a basic form of consciousness. If that is so, says Bjorn Merker, a neuroscientist who surveyed caretakers of more than a hundred children with hydranencephaly, a plan “to harvest organs from organisms modeled on this condition would be unethical.”

Of course, the most extreme version of the replacement dream isn’t just to take organs. It’s to take over the body entirely. Sergio Canavero, a controversial Italian surgeon who has proposed head and brain transplants, says he was approached for advice by Schloendorn and others a few years ago. “They told me they were looking at a head transplant on a two- or three-year-old,” he says. “I stopped short. How could you even conceive of that? The biomechanical compatibility is not there. You have to wait until at least 14. And I would say 16. It was very clear to me these guys are not surgeons—they are biologists.”

Canavero says he’s not opposed to cloning bodies for transplant—he thinks it could work. “But if you want to use a clone,” he says, “it must be a nonsentient clone. Otherwise it’s murder, a homicide.”

MIT Technology Review has not found any evidence that R3 has yet created an “organ sack,” much less a brainless human clone. And there are many reasons to believe their hypothetical future of “full body replacement” will never come to pass—that it is just a live-forever fantasy.

“There are so many barriers,” says Cibelli. It’s a long list: Human cloning is illegal in many countries, it’s unsafe, and few competent experts would want, or dare, to participate. And then there’s the inconvenient fact that for now, there’s no way to grow a brainless clone to birth, except in a woman’s body. Think about it, Cibelli says: “You’d have to convince a woman to carry a fetus that is going to be abnormal.”

Sandberg agrees that is where things could start to get tricky. “The problem here, of course,” he says, “is that the yuck factor is magnificent.”

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Feb 27 2026

America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.

To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged.

For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars.

Its rovers have journeyed around a nightmarish ocher desert that, billions of years ago, was home to rivers, lakes, perhaps even seas and oceans. They’ve been seeking to answer a momentous question: Once upon a time, did microbial life wriggle across its surface?

Then, in July 2024, after more than three years on the planet, the Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop. Instead of the usual crystals or layers of sediment, this one had spots. Two kinds, in fact: one that looked like poppy seeds, and another that resembled those on a leopard. It’s possible that run-of-the-mill chemical reactions could have cooked up these odd features. But on Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.

To put it plainly: Holy crap.

Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos. And they meant the most existential question of all—Are we alone?—might soon be addressed. “If you do it, then human history is never the same,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes planetary exploration and defense and the search for extraterrestrial life.

But the only way to confirm whether these seeds and spots are the fossilized imprint of alien biology is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.

Perseverance was the first stage of an ambitious scheme to do just that—in effect, to pull off a space heist. The mission—called Mars Sample Return and planned by the US, along with its European partners—would send a Rube Goldberg–like series of robotic missions to the planet to capture pristine rocks. The rover’s job was to find the most promising stones and extract samples; then it would pass them to another robot—the getaway driver—to take them off Mars and deliver them to Earth.

But now, just over a year and a half later, the project is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.

“We’ve spent 50 years preparing to get these samples back. We’re ready to do that,” says Philip Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who works closely with NASA. “Now we’re two feet from the finish line—Oh, sorry, we’re not going to complete the job.”

This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of MSR. It’s leaner than America and Europe’s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won’t be the headline people remember—the one in the scientific journals and the history books. “At the rate we’re going, there’s a very good chance they’ll do it before we do,” laments Christensen. “Being there first is what matters.”

Of course, any finding of extraterrestrial life advances human knowledge writ large, no matter the identity of the discoverers. But there is the not-so-small issue of pride in an already heated nationalistic competition, not to mention the fact that many scientists in America (to say nothing of US lawmakers) don’t necessarily want their future research and scientific progress subject to a foreign gatekeeper. And even for those not especially concerned about potentially unearthing alien microbes, MSR and the comparable Chinese mission are technological stepping stones toward a long-held dream shared by many beyond Elon Musk: getting astronauts onto the Red Planet and, eventually, setting up long-term bases for astronauts there. It’d be a huge blow to show up only after a competitor had already set up shop … or not to get there at all.

“If we can’t do this, how do we think we’re gonna send humans there and get back safely?” says Victoria Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is also the chair of the NASA-affiliated Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group.

Or as Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, puts it: “If you’re going to bring humans back from Mars, you sure as shit have to figure out how to bring the samples back first.”

Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It’s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries—as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment.

“I spent most of my career studying Mars,” says Christensen. There are countless things about it that bewitch him. But by examining it, he suspects, we’ll get further than ever in the Homeric investigation of how life began.

Sure, the Mars of today is a postapocalyptic wasteland, an arid and cold desert bathed in lethal radiation. But billions of years ago, water lapped up against the slopes of fiery volcanoes that erupted under a clement sky. Then its geologic interior cooled down so quickly, changing everything. Its global magnetic field collapsed like a deflating balloon, and its protective atmosphere was stripped away by the sun.

NASA first touched down on Mars in 1976 with two Viking landers. The Mars Odyssey spacecraft has been orbiting the planet since 2001 and produced this image of Valles Marineris, which is 10 times longer, 5 times deeper, and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon.

Its surface is now remarkably hostile to life as we know it. But deep below ground, where it’s shielded from space, and where it’s warmer and wetter, there could maybe be microbes inching about.

Scientists have long possessed several Martian meteorites that have been flung our way, but none of them are pristine; they were all damaged by cosmic radiation midflight, before getting scorched in Earth’s atmosphere. Plus, there’s another problem: “We currently have no rocks from Mars that are sedimentary, the rock type likely to contain fossils,” says Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at London’s Natural History Museum.

For those, humans (or robots) would need to get on the ground.

NASA first made the stuff of sci-fi films a reality 50 years ago, when two Viking landers touched down on the planet in 1976. One of their experiments dropped some radioactively tagged nutrients into soil samples, the idea being that if any microbes were present, they’d gobble up the nutrients and burp out some radioactive waste gas that the landers could detect. Tantalizingly, this experiment hinted that something microbe-like was interacting with those nutrients—but the result was inconclusive (and today most scientists don’t suspect biology was responsible).

Still, it was enough to elevate scientists’ curiosity about the genuine possibility of Martian life. Over the coming decades, America sent an ever-expanding fleet of robots to Mars—orbiting spacecraft, landers, and wheeled rovers. But no matter how hard they studied their adoptive planet’s rocks, they weren’t designed to definitively detect signs of life. For that, promising-looking rocks would need to be captured and, somehow, shuttled back to labs on Earth in carefully sealed containers.

A 2023 plan from NASA and the European Space Agency to safely transport pristine samples received from Mars.

This became a top priority for the US planetary science community in 2003, following the publication of the first Planetary Decadal Survey, a census conducted at NASA’s request. The scientific case for the mission was clear—even to the people who didn’t think they’d find signs of life. “I bet there isn’t life on Mars. But if there is, or was, that would be an incredibly important discovery,” says Christensen. And if not, “Why not?”

He adds: “We may understand more about why life started on Earth by understanding why it may not have started on Mars. What was that key difference between those two planets?”

And so, MSR was born. America went all in, and the European Space Agency joined the team. Over the next decade or so, a complex plan was drawn up.

First, a NASA rover would land on Mars in a spot that once was potentially habitable—later determined to be Jezero Crater. It would zip about, look for layered rocks of the sort that you’d find in lakes and riverbeds, extract cores of them, and cache them in sealed containers. Then a second NASA spacecraft would land on Mars, receive the rover’s sample tubes (in one of several different ways), and transfer the samples to a rocket that would launch them into Martian orbit. A European-provided orbiter would catch that rocket like a baseball glove before returning home and dropping the rocks into Earth’s atmosphere, where they would be guided, via parachute, to eagerly awaiting scientists no later than the mid-2030s.

Two messages were encoded on the 70-foot parachute used by the Perseverance rover as it descended toward Mars. This annotated image shows how NASA systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips; he also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Put simply, this is the most scientifically careful sample collection mission possible, conducted in one of the most promising places on Mars to look for signs of past life,” says Jonathan Lunine, the chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “And, of course, should evidence of life be found in the sediments, that would be an historic discovery.”

It got off to an auspicious start. On July 30, 2020, in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic, NASA’s Perseverance rover launched atop a rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The NASA administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine, didn’t mince words: “We are in extraordinary times right now,” he told reporters, “yet we have in fact persevered, and we have protected this mission because it is so important.”

But just earlier that same month, the mission to Mars had turned into a race. China was now prepping its own sample return spacecraft.

And that’s when things for MSR started to unravel.

China was comparatively late to develop a competitive space program, but once it began doing so, it wasted no time. In 2003, it first sent one of its astronauts into space, via its own bespoke rocket; in the two decades since, it has launched its own space station and sent multiple uncrewed spacecraft to the moon—first orbiters, then landers—as part of its Chang’e Project, named after a lunar goddess.

But a real turning point for China’s interplanetary ambitions came in 2020, the same year as Perseverance’s launch to Mars.

That December, Chang’e-5 touched down in the moon’s Ocean of Storms, a realm of frozen lava 1,600 miles long. It grabbed some 2-billion-year-old rocks, put them in a rocket, and blasted them into the firmament. The samples were captured by a small orbiting spacecraft; crucially, the idea was not all that dissimilar from how MSR imagined catching its own samples, baseball-glove style. China’s lunar haul was then dropped off back on Earth just before Christmas. It marked the first time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon, and the mission was seamless.

two labelled vials of soil next to a small ruler for scale — China brought back soil samples from the moon’s Ocean of Storms during its Chang’e-5 mission, marking the first time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon.

That same year, China made its first foray toward Mars. The project was called Tianwen-1, meaning “Questions to Heaven”—the first in a new series of audacious space missions to the Red Planet and orbiting asteroids. While its success was far from guaranteed, China was willing to kick into high gear immediately, sending both an orbiting spacecraft and a rover to Mars at the same time. No other country had ever managed to perform this act of spaceflight acrobatics on its first try.

Just as China ramped up its space schemes, some people in the scientific community began to wonder if NASA was (inadvertently) promising too much with MSR—and whether the heist would be worth the cost.

In 2020, the price tag for the program had jumped from an already expensive $5.3 billion to an estimated $7 billion. (For context, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which is currently being pieced together, has a price tag of around $1.2 billion. This space observatory is designed to find Earthbound asteroids and is tasked with defending all 8 billion of us from a catastrophic impact.)

But Perseverance was already on its way to Mars. It wasn’t as if this expensive train could go back to the station. The project’s advocates just hoped it’d actually make it there in one piece.

While the US had previously entered Martian orbit successfully, several other entry, descent, and landing attempts on the planet had ended in explosive disaster; the primary antagonist is the Martian atmosphere, which can cause spacecraft to tumble wildly out of control or heat up and ignite. Perseverance would be traveling at nearly 12,500 miles per hour as it entered Mars’s airspace, and to land it’d need to decelerate, deploy a parachute, fire several rockets, and pilot itself to the skies above Jezero Crater—before a levitating crane would drop off the actual rover.

Thankfully, Perseverance’s deployment went off without a hitch. On February 18, 2021, Mars became its new home—and the rover’s makers hugged, high-fived, and whooped for joy in NASA’s flight control room.

As Lori Glaze, then director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at the time, “Now the fun really starts.”

Members of NASA’s Perseverance rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, celebrate after receiving confirmation that the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars in February 2021.

That very same month, China arrived at Mars’s doorstep for the first time.

On February 10, 2021, Tianwen-1 began to orbit the planet. Then, on May 14, it slipped a drop shipment through the spacecraft-frying atmosphere to deliver a rover onto an expansive landscape called Utopia Planitia—giving Perseverance a neighbor, albeit one 1,200 miles away.

This explorer was nowhere near as sophisticated as Perseverance, and its assignment was a far cry from a sample return mission. It had some cameras and scientific instruments for studying its environment, making it comparable to one of NASA’s older rovers. It was also supposed to operate for just three months (though it ended up persisting for an entire year before being fatally smothered by pernicious Martian dust).

Nevertheless, Tianwen-1 was a remarkable achievement for China, one that the US couldn’t help but applaud. “This is a really big deal,” said Roger Launius, then NASA’s chief historian.

And even if grabbing pieces of Mars was increasingly likely in China’s future, it was already happening in the present for the US. The race, the Americans thought, was over before it had even begun … right?

Over the next few years, Perseverance went on an extraterrestrial joyride. It meandered through frozen flows of lava and journeyed over fans of sediment once washed about by copious liquid water. It pulled out rocks that preserved salty, muddy layers—exactly the environment that, on Earth, would be teeming with microorganisms and organic matter.

“Jezero Crater clearly meets the astrobiological criterion for a sampling site where life may once have existed,” says Lunine from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “Rocks of broadly similar age and setting on Earth contain some of the earliest evidence for life on our own planet.”

The Perseverance rover has been on an extraterrestrial joyride since 2021, drilling holes in promising looking space rocks that it hopes could be teeming with microorganisms and organic matter.

Then, in September 2023, as Perseverance was trundling across the ruins of what may once have been a microbial metropolis, an independent panel of researchers published a report that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that MSR was the opposite of okay.

They found that the project was too decentralized among the nation’s plethora of NASA centers, leaving confusion as to who was actually in charge. And at its current pace, MSR wouldn’t get its Mars rocks back home until the 2040s at the earliest—as much as a whole decade later than initial estimates. And it would cost as much as $11 billion, more than doubling the initial tab.

“MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,” the report reads. “MSR was also organized under an unwieldy structure. As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.”

Members of Congress started to wonder aloud whether MSR should be canceled outright, and the scientific community that had once so enthusiastically supported the mission faced a moment of reckoning.

Byrne, the planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, had always been something of a rebel, never really a fan of NASA’s multi-decadal, over-the-top fascination with Mars. The solar system, he argued, is filled with curious worlds to explore—especially Venus, another nearby rocky world that was once rather Earth-like. Couldn’t we spare some of NASA’s budget to make sure we explore Venus, too?

Still, like many other critical colleagues, Byrne did not want to see MSR put down. The report’s findings didn’t change the fact that Perseverance was dutifully working around the clock to accomplish the mission’s opening stages. What would be the point of gathering all those samples if they were going to be left to stay on Mars? The community, Byrne explains, just needed to answer one question: “How do you do this in a way that’s faster and cheaper?”

In April 2024, NASA publicly sought help from its industry partners in the space sector: Could anyone come up with a way to save MSR? Various players with spaceflight experience, like Lockheed Martin, sent in proposals for consideration.

Then, just a few months later in July 2024, Perseverance came in clutch, finding those special leopard-spotted and speckled rocks in an old river valley—a sign of hope that NASA had been desperately seeking. Now the agency’s request for help was all the more urgent—these rocks had to get home. After various panels assessed plans that could effectively save MSR, two potential options for a faster, leaner, less expensive version were previewed at a January 2025 press briefing.

One option brought in tried-and-tested tech: Since Perseverance had been safely deployed onto the surface of Mars using a hovering platform known as a sky crane, it was proposed that the sample-gathering lander for MSR could also be dropped off using a sky crane, which would simplify this step and reduce the overall cost of the program. The other suggestion was that the lander could be delivered to Mars via a spaceship from a commercial spaceflight company. The lander design itself could also be streamlined, and tweaks could be made to the rocket that would launch the samples back into space.

The proposals needed greater study, but everyone’s spirits were lifted by the fact these plans could, at least theoretically, get samples back in the 2030s, not the 2040s. And, crucially, “it was possible to get the cost down,” says Jack Mustard, an Earth and planetary scientist at Brown University and a member of one of the two proposal-reviewing panels. Still, it didn’t save a lot: They could do MSR for $8 billion.

“What we came up with was very reasonable, rational, much simpler,” says Christensen, who was part of the same review panel. “And $8 billion is about the right amount it would take to guarantee that it’s going to work.”

While the US became increasingly consumed with its own interplanetary woes, China was riding high.

In June 2024, the sixth installment in the Chang’e project made history. It was another lunar sample return mission, but this one did something nobody had ever done in the history of spaceflight: It landed on the difficult-to-reach, out-of-view far side of the moon and snagged samples from it.

China made it look effortless when a capsule containing matter from this previously untouched region safely landed in Inner Mongolia. Long Xiao, a planetary geoscientist at the China University of Geosciences, told reporters at the time that the mission’s success was “a cause for celebration for all humanity.”

But it was also effectively a bombshell for NASA. Yes, the moon is much closer to Earth, and it doesn’t have a spaceship-destroying atmosphere like Mars. But China was speedrunning through the race while America was largely looking the other way.

Then, in May 2025, China launched Tianwen-2. Its destination was not Mars but a near-Earth asteroid. The plan is that it will scoop up some of the space rock’s primordial pebbles later this year and deliver them back to Earth in late 2027. In light of China’s past successes, many suspect it’ll nail this project, too.

Tianwen-2 on the launchpad — China’s Tianwen missions, meaning “Questions to Heaven,” aim to explore both Mars and orbiting asteroids. The Tianwen-2 probe blasted off in May 2025, headed toward a near-Earth asteroid for a sample-return mission.

But perhaps the biggest blow to the US came in June 2025: China revealed its formal designs on returning samples from Mars—and potentially addressing the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Chinese researchers outlined a bold plan for Tianwen-3 in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Searching for signs of life, or astrobiology studies, are the first priority,” says Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong. And while many observers had long been cognizant of this ambition, seeing it so clearly spelled out in academic writing made it real.

“The selection of the landing site is still ongoing,” says Li Yiliang, an astrobiologist at the University of Hong Kong, an author of the Tianwen-3 study, and a member of the spacecraft’s landing site selection team. But the paper notes, in no uncertain terms, that the mission will move at a breakneck pace. “The aim of China’s Mars sample return mission, known as Tianwen-3, is to collect at least 500g of samples from Mars and return them to Earth around 2031.”

2031. Even on its original, speedier timeline, America’s MSR plan wouldn’t get samples back by that date. So how is China planning to pull it off?

Qian explains that Tianwen-3 is building on the success of the lunar sample return program. Doing something similar for Mars is a rather giant technological leap (requiring two rockets, not one)—but, he argues, “the technologies here are similar.”

The plan is for a duet of rockets to blast off from Earth in 2028. The first will contain the lander-ascender combination, or LAC. The second is the orbiter-returner combination, or ORC. The LAC will get to Mars and deploy a lander as well as a small helicopter, which will scout promising locations around the landing site while using a claw to bring several small samples back to the lander.

China’s Tianwen-3 mission is searching for signs of Martian life with an eye toward having samples back home sometime in 2031.

The LAC will then travel to the most promising site. The lander’s drill, which can get down to around seven feet below the surface, is the most important part of the mission. At that depth, there are greater odds of capturing signs of past life. When at least 500 grams of pristine rocks have been loaded aboard the lander, the samples will be launched into space, where the orbiter will be waiting to capture them and send them back home sometime in 2031.

“The returned samples will be quarantined strictly in an under-planning facility near Hefei city,” says Yiliang. And there, in those bio-secure labs, scientists might very well find the first clear signs of alien life, past or present.

The very same month that Chinese researchers published their daring plans for returning Mars samples, the new Trump administration released a draconian NASA budget for Congress to consider—one that sparked panic across the planetary science community.

If enacted, it would have been a historic catastrophe for the venerable space agency, giving NASA its smallest budget since 1961. This would have forced it to let go of a huge number of staffers, slash its science program budget in half, and terminate 19 missions currently in operation. MSR was in the crosshairs, too.

“Grim is the word,” says Dreier of the Planetary Society.

Over the next few months, Congress pushed back on the potential gutting of NASA, but largely to save ongoing solar system exploration missions. MSR was not considered an active effort; Perseverance was effectively a scientific scout acting independently by this point. A counterproposal by the House offered up $300 million for MSR, but no policymaker was cheerleading for it. (The US Office of Management and Budget, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and the office of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Mars Sample Return doesn’t seem to have very many advocates right now,” says Byrne. The project “isn’t featuring in anyone’s conversation at the moment, with all of the existential shit that’s happening to NASA.” Everyone working on a NASA mission hoped that they, and their spacecraft, would survive the onslaught. As Byrne adds: “[People are] just trying to keep their heads down.”

Researchers in America suddenly found themselves at an inflection point. “The attack on science, and the attack on NASA science, has been very successful, in that it has completely demoralized the science community,” says Christensen. “Everyone’s in a state of shock.”

When I contacted NASA in July about the state of MSR, which was then in the middle of a months-long limbo, I was told that experts weren’t available to comment. Roxana Bardan, a spokesperson, instead sent a statement: “Under President Trump’s America First agenda, NASA is committed to sustained U.S. space leadership. We will continue to innovate, explore, and excel to ensure American preeminence in space.” (The agency did not respond to a follow-up request for comment.)

That notion stood in direct contrast to what Christensen told me around the same time. “The US … has led the exploration of Mars for 50 years,” he said. “And as we approach one of the key discovery points, we’re about to concede that leadership to someone else.”

From China’s perspective, the fumbling of MSR is more confusing than anything else. “NASA has so well prepared for her MSR mission in both technology and science, and I and my colleagues have learned so much from NASA’s scientific communities,” says Yiliang.

And if China wins the race because America decided to shoot itself in the foot? “This is sad,” he says. “If this comes true, I believe the Chinese will not be that happy to win the race in this way.”

Tianwen-3 will still have to overcome many of the same hurdles as MSR. Nobody, for example, has autonomously launched a rocket of any kind off the surface of Mars. But many believe the Chinese can succeed, even at their program’s superspeed. Christensen, for one, fully expected several of their past robotic missions to the moon and Mars to fail—but “the fact that they pulled it off the first time really says a lot about their engineering capability,” he says.

Mustard agrees: “They know how to land; they know how to leave. I have a lot of confidence that they’ve learned enough from the lunar work that they’ll be able to do it.”

Plus, Tianwen-3’s architecture is simpler than the US-European mission. It has fewer components, and fewer points of potential failure. This also means, though, that the quality of the loot will be somewhat lacking. Tianwen-3 will sample from only one small patch of Mars. Conversely, Perseverance is roving around a vast and geologically diverse landscape, sampling as it goes, which would translate to “literally orders of magnitude more science than what will come from the Chinese samples,” says Christensen.

But China could serendipitously land on a biologically rich patch of the planet. As the Southwest Research Institute’s Hamilton says, the mission could “pick up something entirely unexpected and, you know, miraculous.”

The likeliest outcome is still that neither nation finds fossilized microbes, but that China brings back rocks from Mars first. At the end of the day, that’s what Americans (and Europeans) will hear: “You’re second. You lost,” says Mustard.

Like many of his colleagues, Christensen is irked by the thought of losing the race to Mars, because it would be such an own goal. The US has been sending robots over there for decades and investing billions in forging the technology that would be required to make MSR a success. And suddenly “the Chinese come along and say, Thank you very much, we’ll take all of that information—we’ll build one mission and go and do what you guys did the groundwork for,” Christensen says. “As a taxpayer, I’m like: It just seems foolish to me.”

Even the MSR skeptics concede that this kind of loss would have sweeping ramifications. Byrne worries that if something like MSR can be snuffed out so easily, what’s to say the next big mission—to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond—won’t suffer the same ignoble fate? In other words, the death of MSR would severely damage “the ability of the planetary community to dream big,” he says. “If we don’t pull this off, what does that mean? Are we not going to do big, expensive, difficult things?”

Another big, expensive, difficult thing? Putting humans on Mars. Both critics and advocates of MSR largely agree it is an invaluable dress rehearsal. Making sure you can safely launch a rocket off Mars is a necessary prerequisite to ensuring that an array of equipment can survive for a long time on the planet’s lethal surface.

China, too, has explicitly acknowledged this. As one of the first lines of the Tianwen-3 study states, “Mars is the most promising planet for humanity’s expansion beyond Earth, with its potential for future habitability and accessible resources.”

Though such expansion is still of course a far-future dream, it’s not hard to see how losing the race here would put the US at a huge disadvantage. Members of America’s planetary science community say that to try to sway politicians in their favor, they have framed MSR as a national security issue. But they haven’t had much luck. “We’ve been in discussions with decision-makers who have never heard that perspective before,” says the Planetary Society’s Dreier.

“It is surprising that doesn’t have more weight,” adds Mustard.

Despite months of purgatory, it still stung when the coup de grâce arrived in January. In the draft for a must-pass spending bill, House and Senate appropriators spared NASA from the harshest proposed cuts, thereby saving dozens of spaceflight missions and preserving much of the agency’s planetary science output. But the bill provided absolutely zero political or financial support for MSR. There it was, in black and white: America’s plans to perform a history-making heist on Mars were dead. The bill became law in January and Perseverance, it seems, is now destined to rove alone on the Red Planet until its nuclear battery burns out.

This austere reality clashes with the soaring aspirations outlined in the first Planetary Decadal Survey, written just over two decades ago. It stated that the US exploration of the solar system “has a proud past, a productive present, and an auspicious future.” It also noted that “answers to profound questions about our origins and our future may be within our grasp.”

Now the answers have all but slipped away. Even though Perseverance continues to roam, it’s increasingly likely we’ll never see those promising bespeckled rocks with human eyes, let alone any other rocks the rover finds intriguing. It is far easier to imagine that in the near future, perhaps in the early 2030s, Perseverance will point its camera up at the night sky above Jezero Crater. It will catch a small glimmer: Tianwen-3’s orbiter, preparing to send ancient rocks back to Earth. Meanwhile, Perseverance’s own sample tubes—perhaps some containing signs of life—will be trapped on the Martian surface, gathering dust.

Sample tubes collected by the Perseverance rover may never make it home from the Martian surface.

It is a sobering thought for Christensen. “We’ll wake up one day and go: What the hell?” he says. “How did we let this happen?”

Robin George Andrews is an award-winning science journalist and doctor of volcanoes based in London. He regularly writes about the Earth, space, and planetary sciences, and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Super Volcanoes (2021) and How to Kill An Asteroid (2024).

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Jan 30 2026

Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong”

“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?”

Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should be humanity’s number one priority—quite literally, that it should come above all else in the social and political hierarchy.

“If you believe that life is good and there’s inherent moral value to life,” he told them, “it stands to reason that the ultimate logical conclusion here is that we should try to extend lifespan indefinitely.”

Solving aging, he added, is “a problem that has an incredible moral duty for all of us to get involved in.”

It was the end of April, and the crowd—with its whoops and yeahs—certainly seemed convinced. They’d gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency (simply called Vitalist Bay) that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago.

No relation to the lowercase vitalism of old, this Vitalism has a foundational philosophy that’s deceptively simple: to acknowledge that death is bad and life is good. The strategy for executing it, though, is far more obviously complicated: to launch a longevity revolution.

Interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, but as the Vitalists see it, it has a branding problem. The term “longevity” has been used to sell supplements with no evidence behind them, “anti-aging” has been used by clinics to sell treatments, and “transhumanism” relates to ideas that go well beyond the scope of defeating death. Not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. As Gries, a longtime longevity devotee who has largely become the enthusiastic public face of Vitalism, said in an online presentation about the movement in 2024, “We needed some new word.”

“Vitalism” became a clean slate: They would start a movement to defeat death, and make that goal the driving force behind the actions of individuals, societies, and nations. Longevity could no longer be a sideshow. For Vitalism to succeed, budgets would need to change. Policy would need to change. Culture would need to change. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.

“The idea is to change the systems and the priorities of society at the highest levels,” Gries said in the presentation.

To be clear, the effective anti-aging treatments the Vitalists are after don’t yet exist. But that’s sort of the point: They believe they could exist if Vitalists are able to spread their gospel, influence science, gain followers, get cash, and ultimately reshape government policies and priorities.

For the past few years, Gries and Cheng have been working to recruit lobbyists, academics, biotech CEOs, high-net-worth individuals, and even politicians into the movement, and they’ve formally established a nonprofit foundation “to accelerate Vitalism.” Today, there’s a growing number of Vitalists (some paying foundation members, others more informal followers, and still others who support the cause but won’t publicly admit as much), and the foundation has started “certifying” qualifying biotech companies as Vitalist organizations. Perhaps most consequentially, Gries, Cheng, and their peers are also getting involved in shaping US state laws that make unproven, experimental treatments more accessible. They hope to be able to do the same at the national level.

Nathan Cheng being interviewed outdoors at Longevity State Conference

Adam Gries being interviewed outdoors at Longevity State Conference

Vitalism cofounders Nathan Cheng and Adam Gries want to launch a longevity revolution.

All this is helping Vitalists grow in prominence, if not also power. In the past, people who have spoken of living forever or making death “optional” have been dismissed by their academic colleagues. I’ve been covering the broader field of aging science for a decade, and I’ve seen scientists roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and turn their backs on people who have talked this way. That’s not the case for the Vitalists.

Even the scientists who think that Vitalist ideas of defeating death are wacky, unattainable ones, with the potential to discredit their field, have shown up on stage with Vitalism’s founders, and these serious researchers provide a platform for them at more traditionally academic events.

I saw this collegiality firsthand at Vitalist Bay. Faculty members from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, all spoke at events. Eric Verdin, the prominent researcher who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, had also planned to speak, although a scheduling clash meant he couldn’t make it in the end. “I have very different ideas in terms of what’s doable,” he told me. “But that’s part of the [longevity] movement—there’s freedom for people to say whatever they want.”

Many other well-respected scientists attended, including representatives of ARPA-H, the US federal agency for health research and breakthrough technologies. And as I left for a different event on longevity in Washington, DC, just after the Vitalist Bay Summit, a sizable group of Vitalist Bay attendees headed that way too, to make the case for longevity to US lawmakers.

The Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern.

This, of course, sparks some pretty profound questions. What would a society without death look like—and would we even want it? After all, death has become an important part of human culture the world over. And even if Vitalists aren’t destined to realize their lofty goal, their growing influence could still have implications for us all. As they run more labs and companies, and insert themselves into the making of laws and policy, perhaps they will discover treatments that really do slow or even reverse aging. In the meantime, though, some ethicists are concerned that experimental and unproven medicines—including potentially dangerous ones—are becoming more accessible, in some cases with little to no oversight.

Gries, ultimately, has a different view of the ethics here. He thinks that being “okay with death” is what disqualifies a person from being considered ethical. “Death is just wrong,” he says. “It’s not just wrong for some people. It’s wrong for all people.”

The birth of a revolution

When I arrived at the Vitalist Bay Summit on April 25, I noticed that the venue was equipped with everything a longevity enthusiast might need: napping rooms, a DEXA body-composition scanner, a sauna in a bus, and, for those so inclined, 24-hour karaoke.

I was told that around 300 people had signed up for that day’s events, which was more than had attended the previous week. That might have been because arguably the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, Bryan Johnson, was about to make an appearance. (If you’re curious to know more about what Johnson was doing there, you can read about our conversation here.)

The key to Vitalism has always been that “death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” cofounder Adam Gries told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”

But Gries, another man in his 40s who doesn’t want to die, was the first to address the audience that day. Athletic and energetic, he bounded across a stage wearing bright yellow shorts and a long-sleeved shirt imploring people to “Choose Life: VITALISM.”

Gries is a tech entrepreneur who describes himself as a self-taught software engineer who’s “good at virality.” He’s been building companies since he was in college in the 2000s, and grew his personal wealth by selling them.

As with many other devotees to the cause, his deep interest in life extension was sparked by Aubrey de Grey, a controversial researcher with an iconic long beard and matching ponytail. He’s known widely both for his optimistic views about “defeating aging” and for having reportedly made sexual comments to two longevity entrepreneurs. (In an email, de Grey said he’s “never disputed” one of these remarks but denied having made the other. “My continued standing within the longevity community speaks for itself,” he added.)

In an influential 2005 TED Talk (which has over 4.8 million views), de Grey predicted that people would live to 1,000 and spoke of the possibility of new technologies that would continue to stave off death, allowing some to avoid it indefinitely. (In a podcast recorded last year, Cheng described a recording of this talk as “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”)

“It was kind of evident to me that life is great,” says Gries. “So I’m kind of like, why would I not want to live?”

A second turning point for Gries came during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when he essentially bet against companies that he thought would collapse. “I made this 50 [fold] return,” he says. “It was kind of like living through The Big Short.”

Gries and his wife fled from San Francisco to Israel, where he grew up, and later traveled to Taiwan, where he’d obtained a “golden visa” and which was, at the time, one of only two countries that had not reported a single case of covid. His growing wealth afforded him the opportunity to take time from work and think about the purpose of life. “My answer was: Life is the purpose of life,” he says. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to experience the “journey of decrepitude” that aging often involves.

So he decided to dedicate himself to the longevity cause. He went about looking up others who seemed as invested as he was. In 2021 his search led him to Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur based in Toronto. He had dropped out of a physics PhD a few years earlier after experiencing what he describes on his website as “a massive existential crisis” and shifted his focus to “radical longevity.” (Cheng did not respond to email requests for an interview.)

The pair “hit it off immediately,” says Gries, and they spent the following two years trying to figure out what they could do. The solution they finally settled on: revolution.

After all, Gries reasons, that’s how significant religious and social movements have happened in the past. He says they sought inspiration from the French and American Revolutions, among others. The idea was to start with some kind of “enlightenment,” and with a “hardcore group,” to pursue significant social change with global ramifications.

“We were convinced that without a revolution,” Gries says, “we were as good as dead.”

A home for believers

Early on, they wrote a Vitalist declaration, a white paper that lists five core statements for believers:

Life and health are good. Death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent.
Aging causes immense suffering, and obviating aging is scientifically plausible.
Humanity should apply the necessary resources to reach freedom from aging as soon as possible.
I will work on or support others to work on reaching unlimited healthy human lifespan.
I will carry the message against aging and death.

While it’s not an explicit part of the manifesto, it was important to them to think about it as a moral philosophy as well as a movement. As Cheng said at the time, morality “guides most of the actions of our lives.” The same should be true of Vitalism, he suggested.

Gries has echoed this idea. The belief that “death is morally bad” is necessary to encourage behavior change, he told me in 2024. It is a moral drive, or moral purpose, that pushes people to do difficult things, he added.

Revolution, after all, is difficult. And to succeed—to “get unlimited great health to the top of the priority list,” as Gries says—the movement would need to infiltrate the government and shape policy decisions and national budgets. The Apollo program got people to the moon with less than 1% of US GDP; imagine, Gries asks, what we could do to human longevity with a mere 1% of GDP?

It makes sense, then, that Gries and Cheng launched Vitalism in 2023 at Zuzalu, a “pop-up city” in Montenegro that provided a two-month home for like-minded longevity enthusiasts. The gathering was in some ways a loose prototype for what they wanted to accomplish. Cheng spoke there of how they wanted to persuade 10,000 or so Vitalists to move to Rhode Island. Not only was it close to the biotech hub of Boston, but they believed it had a small enough population for an influx of new voters sharing their philosophy to influence local and state elections. “Five to ten thousand people—that’s all we need,” he said. Or if not Rhode Island, another small-ish US state, where they could still change state policy from the inside.

The ultimate goal was to recruit Vitalists to help them establish a “longevity state”—a recognized jurisdiction that “prioritizes doing something about aging,” Cheng said, perhaps by loosening regulations on clinical trials or supporting biohacking.

Bryan Johnson sitting cross-legged at home — Bryan Johnson, who is perhaps the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, spoke at Vitalist Bay and is trying to start a Don’t Die religion.

This idea is popular among many vocal members of the Vitalism community. It borrows from the concept of the “network state” developed by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, defined as a new city or country that runs on cryptocurrency; focuses on a goal, in this case extending human lifespan; and “eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.”

Some people not interested in dying have made progress toward realizing such a domain. Following the success of Zuzalu, one of the event’s organizers, Laurence Ion, a young cryptocurrency investor and self-proclaimed Vitalist, joined a fellow longevity enthusiast named Niklas Anzinger to organize a sequel in Próspera, the private “special economic zone” on the Honduran island of Roatán. They called their “pop-up city” Vitalia.

I visited shortly after it launched in January 2024. The goal was to create a low-regulation biotech hub to fast-track the development of anti-aging drugs, though the “city” was more like a gated resort that hosted talks from a mix of respected academics, biohackers, biotech CEOs, and straight-up eugenicists. There was a strong sense of community—many attendees were living with or near each other, after all. A huge canvas where attendees could leave notes included missives like “Don’t die,” “I love you,” and “Meet technoradicals building the future!”

But Vitalia was short-lived, with events ending by the start of March 2024. And while many of the vibes were similar to what I’d later see at Vitalist Bay, the temporary nature of Vitalia didn’t quite match the ambition of Gries and Cheng.

Patri Friedman, a 49-year-old libertarian and grandson of the economist Milton Friedman who says he attended Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Vitalist Bay, envisions something potentially even bolder. He’s the founder of the Seasteading Institute, which has the goal of “building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy” and has received funding and support from the billionaire Peter Thiel. Friedman also founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in projects focused on “building the cities of tomorrow.”

His company is exploring various types of potential network states, but he says he’s found that medical tourism—and, specifically, a hunger for life extension—dominates the field. “People do not want this ‘10 years and a billion dollars to pass a drug’ thing with the FDA,” says Friedman. (While he doesn’t call himself a Vitalist, partly because he’s “almost never going to agree with” any kind of decree, Friedman holds what you might consider similarly staunch sentiments about death, which he referred to as “murder by omission.” When I asked him if he has a target age he’d like to reach, he told me he found the question “mind-bogglingly strange” and “insane.” “How could you possibly be like: Yes, please murder me at this time?” he replied. “I can always fucking shoot myself in the head—I don’t need anybody’s help.”)

But even as Vitalists and those aligned with their beliefs embrace longevity states, Gries and Cheng are reassessing their former ambitions. The network-state approach has limits, Gries tells me. And encouraging thousands of people to move to Rhode Island wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped it might be.

Not because he can’t find tens of thousands of Vitalists, Gries stresses—but most of them are unwilling to move their lives for the sake of influencing the policy of another state. He compares Vitalism to a startup, with a longevity state as its product. For the time being, at least, there isn’t enough consumer appetite for that product, he says.

The past year shows that it may in fact be easier to lobby legislators in states that are already friendly to deregulation. Anzinger and a lobbying group called the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) were integral to making Montana the first US hub for experimental medical treatments, with a new law to allow clinics to sell experimental therapies once they have been through preliminary safety tests (which don’t reveal whether a drug actually works). But Gries and his Vitalist colleagues also played a role—“providing feedback, talking to lawmakers … brainstorming [and] suggesting ideas,” Gries says.

The Vitalist crew has been in conversation with lawmakers in New Hampshire, too. In an email in December, Gries and Cheng claimed they’d “helped to get right-to-try laws passed” in the state—an apparent reference to the recent expansion of a law to make more unapproved treatments accessible to people with terminal illnesses. Meanwhile, three other bills that expand access even further are under consideration.

Ultimately, Gries stresses, Vitalism is “agnostic to the fixing strategies” that will help them meet their goals. There is, though, at least one strategy he’s steadfast about: building influence.

Only the hardcore

To trigger a revolution, the Vitalists may need to recruit only around 3% or 4% of “society” to their movement, Gries believes. (Granted, that does still mean hundreds of millions of people.) “If you want people to take action, you need to focus on a small number of very high-leverage people,” he tells me.

That, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes wealthy individuals with “a net worth of $10 million or above,” he says. He wants to understand why (with some high-profile exceptions, including Thiel, who has been investing in longevity-related companies and foundations for decades) most uber-wealthy people don’t invest in the field—and how he might persuade them to do so. He won’t reveal the names of anyone he’s having conversations with.

These “high-leverage” people might also include, Gries says, well-respected academics, leaders of influential think tanks, politicians and policymakers, and others who work in government agencies.

A revolution needs to find its foot soldiers. And at the most basic level, that will mean boosting the visibility of the Vitalism brand—partly through events like Vitalist Bay, but also by encouraging others, particularly in the biotech space, to sign on. Cheng talks of putting out a “bat signal” for like-minded people, and he and Gries say that Vitalism has brought together people who have gone on to collaborate or form companies.

There’s also their nonprofit Vitalism International Foundation, whose supporters can opt to become “mobilized Vitalists” with monthly payments of $29 or more, depending on their level of commitment. In addition, the foundation works with longevity biotech companies to recognize those that are “aligned” with its goals as officially certified Vitalist organizations. “Designation may be revoked if an organization adopts apologetic narratives that accept aging or death,” according to the website. At the time of writing, that site lists 16 certified Vitalist organizations, including cryopreservation companies, a longevity clinic, and several research companies.

One of them is Shift Bioscience, a company using CRISPR and aging clocks—which attempt to measure biological age—to identify genes that might play a significant role in the aging process and potentially reverse it. It says it has found a single gene that can rejuvenate multiple types of cells.

Shift cofounder Daniel Ives, who holds degrees in mitochondrial and computational biology, tells me he was also won over to the longevity cause by de Grey’s 2005 TED Talk. He now has a countdown on his computer: “It’s my days till death,” he says—around 22,000 days left. “I’m using that to keep myself focused.”

Ives calls himself the “Vitalist CEO” of Shift Bioscience. He thinks the label is important first as a way for like-minded people to find and support each other, grow their movement, and make the quest for longevity mainstream. Second, he says, it provides a way to appeal to “hardcore” lifespan extensionists, given that others in the wellness and cosmetics industry have adopted the term “longevity” without truly applying themselves to finding rejuvenation therapies. He refers to unnamed companies and individuals who claim that drinking juices, for example, can reverse aging by five years or so.

“You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” says ARPA-H science and engineering advisor Mark Hamalainen. Though “kind of a terrible example,” he notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”

“Somebody will make these claims and basically throw legitimate science under the bus,” he says. He doesn’t want spurious claims made on social media to get lumped in with the company’s serious molecular biology. Shift’s head of machine learning, Lucas Paulo de Lima Camillo, was recently awarded a $10,000 prize by the well-respected Biomarkers of Aging Consortium for an aging clock he developed.

Another out-and-proud Vitalist CEO is Anar Isman, the cofounder of AgelessRx, a telehealth provider that offers prescriptions for purported longevity drugs—and a certified Vitalist organization. (Isman, who is in his early 40s, used to work at a hedge fund but was inspired to join the longevity field by—you guessed it—de Grey.)

During a panel session at Vitalist Bay, he stressed that he too saw longevity as a movement—and a revolution—rather than an industry. But he also claimed his company wasn’t doing too badly commercially. “We’ve had a lot of demand,” he said. “We’ve got $60 million plus in annual revenue.”

Many of his customers come to the site looking for treatments for specific ailments, he tells me. He views each as an opportunity to “evangelize” his views on “radical life extension.” “I don’t see a difference between … dying tomorrow or dying in 30 years,” he says. He wants to live “at least 100 more” years.

Vitalism, though, isn’t just appealing to commercial researchers. Mark Hamalainen, a 41-year-old science and engineering advisor at ARPA-H, describes himself as a Vitalist. He says he “kind of got roped into” Vitalism because he also works with Cheng—they founded the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which supports new entrants to the field through mentoring programs. “I kind of view it as a more appealing rebranding of some of the less radical aspects of transhumanism,” he says. Transhumanism—the position that we can use technologies to enhance humans beyond the current limits of biology—covers a broad terrain, but “Vitalism is like: Can we just solve this death thing first? It’s a philosophy that’s easy to get behind.”

In government, he works with individuals like Jean Hébert, a former professor of genetics and neuroscience who has investigated the possibility of rejuvenating the brain by gradually replacing parts of it; Hébert has said that “[his] mission is to beat aging.” He spoke at Zuzalu and Vitalist Bay.

Andrew Brack, who serves as the program manager for proactive health at ARPA-H, was at Vitalist Bay, too. Both Brack and Hébert oversee healthy federal budgets—Hébert’s brain replacement project was granted $110 million in 2024, for example.

Neither Hébert nor Brack has publicly described himself as a Vitalist, and Hébert wouldn’t agree to speak to me without the approval of ARPA-H’s press office, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview with him or Brack. Brack did not respond to direct requests for an interview.

Gries says he thinks that “many people at [the US Department of Health and Human Services], including all agencies, have a longevity-positive view and probably agree with a lot of the ideas Vitalism stands for.” And he is hoping to help secure federal positions for others who are similarly aligned with his philosophy. On both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve last year, Gries and Cheng sent fundraising emails describing an “outreach effort” to find applicants for six open government positions that, together, would control billions of dollars in federal funding. “Qualified, mission-aligned candidates we’d love to support do exist, but they need to be found and encouraged to apply,” the pair wrote in the second email. “We’re starting a systematic search to reach, screen, and support the best candidates.”

Hamalainen supports Gries’s plan to target high-leverage individuals. “You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” he says. Though “kind of a terrible example,” Hamalainen notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”

One of the “right” people may be the man who inspired Gries, Hamalainen, Ives, Isman, and so many others to pursue longevity in the first place: de Grey. He’s now a paid-up Vitalist and even spoke at Vitalist Bay. Having been in the field for over 20 years, de Grey tells me, he’s seen various terms fall in and out of favor. Those terms now have “baggage that gets in the way,” he says. “Sometimes it’s useful to have a new term.”

The sometimes quiet (sometimes powerful, sometimes influential) Vitalists

Though one of the five principles of Vitalism is a promise to “carry the message,” some people who agree with its ideas are reluctant to go public, including some signed-up Vitalists. I’ve asked Gries multiple times over several years, but he won’t reveal how many Vitalists there are, let alone who makes up the membership.

Even some of the founders of Vitalism don’t want to be public about it. Around 30 people were involved in developing the movement, Gries says—but only 22 are named as contributors to the Vitalism white paper (with Gries as its author), including Cheng, Vitalia’s Ion, and ARPA-H’s Hamalainen. Gries won’t reveal the names of the others. He acknowledges that some people just don’t like to publicly affiliate with any organization. That’s certainly what I’ve found when I’ve asked members of the longevity community if they’re Vitalists. Many said they agreed with the Vitalist declaration, and that they liked and supported what Gries was doing. But they didn’t want the label.

Some people worry that associating with a belief system that sounds a bit religious—even cult-like, some say—won’t do the cause any favors. Others have a problem with the specific wording of the declaration.

For instance, Anzinger—the other Vitalia founder—won’t call himself a Vitalist. He says he respects the mission, but that the declaration is “a bit poetic” for his liking.

And Dylan Livingston, CEO of A4LI and arguably one of the most influential longevity enthusiasts out there, won’t describe himself as a Vitalist either.

Many other longevity biotech CEOs also shy away from the label—including Emil Kendziorra, who runs the human cryopreservation company Tomorrow Bio, even though that’s a certified Vitalist organization. Kendziorra says he agrees with most of the Vitalist declaration but thinks it is too “absolutist.” He also doesn’t want to imply that the pursuit of longevity should be positioned above war, hunger, and other humanitarian issues. (Gries has heard this argument before, and counters that both the vast spending on health care for people in the last years of their life and the use of lockdown strategies during the covid pandemic suggest that, deep down, lifespan extension is “society’s revealed preference.”)

Still, because Kendziorra agrees with almost everything in the declaration, he believes that “pushing it forward” and bringing more attention to the field by labeling his company a Vitalist organization is a good thing. “It’s to support other people who want to move the world in that direction,” he says. (He also offered Vitalist Bay attendees a discount on his cryopreservation services.)

“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” explains Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.” He claims that people who represent biotech companies tell him “all the time” that they are secretly longevity companies but avoid using the term because they don’t want funders or collaborators to be “put off.”

Ultimately, it may not really matter how much people adopt the Vitalist label as long as the ideas break through. “It’s pretty simple. [The Vitalist declaration] has five points—if you agree with the five points, you are a Vitalist,” says Hamalainen. “You don’t have to be public about it.” He says he’s spoken to others about “coming out of the closet” and that it’s been going pretty well.

Gries puts it more bluntly: “If you agree with the Vitalist declaration, you are a Vitalist.”

And he hints that there are now many people in powerful positions—including in the Trump administration—who share his views, even if they don’t openly identify as Vitalists.

For Gries, this includes Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, whom I profiled a few months after he became Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s number two. (More recently, O’Neill was temporarily put in charge of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Jim O'Neill sworn in by Robert F Kennedy Jr as Deputy Secretary of the HHS — Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, is one of the highest-profile longevity enthusiasts serving in government. Gries says, “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”

O’Neill has long been interested in both longevity and the idea of creating new jurisdictions. Until March 2024, he served on the board of directors of Friedman’s Seasteading Institute. He also served as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, a longevity organization founded by de Grey, between 2019 and 2021, and he represented Thiel as a board member there for many years. Many people in the longevity community say they know him personally, or have at least met him. (Tristan Roberts, a biohacker who used to work with a biotech company operating in Próspera, tells me he served O’Neill gin when he visited his Burning Man camp, which he describes as a “technology gay camp from San Francisco and New York.” Hamalainen also recalls meeting O’Neill at Burning Man, at a “techy, futurist” camp.) (Neither O’Neill nor representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request to comment about this.)

O’Neill’s views are arguably becoming less fringe in DC these days. The day after the Vitalist Bay Summit, A4LI was hosting its own summit in the capital with the goal of “bringing together leaders, advocates, and innovators from around the globe to advance legislative initiatives that promote a healthier human lifespan.” I recognized lots of Vitalist Bay attendees there, albeit in more formal attire.

The DC event took place over three days in late April. The first two involved talks by longevity enthusiasts across the spectrum, including scientists, lawyers, and biotech CEOs. Vitalia’s Anzinger spoke about the success he’d had in Próspera, and ARPA-H’s Brack talked about work his agency was doing. (Hamalainen was also there, although he said he was not representing ARPA-H.)

But the third day was different and made me think Gries may be right about Vitalism’s growing reach. It began with a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, during which Representative Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida, asked, “Who doesn’t want to live longer, right?” As he explained, “Longevity science … directly aligns with the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement.”

“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” says Daniel Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.”

Bilirakis and Representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, were followed by Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor who now leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; he opened with typical MAHA talking points about chronic disease and said US citizens have a “patriotic duty” to stay healthy to keep medical costs down. The audience was enthralled as Oz talked about senescent cells, the zombie-like aged cells that are thought to be responsible for some age-related damage to organs and tissues. (The offices of Bilirakis and Tonko did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)

And while none of the speakers went anywhere near the concept of radical life extension, the Vitalists in the audience were suitably encouraged.

Gries is too: “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”

The fate of “immortality quests”

Whether or not Vitalism starts a revolution, it will almost always be controversial in some quarters. While believers see an auspicious future, others are far less certain of the benefits of a world designed to defeat death.

Gries and Cheng often make the case for deregulation in their presentations. But ethicists—and even some members of the longevity community—point out that this comes with risks. Some question whether it is ever ethical to sell a “treatment” without some idea of how likely it is to benefit the person buying and taking it. Enthusiasts counter with arguments about bodily autonomy. And they hope Montana is just the start.

Then there’s the bigger picture. Is it really that great not to die … ever? Some ethicists argue that for many cultures, death is what gives meaning to life.

Sergio Imparato, a moral philosopher and medical ethicist at Harvard University, believes that death itself has important moral meaning. We know our lives will end, and our actions have value precisely because our time is limited, he says. Imparato is concerned that Vitalists are ultimately seeking to change what it means to be human—a decision that should involve all members of society.

Alberto Giubilini, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, agrees. “Death is a defining feature of humanity,” he says. “Our psychology, our cultures, our rituals, our societies, are built around the idea of coping with death … it’s part of human nature.”

Imparato’s family is from Naples, Italy, where poor residents were once laid to rest in shared burial sites, with no headstones to identify them. He tells me how the locals came to visit, clean, and even “adopt” the skulls as family members. It became a weekly ritual for members of the community, including his grandmother, who was a young girl at the time. “It speaks to what I consider the cultural relevance of death,” he says. “It’s the perfect counterpoint to … the Vitalist conception of life.”

Gries seems aware of the stigma around such “immortality quests,” as Imparato calls them. In his presentations, Gries shares lists of words that Vitalists should try to avoid—like “eternity,” “radical,” and “forever,” as well as any religious terms.

He also appears to be dropping, at least publicly, the idea that Vitalism is a “moral” movement. Morality was “never part of the Vitalist declaration,” Gries told me in September. When I asked him why he had changed his position on this, he dismissed the question. “Our point … was always that death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” he told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”

But despite these attempts to tweak and control the narrative, Vitalism appears to be opening the door to an incredibly wide range of sentiments in longevity science. A decade ago, I don’t think there would have been any way that the views espoused by Gries, Anzinger, and others who support Vitalist sentiments would have been accepted by the scientific establishment. After all, these are people who publicly state they hope to live indefinitely and who have no training in the science of aging, and who are open about their aims to find ways to evade the restrictions set forth by regulatory agencies like the FDA—all factors that might have rendered them outcasts not that long ago.

But Gries and peers had success in Montana. Influential scientists and policymakers attend Vitalism events, and Vitalists are featured regularly at more mainstream longevity events. Last year’s Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Copenhagen—widely recognized as the most important meeting in aging science—was sponsored in part by Anzinger’s new Próspera venture, Infinita City, as well as by several organizations that are either certified Vitalist or led by Vitalists.

“I was thinking that maybe what I was doing was very fringe or out there,” Anzinger, the non-Vitalist supporter of Vitalism, admits. “But no—I feel … loads of support.”

There was certainly an air of optimism at the Vitalist Bay Summit in Berkeley. Gries’s positivity is infectious. “All the people who want a fun and awesome surprise gift, come on over!” he called out early on the first day. “Raise your voice if you’re excited!” The audience whooped in response. He then proceeded to tell everyone, Oprah Winfrey–style, that they were all getting a free continuous glucose monitor. “You get a CGM! You get a CGM!” Plenty of attendees actually attached them to their arms on the spot.

Every revolution has to start somewhere, right?

This piece has been updated to clarify a quote from Mark Hamalainen.

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Dec 23 2025

Welcome to Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change

The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still.

Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, remains in the ground. Obsidian caves and jagged stone towers preside over the steam that spurts out of fissures in the soil and wafts from pools of boiling-hot water—produced by magma that, in some areas, sits just a few miles below the surface.

It’s a landscape born from violent geologic processes some 25 million years ago, when the Nubian and Somalian tectonic plates pulled apart. That rupture cut a depression in the earth some 4,000 miles long—from East Africa up through the Middle East—to create what’s now called the Great Rift Valley.

This volatility imbues the land with vast potential, much of it untapped. The area, no more than a few hours’ drive from Nairobi, is home to five geothermal power stations, which harness the clouds of steam to generate about a quarter of Kenya’s electricity. But some energy from this process escapes into the atmosphere, while even more remains underground for lack of demand.

That’s what brought Octavia Carbon here.

In June, just north of the lake in the small but strategically located town of Gilgil, the startup began running a high-stakes test. It’s harnessing some of that excess energy to power four prototypes of a machine that promises to remove carbon dioxide from the air in a manner that the company says is efficient, affordable, and—crucially—scalable.

In the short term, the impact will be small—each device’s initial capacity is just 60 tons per year of CO₂—but the immediate goal is simply to demonstrate that carbon removal here is possible. The longer-term vision is far more ambitious: to prove that direct air capture (DAC), as the process is known, can be a powerful tool to help the world keep temperatures from rising to ever more dangerous levels.

“We believe we are doing what we can here in Kenya to address climate change and lead the charge for positioning Kenya as a climate vanguard,” Specioser Mutheu, Octavia’s communications lead, told me when I visited the country last year.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that in order to keep the world from warming more than 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels (the threshold set out in the Paris Agreement), or even the more realistic but still difficult 2 °C, it will need to significantly reduce future fossil-fuel emissions—and also pull from the atmosphere billions of tons of carbon that have already been released.

Some argue that DAC, which uses mechanical and chemical processes to suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it in a stable form (usually underground), is the best way to do that. It’s a technology with immense promise, offering the possibility that human ingenuity and innovation can get us out of the same mess that development caused in the first place.

Last year, the world’s largest DAC plant, Mammoth, came online in Iceland, offering the eventual capacity to remove up to 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year—roughly equal to the emissions of 7,600 gas-powered cars. The idea is that DAC plants like this one will remove and permanently store carbon and create carbon credits that can be purchased by corporations, governments, and local industrial producers, which will collectively help keep the world from experiencing the most dangerous effects of climate change.

large pipes run along the ground with the buildings of the Climeworks' Mammoth plant in the distance — Climeworks’ Mammoth carbon removal plant near Reykjavik, Iceland.

Now, Octavia and a growing number of other companies, politicians, and investors from Africa, the US, and Europe are betting that Kenya’s unique environment holds the keys to reaching this lofty goal—which is why they’re pushing a sweeping vision to remake the Great Rift Valley into the “Great Carbon Valley.” And they hope to do so in a way that provides a genuine economic boost for Kenya, while respecting the rights of the Indigenous people who live on this land. If they can do so, the project could not just give a needed jolt to the DAC industry—it could also provide proof of concept for DAC across the Global South, which is particularly vulnerable to the ravages of climate change despite bearing very little responsibility for it.

But DAC is also a controversial technology, unproven at scale and wildly expensive to operate. In May, an Icelandic news outlet published an investigation into Climeworks, which runs the Mammoth plant, finding that it didn’t even pull in enough carbon dioxide to offset its own emissions, let alone the emissions of other companies.

Critics also argue that the electricity DAC requires can be put to better use cleaning up our transportation systems, heating our homes, and powering other industries that still rely largely on fossil fuels. What’s more, they say that relying on DAC can give polluters an excuse to delay the transition to renewables indefinitely. And further complicating this picture is shrinking demand from governments and corporations that would be DAC’s main buyers, which has left some experts questioning whether the industry will even survive.

Carbon removal is a technology that seems always on the verge of kicking in but never does, says Fadhel Kaboub, a Tunisian economist and advocate for an equitable green transition. “You need billions of dollars of investment in it, and it’s not delivering, and it’s not going to deliver anytime soon. So why do we put the entire future of the planet in the hands of a few people and a technology that doesn’t deliver?”

Layered on top of concerns about the viability and wisdom of DAC is a long history of distrust from the Maasai people who have called the Great Rift Valley home for generations but have been displaced in waves by energy companies coming in to tap the land’s geothermal reserves. And many of those remaining don’t even have access to the electricity generated by these plants.

Maasai men walk along the road beside the Olkaria geothermal plant.

It’s an immensely complicated landscape to navigate. But if the project can indeed make it through, Benjamin Sovacool, an energy policy researcher and director of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability, sees immense potential for countries that have been historically marginalized from climate policy and green energy investment. Though he’s skeptical about DAC as a near-term climate solution, he says these nations could still see big benefits from what could be a multitrillion-dollar industry.

“[Of] all the technologies we have available to fight climate change, the idea of reversing it by sucking CO₂ out of the air and storing it is really attractive. It’s something even an ordinary person can just get,” Sovacool says. “If we’re able to do DAC at scale, it could be the next huge energy transition.”

But first, of course, the Great Carbon Valley has to actually deliver.

Challenging the power dynamic

The “Great Carbon Valley” is both a broad vision for the region and a company founded to shepherd that vision into reality.

Bilha Ndirangu, a 42-year-old MIT electrical engineering graduate who grew up in Nairobi, has long worried about the impacts of climate change on Kenya. But she doesn’t want the country to be a mere victim of rising temperatures, she tells me; she hopes to see it become a source of climate solutions. So in 2021, Ndirangu cofounded Jacob’s Ladder Africa, a nonprofit with the goal of preparing African workers for green industries.

She also began collaborating with the Kenyan entrepreneur James Irungu Mwangi, the CEO of Africa Climate Ventures, an investment firm focused on building and accelerating climate-smart businesses. He’d been working on an idea that spoke to their shared belief in the potential for the country’s vast geothermal capacity; the plan was to find buyers for Kenya’s extra geothermal energy in order to kick-start the development of even more renewable power. One energy-hungry, climate-positive industry stood out: direct air capture of carbon dioxide.

The Great Rift Valley was the key to this vision. The thinking was that it could provide the cheap energy needed to power affordable DAC at scale while offering an ideal geology to effectively store carbon deep underground after it was extracted from the air. And with nearly 90% of the country’s grid already powered by renewable energy, DAC wouldn’t be siphoning power away from other industries that need it. Instead, attracting DAC to Kenya could provide the boost needed for energy providers to build out their infrastructure and expand the grid—ideally connecting the roughly 25% of people in the country who lack electricity and reducing scenarios in which power has to be rationed.

“This push for renewable energy and the decarbonization of industries is providing us with a once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunity,” Ndirangu tells me.

So in 2023, the pair founded Great Carbon Valley, a project development company whose mission is attracting DAC companies to the area, along with other energy-intensive industries looking for renewable power.

It has already brought on high-profile companies like the Belgian DAC startup Sirona Technologies, the French DAC company Yama, and Climeworks, the Swiss company that operates Mammoth and another DAC plant in Iceland (and was on MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies list in 2022, and the list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023). All are planning on launching pilot projects in Kenya in the coming years, with Climeworks announcing plans to complete its Kenyan DAC plant by 2028. GCV has also partnered with Cella, an American carbon-storage company that works with Octavia, and is facilitating permits for the Icelandic company Carbfix, which injects the carbon from Climeworks’ DAC facilities.

drone view of shipping container buildings next to a solar array — Cella and Sirona Technologies have a pilot program in the Great Rift Valley called Project Jacaranda.

“Climate change is disproportionately impacting this part of the world, but it’s also changing the rules of the game all over the world,” Cella CEO and cofounder Corey Pattison tells me, explaining the draw of Mwangi and Ndirangu’s concept. “This is also an opportunity to be entrepreneurial and creative in our thinking, because there are all of these assets that places like Kenya have.”

Not only can the country offer cheap and abundant renewable energy, but supporters of Kenyan DAC hope that the young and educated local workforce can supply the engineers and scientists needed to build out this infrastructure. In turn, the business could open opportunities to the country’s roughly 6 million un- or under-employed youths.

“It’s not a one-off industry,” Ndirangu says, highlighting her faith in the idea that jobs will flow from green industrialization. Engineers will be needed to monitor the DAC facilities, and the additional demand for renewable power will create jobs in the energy sector, along with related services like water and hospitality.

“You’re developing a whole range of infrastructure to make this industry possible,” she adds. “That infrastructure is not just good for the industry—it’s also just good for the country.”

The chance to solve a “real-world issue”

In June of last year, I walked up a dirt path to the HQ of Octavia Carbon, just off Nairobi’s Eastern Bypass Road, on the far outskirts of the city.

The staffers I met on my tour exuded the kind of boundless optimism that’s common in early-stage startups. “People used to write academic articles about the fact that no human will ever be able to run a marathon in less than two hours,” Octavia CEO Martin Freimüller told me that day. The Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge broke that barrier in a race in 2019. A mural of him features prominently on the wall, along with the athlete’s slogan, “No human is limited.”

“It’s impossible, until Kenya does it,” Freimüller added.

In June, Octavia started testing its technology in the field in a pilot project in Gilgil.

Although not an official partner of Ndirangu’s Great Carbon Valley venture, Octavia aligns with the larger vision, he told me. The company got its start in 2022, when Freimüller, an Austrian development consultant, met Duncan Kariuki, an engineering graduate from the University of Nairobi, in the OpenAir Collective, an online forum devoted to carbon removal. Kariuki introduced Freimüller to his classmates Fiona Mugambi and Mike Bwondera, and the four began working on a DAC prototype, first in lab space borrowed from the university and later in an apartment. It didn’t take long for neighbors to complain about the noise, and within six months, the operation had moved to its current warehouse.

That same year, they announced their first prototype, affectionately called Thursday after the day it was unveiled at a Nairobi Climate Network event. Soon, Octavia was showing off its tech to high-profile visitors including King Charles III and President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman.

Three years later, the team has more than 40 engineers and has built its 12th DAC unit: a metal cylinder about the size of a large washing machine, containing a chemical filter using an amine, an organic compound derived from ammonia. (Octavia declined to provide further details about the arrangement of the filter inside the machine because the company is awaiting approval of a patent for the design.)

Octavia relies on an amine absorption method similar to the one used by other DAC plants around the world, but its project stands apart—having been tailored to suit the local climate and run on more than 80% thermal energy.

Hannah Wanjau, an engineer at the company, explained how it works: Fans draw air from the outside across the filter, causing carbon dioxide (which is acidic) to react with the basic amine and form a carbonate salt. When that mixture is heated inside a vacuum to 80 to 100 °C, the CO₂ is released, now as a gas, and collected in a special chamber, while the amine can be reused for the next round of carbon capture.

The amine absorption method has been used in other DAC plants around the world, including those operated by Climeworks, but Octavia’s project stands apart on several key fronts. Wanjau explained that its technology is tailored to suit the local climate; the company has adjusted the length of time for absorption and the temperature for CO₂ release, making it a potential model for other countries in the tropics.

And then there’s its energy source: The device operates on more than 80% thermal energy, which in the field will consist of the extra geothermal energy that the power plants don’t convert into electricity. This energy is typically released into the atmosphere, but it will be channeled instead to Octavia’s machines. What’s more, the device’s modular design can fit inside a shipping container, allowing the company to easily deploy dozens of these units once the demand is there, Mutheu told me.

This technology is being tested in the field in Gilgil, where Mutheu told me the company is “continuing to capture and condition CO₂ as part of our ongoing operations and testing cycles.” (She declined to provide specific data or results at this stage.)

Once the CO₂ is captured, it will be heated and pressurized. Then it will be pumped to a nearby storage facility operated by Cella, where the company will inject the gas into fissures underground. The region’s special geology again offers an advantage: Much of the rock found underground here is basalt, a volcanic mineral that contains high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions. They react with carbon dioxide to form substances like calcite, dolomite, and magnesite, locking the carbon atoms away in the form of solid minerals.

This process is more durable than other forms of carbon storage, making it potentially more attractive to buyers of carbon credits, says Pattison, the Cella CEO. Non-geologic carbon mitigation methods, such as cookstove replacement programs or nature-based solutions like tree planting, have recently been rocked by revelations of fraud or exaggeration. The money for Cella’s pilot, which will see the injection of 200 tons of CO₂ this year, has come mainly from the Frontier advance market commitment, under which a group of companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Meta, and others has collectively pledged to spend $1 billion on carbon removal by 2030.

The modular design of Octavia’s device can fit inside a shipping container, allowing the company to easily deploy dozens of these units once demand is there.

These projects have already opened up possibilities for young Kenyans like Wanjau. She told me there were not a lot of opportunities for aspiring mechanical engineers like her to design and test their own devices; many of her classmates were working for construction or oil companies, or were unemployed. But almost immediately after graduation, Wanjau began working for Octavia.

“I’m happy that I’m trying to solve a problem that’s a real-world issue,” she told me. “Not many people in Africa get a chance to do that.”

An uphill climb

Despite the vast enthusiasm from partners and investors, the Great Carbon Valley faces multiple challenges before Ndirangu and Mwangi’s vision can be fully realized.

Since its start, the venture has had to contend with “this perception that doing projects in Africa is risky,” says Ndirangu. Of the dozens of DAC facilities planned or in existence today, only a handful are in the Global South. Indeed, Octavia has described itself as the first DAC plant to be located there. “Even just selling Kenya as a destination for DAC was quite a challenge,” she says.

So Ndirangu played up Kenya’s experience developing geothermal resources, as well as local engineering talent and a lower cost of labor. GCV has also offered to work with the Kenyan government to help companies secure the proper permits to break ground as soon as possible.

In pitching the Great Carbon Valley, Ndirangu has played up Kenya’s experience developing geothermal resources, as well as local engineering talent and a lower cost of labor.

Ndirangu says that she’s already seen “a real appetite” from power producers who want to build out more renewable-energy infrastructure, but at the same time they’re waiting for proof of demand. She envisions that once that power is in place, lots of other industries—from data centers to producers of green steel, green ammonia, and sustainable aviation fuels—will consider basing themselves in Kenya, attracting more than a dozen projects to the valley in the next few years.

But recent events could dampen demand (which some experts already worried was insufficient). Global governments are retreating from climate action, particularly in the US. The Trump administration has dramatically slashed funding for development related to climate change and renewable energy. The Department of Energy appears poised to terminate a $50 million grant to a proposed Louisiana DAC plant that would have been partially operated by Climeworks, and in May, not long after that announcement, the company said it was cutting 22% of its staff.

At the same time, many companies that would have likely been purchasers of carbon credits—and that a few years ago had voluntarily pledged to reduce or eliminate their carbon emissions—are quietly walking back their commitments. Over the long term, experts warn, there are limits to the amount of carbon removal that companies will ever voluntarily buy. They argue that governments will ultimately have to pay for it—or require polluters to do so.

Further compounding all these challenges are costs. Critics say DAC investments are a waste of time and money compared with other forms of carbon drawdown. As of mid-December, carbon removal credits in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, one of the world’s largest carbon markets, were priced at around $84 per ton. The average price per DAC credit, for comparison, is nearly $450. Natural processes like reforestation absorb millions of tons of carbon annually and are far cheaper (though programs to harness them for carbon credits are beset with their own controversies). Ultimately, DAC continues to operate on a small scale, removing only about 10,000 metric tons of CO₂ each year.

Even if DAC suppliers do manage to push past these obstacles, there are still thorny questions coming from inside Kenya. Groups like Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based think tank that advocates for climate action on the continent, have derided carbon credits as “pollution permits” and blamed them for delaying the move toward electrification.

“The ultimate goal of [carbon removal] is that you can say at the end, well, we can actually continue our emissions and just recapture them with this technology,” says Kaboub, the Tunisian economist, who has worked with Power Shift Africa. “So there’s no need to end fossil fuels, which is why you get a lot of support from oil countries and companies.”

Another problem he sees is not limited to DAC but extends to the way that Kenya and other African nations are pursuing their goal of green industrialization. While Kenyan President William Ruto has courted international financial investment to turn Kenya into a green energy hub, his administration’s policies have deepened the country’s external debt, which in 2024 was equal to around 30% of its GDP. Geothermal energy development in Kenya has often been financed by loans from international institutions or other governments. As its debt has risen, the country has enacted national austerity measures that have sparked deadly protests.

Kenya may indeed have advantages over other countries, and DAC costs will most likely go down eventually. But some experts, such as Boston University’s Sovacool, aren’t quite sold on the idea that the Great Carbon Valley—or any DAC venture—can significantly mitigate climate change. Sovacool’s research has found that at best, DAC will be ready to deploy on the necessary scale by midcentury, much too late to make it a viable climate solution. And that’s if it can overcome additional costs—such as the losses associated with corruption in the energy sector, which Sovacool and others have found is a widespread problem in Kenya.

Nevertheless, others within the carbon removal industry remain more optimistic about DAC’s overall prospects and are particularly hopeful that Kenya can address some of the challenges the technology has encountered elsewhere. Cost is “not the most important thing,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “There’s lots of things we pay for.” She notes that governments in Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, the European Union, and elsewhere are all looking at developing compliance markets for carbon, even though the US is stagnating on this front.

The Great Carbon Valley, she believes, stands poised to benefit from these developments. “It’s big. It’s visionary,” Burns says. “You’ve got to have some ambition here. This isn’t something that is like deploying a technology that’s widely deployed already. And that comes with an enormous potential for huge opportunity, huge gains.”

Back to the land

More than any external factor, the Great Carbon Valley’s future is perhaps most intimately intertwined with the restless earth on which it’s being built, and the community that has lived here for centuries.

To the Maasai people, nomadic pastoralists who inhabit swathes of Eastern Africa, including Kenya, this land around Lake Naivasha is “ol-karia,” meaning “ochre,” after the bright red clay found in abundance.

South of the lake is Hell’s Gate National Park, a 26-square-mile nature reserve where the region’s five geothermal power complexes—with a sixth under construction—churn on top of the numerous steam vents. The first geothermal power plant here was brought into service in 1981 by KenGen, a majority-state-owned electricity company; it was named Olkaria.

But for decades most of the Maasai haven’t had access to that electricity. And many of them have been forced off the land in a wave of evictions. In 2014, construction on a KenGen geothermal complex expelled more than 2,000 people and led to a number of legal complaints. At the same time, locals living near a different, privately owned geothermal complex 50 miles north of Naivasha have complained of noise and air pollution; in March, a Kenyan court revoked the operating license of one of the project’s three plants.

Neither Octavia or Cella is powered by output from these two geothermal producers, but activists have warned that similar environmental and social harms could resurface if demand for new geothermal infrastructure grows in Kenya—demand that could be driven by DAC.

Ndirangu says she believes some of the complaints about displacement are “exaggerated,” but she nonetheless acknowledges the need for stronger community engagement, as does Octavia. In the long term, Ndirangu says, she plans to provide job training to residents living near the affected areas and integrate them into the industry, although she also says those plans need to be realistic. “You don’t want to create the wrong expectation that you will hire everyone from the community,” she says.

That’s part of the problem for Maasai activists like Agnes Koilel, a teacher living near the Olkaria geothermal field. Despite past promises of employment at the power plants, the jobs that are offered are lower-paying positions in cleaning or security. “Maasai people are not [as] employed as they think,” she says.

The Maasai people have inhabited swathes of Eastern Africa, including Kenya, for centuries, though many still lack access to the power that’s now produced there.

DAC is a small industry, and it can’t do everything. But if it’s going to become as big as Ndirangu, Freimüller, and other proponents of the Great Carbon Valley hope it will be, creating jobs and driving Kenya’s green industrialization, communities like Koilel’s will be among those most directly affected—much as they are by climate change.

When I asked Koilel what she thought about DAC development near her home, she told me she had never heard of the Great Carbon Valley idea, or of carbon removal in general. She wasn’t necessarily against geothermal power development on principle, or opposed to any of the industries that might push it to expand. She just wants to see some benefits, like a health center for her community. She wants to reverse the evictions that have pushed her neighbors off their land. And she wants electricity—the same kind that would power the fans and pumps of future DAC hubs.

Power “is generated from these communities,” Koilel said. “But they themselves do not have that light.”

Diana Kruzman is a freelance journalist covering environmental and human rights issues around the world. Her writing has appeared in New Lines Magazine, The Intercept, Inside Climate News, and other publications. She lives in New York City.

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Sep 26 2025

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral

When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of Wikipedia four years ago, his first act was to delete almost everything. It had to go, he thought, if it had any chance of surviving.

Wehr, who’s 26, isn’t from Greenland—he grew up in Germany—but he had become obsessed with the island, an autonomous Danish territory, after visiting as a teenager. He’d spent years writing obscure Wikipedia articles in his native tongue on virtually everything to do with it. He even ended up moving to Copenhagen to study Greenlandic, a language spoken by some 57,000 mostly Indigenous Inuit people scattered across dozens of far-flung Arctic villages.

The Greenlandic-language edition was added to Wikipedia around 2003, just a few years after the site launched in English. By the time Wehr took its helm nearly 20 years later, hundreds of Wikipedians had contributed to it and had collectively written some 1,500 articles totaling over tens of thousands of words. It seemed to be an impressive vindication of the crowdsourcing approach that has made Wikipedia the go-to source for information online, demonstrating that it could work even in the unlikeliest places.

There was only one problem: The Greenlandic Wikipedia was a mirage.

Virtually every single article had been published by people who did not actually speak the language. Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. But what worried him most was something else: Over time, he had noticed that a growing number of articles appeared to be copy-pasted into Wikipedia by people using machine translators. They were riddled with elementary mistakes—from grammatical blunders to meaningless words to more significant inaccuracies, like an entry that claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants. Other pages sometimes contained random strings of letters spat out by machines that were unable to find suitable Greenlandic words to express themselves.

“It might have looked Greenlandic to [the authors], but they had no way of knowing,” complains Wehr.

“Sentences wouldn’t make sense at all, or they would have obvious errors,” he adds. “AI translators are really bad at Greenlandic.”

What Wehr describes is not unique to the Greenlandic edition.

Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project after the Bible: There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400 even more obscure ones are being developed and tested. Many of these smaller editions have been swamped with automatically translated content as AI has become increasingly accessible. Volunteers working on four African languages, for instance, estimated to MIT Technology Review that between 40% and 60% of articles in their Wikipedia editions were uncorrected machine translations. And after auditing the Wikipedia edition in Inuktitut, an Indigenous language close to Greenlandic that’s spoken in Canada, MIT Technology Review estimates that more than two-thirds of pages containing more than several sentences feature portions created this way.

This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, learn to “speak” new languages by scraping huge quantities of text from the internet. Wikipedia is sometimes the largest source of online linguistic data for languages with few speakers—so any errors on those pages, grammatical or otherwise, can poison the wells that AI is expected to draw from. That can make the models’ translation of these languages particularly error-prone, which creates a sort of linguistic doom loop as people continue to add more and more poorly translated Wikipedia pages using those tools, and AI models continue to train from poorly translated pages. It’s a complicated problem, but it boils down to a simple concept: Garbage in, garbage out.

“These models are built on raw data,” says Kevin Scannell, a former professor of computer science at Saint Louis University who now builds computer software tailored for endangered languages. “They will try and learn everything about a language from scratch. There is no other input. There are no grammar books. There are no dictionaries. There is nothing other than the text that is inputted.”

There isn’t perfect data on the scale of this problem, particularly because a lot of AI training data is kept confidential and the field continues to evolve rapidly. But back in 2020, Wikipedia was estimated to make up more than half the training data that was fed into AI models translating some languages spoken by millions across Africa, including Malagasy, Yoruba, and Shona. In 2022, a research team from Germany that looked into what data could be obtained by online scraping even found that Wikipedia was the sole easily accessible source of online linguistic data for 27 under-resourced languages.

This could have significant repercussions in cases where Wikipedia is poorly written—potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.

“Wikipedia will be reflected in the AI models for these languages,” says Trond Trosterud, a computational linguist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, who has been raising the alarm about the potentially harmful outcomes of badly run Wikipedia editions for years. “I find it hard to imagine it will not have consequences. And, of course, the more dominant position that Wikipedia has, the worse it will be.”

Use responsibly

Automation has been built into Wikipedia since the very earliest days. Bots keep the platform operational: They repair broken links, fix bad formatting, and even correct spelling mistakes. These repetitive and mundane tasks can be automated away with little problem. There is even an army of bots that scurry around generating short articles about rivers, cities, or animals by slotting their names into formulaic phrases. They have generally made the platform better.

But AI is different. Anybody can use it to cause massive damage with a few clicks.

Wikipedia has managed the onset of the AI era better than many other websites. It has not been flooded with AI bots or disinformation, as social media has been. It largely retains the innocence that characterized the earlier internet age. Wikipedia is open and free for anyone to use, edit, and pull from, and it’s run by the very same community it serves. It is transparent and easy to use. But community-run platforms live and die on the size of their communities. English has triumphed, while Greenlandic has sunk.

“We need good Wikipedians. This is something that people take for granted. It is not magic,” says Amir Aharoni, a member of the volunteer Language Committee, which oversees requests to open or close Wikipedia editions. “If you use machine translation responsibly, it can be efficient and useful. Unfortunately, you cannot trust all people to use it responsibly.”

Trosterud has studied the behavior of users on small Wikipedia editions and says AI has empowered a subset that he terms “Wikipedia hijackers.” These users can range widely—from naive teenagers creating pages about their hometowns or their favorite YouTubers to well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities.

“The problem with them nowadays is that they are armed with Google Translate,” Trosterud says, adding that this is allowing them to produce much longer and more plausible-looking content than they ever could before: “Earlier they were armed only with dictionaries.”

This has effectively industrialized the acts of destruction—which affect vulnerable languages most, since AI translations are typically far less reliable for them. There can be lots of different reasons for this, but a meaningful part of the issue is the relatively small amount of source text that is available online. And sometimes models struggle to identify a language because it is similar to others, or because some, including Greenlandic and most Native American languages, have structures that make them badly suited to the way most machine translation systems work. (Wehr notes that in Greenlandic most words are agglutinative, meaning they are built by attaching prefixes and suffixes to stems. As a result, many words are extremely context specific and can express ideas that in other languages would take a full sentence.)

Research produced by Google before a major expansion of Google Translate rolled out three years ago found that translation systems for lower-resourced languages were generally of a lower quality than those for better-resourced ones. Researchers found, for example, that their model would often mistranslate basic nouns across languages, including the names of animals and colors. (In a statement to MIT Technology Review, Google wrote that it is “committed to meeting a high standard of quality for all 249 languages” it supports “by rigorously testing and improving [its] systems, particularly for languages that may have limited public text resources on the web.”)

Wikipedia itself offers a built-in editing tool called Content Translate, which allows users to automatically translate articles from one language to another—the idea being that this will save time by preserving the references and fiddly formatting of the originals. But it piggybacks on external machine translation systems, so it’s largely plagued by the same weaknesses as other machine translators—a problem that the Wikimedia Foundation says is hard to solve. It’s up to each edition’s community to decide whether this tool is allowed, and some have decided against it. (Notably, English-language Wikipedia has largely banned its use, claiming that some 95% of articles created using Content Translate failed to meet an acceptable standard without significant additional work.) But it’s at least easy to tell when the program has been used; Content Translate adds a tag on the Wikipedia back end.

Other AI programs can be harder to monitor. Still, many Wikipedia editors I spoke with said that once their languages were added to major online translation tools, they noticed a corresponding spike in the frequency with which poor, likely machine-translated pages were created.

Some Wikipedians using AI to translate content do occasionally admit that they do not speak the target languages. They may see themselves as providing smaller communities with rough-cut articles that speakers can then fix—essentially following the same model that has worked well for more active Wikipedia editions.

Google Translate, for instance, says the Fulfulde word for January means June, while ChatGPT says it’s August or September. The programs also suggest the Fulfulde word for “harvest” means “fever” or “well-being,” among other possibilities.

But once error-filled pages are produced in small languages, there is usually not an army of knowledgeable people who speak those languages standing ready to improve them. There are few readers of these editions, and sometimes not a single regular editor.

Yuet Man Lee, a Canadian teacher in his 20s, says that he used a mix of Google Translate and ChatGPT to translate a handful of articles that he had written for the English Wikipedia into Inuktitut, thinking it’d be nice to pitch in and help a smaller Wikipedia community. He says he added a note to one saying that it was only a rough translation. “I did not think that anybody would notice [the article],” he explains. “If you put something out there on the smaller Wikipedias—most of the time nobody does.”

But at the same time, he says, he still thought “someone might see it and fix it up”—adding that he had wondered whether the Inuktitut translation that the AI systems generated was grammatically correct. Nobody has touched the article since he created it.

Lee, who teaches social sciences in Vancouver and first started editing entries in the English Wikipedia a decade ago, says that users familiar with more active Wikipedias can fall victim to this mindset, which he terms a “bigger-Wikipedia arrogance”: When they try to contribute to smaller Wikipedia editions, they assume that others will come along to fix their mistakes. It can sometimes work. Lee says he had previously contributed several articles to Wikipedia in Tatar, a language spoken by several million people mainly in Russia, and at least one of those was eventually corrected. But the Inuktitut Wikipedia is, by comparison, a “barren wasteland.”

He emphasizes that his intentions had been good: He wanted to add more articles to an Indigenous Canadian Wikipedia. “I am now thinking that it may have been a bad idea. I did not consider that I could be contributing to a recursive loop,” he says. “It was about trying to get content out there, out of curiosity and for fun, without properly thinking about the consequences.”

“Totally, completely no future”

Wikipedia is a project that is driven by wide-eyed optimism. Editing can be a thankless task, involving weeks spent bickering with faceless, pseudonymous people, but devotees put in hours of unpaid labor because of a commitment to a higher cause. It is this commitment that drives many of the regular small-language editors I spoke with. They all feared what would happen if garbage continued to appear on their pages.

Abdulkadir Abdulkadir, a 26-year-old agricultural planner who spoke with me over a crackling phone call from a busy roadside in northern Nigeria, said that he spends three hours every day fiddling with entries in his native Fulfulde, a language used mainly by pastoralists and farmers across the Sahel. “But the work is too much,” he said.

Abdulkadir sees an urgent need for the Fulfulde Wikipedia to work properly. He has been suggesting it as one of the few online resources for farmers in remote villages, potentially offering information on which seeds or crops might work best for their fields in a language they can understand. If you give them a machine-translated article, Abdulkadir told me, then it could “easily harm them,” as the information will probably not be translated correctly into Fulfulde.

Google Translate, for instance, says the Fulfulde word for January means June, while ChatGPT says it’s August or September. The programs also suggest the Fulfulde word for “harvest” means “fever” or “well-being,” among other possibilities.

Abdulkadir said he had recently been forced to correct an article about cowpeas, a foundational cash crop across much of Africa, after discovering that it was largely illegible.

If someone wants to create pages on the Fulfulde Wikipedia, Abdulkadir said, they should be translated manually. Otherwise, “whoever will read your articles will [not] be able to get even basic knowledge,” he tells these Wikipedians. Nevertheless, he estimates that some 60% of articles are still uncorrected machine translations. Abdulkadir told me that unless something important changes with how AI systems learn and are deployed, then the outlook for Fulfulde looks bleak. “It is going to be terrible, honestly,” he said. “Totally, completely no future.”

Across the country from Abdulkadir, Lucy Iwuala contributes to Wikipedia in Igbo, a language spoken by several million people in southeastern Nigeria. “The harm has already been done,” she told me, opening the two most recently created articles. Both had been automatically translated via Wikipedia’s Content Translate and contained so many mistakes that she said it would have given her a headache to continue reading them. “There are some terms that have not even been translated. They are still in English,” she pointed out. She recognized the username that had created the pages as a serial offender. “This one even includes letters that are not used in the Igbo language,” she said.

Iwuala began regularly contributing to Wikipedia three years ago out of concern that Igbo was being displaced by English. It is a worry that is common to many who are active on smaller Wikipedia editions. “This is my culture. This is who I am,” she told me. “That is the essence of it all: to ensure that you are not erased.”

Iwuala, who now works as a professional translator between English and Igbo, said the users doing the most damage are inexperienced and see AI translations as a way to quickly increase the profile of the Igbo Wikipedia. She often finds herself having to explain at online edit-a-thons she organizes, or over email to various error-prone editors, that the results can be the exact opposite, pushing users away: “You will be discouraged and you will no longer want to visit this place. You will just abandon it and go back to the English Wikipedia.”

These fears are echoed by Noah Ha‘alilio Solomon, an assistant professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i. He reports that some 35% of words on some pages in the Hawaiian Wikipedia are incomprehensible. “If this is the Hawaiian that is going to exist online, then it will do more harm than anything else,” he says.

Hawaiian, which was teetering on the verge of extinction several decades ago, has been undergoing a recovery effort led by Indigenous activists and academics. Seeing such poor Hawaiian on such a widely used platform as Wikipedia is upsetting to Ha‘alilio Solomon.

“It is painful, because it reminds us of all the times that our culture and language has been appropriated,” he says. “We have been fighting tooth and nail in an uphill climb for language revitalization. There is nothing easy about that, and this can add extra impediments. People are going to think that this is an accurate representation of the Hawaiian language.”

The consequences of all these Wikipedia errors can quickly become clear. AI translators that have undoubtedly ingested these pages in their training data are now assisting in the production, for instance, of error-strewn AI-generated books aimed at learners of languages as diverse as Inuktitut and Cree, Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, and Manx, a small Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man. Many of these have been popping up for sale on Amazon. “It was just complete nonsense,” says Richard Compton, a linguist at the University of Quebec in Montreal, of a volume he reviewed that had purported to be an introductory phrasebook for Inuktitut.

Rather than making minority languages more accessible, AI is now creating an ever expanding minefield for students and speakers of those languages to navigate. “It is a slap in the face,” Compton says. He worries that younger generations in Canada, hoping to learn languages in communities that have fought uphill battles against discrimination to pass on their heritage, might turn to online tools such as ChatGPT or phrasebooks on Amazon and simply make matters worse. “It is fraud,” he says.

A race against time

According to UNESCO, a language is declared extinct every two weeks. But whether the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has an obligation to the languages used on its platform is an open question. When I spoke to Runa Bhattacharjee, a senior director at the foundation, she said that it was up to the individual communities to make decisions about what content they wanted to exist on their Wikipedia. “Ultimately, the responsibility really lies with the community to see that there is no vandalism or unwanted activity, whether through machine translation or other means,” she said. Usually, Bhattacharjee added, editions were considered for closure only if a specific complaint was raised about them.

But if there is no active community, how can an edition be fixed or even have a complaint raised?

Bhattacharjee explained that the Wikimedia Foundation sees its role in such cases as about maintaining the Wikipedia platform in case someone comes along to revive it: “It is the space that we provide for them to grow and develop. That is where we are at.”

Inari Saami, spoken in a single remote community in northern Finland, is a poster child for how people can take good advantage of Wikipedia. The language was headed toward extinction four decades ago; there were only four children who spoke it. Their parents created the Inari Saami Language Association in a last-ditch bid to keep it going. The efforts worked. There are now several hundred speakers, schools that use Inari Saami as a medium of instruction, and 6,400 Wikipedia articles in the language, each one copy-edited by a fluent speaker.

This success highlights how Wikipedia can indeed provide small and determined communities with a unique vehicle to promote their languages’ preservation. “We don’t care about quantity. We care about quality,” says Fabrizio Brecciaroli, a member of the Inari Saami Language Association. “We are planning to use Wikipedia as a repository for the written language. We need to provide tools that can be used by the younger generations. It is important for them to be able to use Inari Saami digitally.”

This has been such a success that Wikipedia has been integrated into the curriculum at the Inari Saami–speaking schools, Brecciaroli adds. He fields phone calls from teachers asking him to write up simple pages on topics from tornadoes to Saami folklore. Wikipedia has even offered a way to introduce words into Inari Saami. “We have to make up new words all the time,” Brecciaroli says. “Young people need them to speak about sports, politics, and video games. If they are unsure how to say something, they now check Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia is a monumental intellectual experiment. What’s happening with Inari Saami suggests that with maximum care, it can work in smaller languages. “The ultimate goal is to make sure that Inari Saami survives,” Brecciaroli says. “It might be a good thing that there isn’t a Google Translate in Inari Saami.”

That may be true—though large language models like ChatGPT can be made to translate phrases into languages that more traditional machine translation tools do not offer. Brecciaroli told me that ChatGPT isn’t great in Inari Saami but that the quality varies significantly depending on what you ask it to do; if you ask it a question in the language, then the answer will be filled with words from Finnish and even words it invents. But if you ask it something in English, Finnish, or Italian and then ask it to reply in Inari Saami, it will perform better.

In light of all this, creating as much high-quality content online as can possibly be written becomes a race against time. “ChatGPT only needs a lot of words,” Brecciaroli says. “If we keep putting good material in, then sooner or later, we will get something out. That is the hope.” This is an idea supported by multiple linguists I spoke with—that it may be possible to end the “garbage in, garbage out” cycle. (OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Still, the overall problem is likely to grow and grow, since many languages are not as lucky as Inari Saami—and their AI translators will most likely be trained on more and more AI slop. Wehr, unfortunately, seems far less optimistic about the future of his beloved Greenlandic.

Since deleting much of the Greenlandic-language Wikipedia, he has spent years trying to recruit speakers to help him revive it. He has appeared in Greenlandic media and made social media appeals. But he hasn’t gotten much of a response; he says it has been demoralizing.

“There is nobody in Greenland who is interested in this, or who wants to contribute,” he says. “There is completely no point in it, and that is why it should be closed.”

Late last year, he began a process requesting that the Wikipedia Language Committee shut down the Greenlandic-language edition. Months of bitter debate followed between dozens of Wikipedia bureaucrats; some seemed to be surprised that a superficially healthy-seeming edition could be gripped by so many problems.

Then, earlier this month, Wehr’s proposal was accepted: Greenlandic Wikipedia is set to be shuttered, and any articles that remain will be moved into the Wikipedia Incubator, where new language editions are tested and built. Among the reasons cited by the Language Committee is the use of AI tools, which have “frequently produced nonsense that could misrepresent the language.”

Nevertheless, it may be too late—mistakes in Greenlandic already seem to have become embedded in machine translators. If you prompt either Google Translate or ChatGPT to do something as simple as count to 10 in proper Greenlandic, neither program can deliver.

Jacob Judah is an investigative journalist based in London.

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Aug 23 2025

On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop

Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back.

To demonstrate this last image, Kovalskyy—a large, 47-year-old Ukrainian, clad in sweatpants and with tattoos stretching from his wrists up to his neck—leans over to wiggle his fingers in the air behind him, laughing as he does. Components often detach, he says through bleached-white teeth, and they’re sensitive to dust and moisture. “It’s terrible quality. Very terrible.”

But even if he’s not particularly impressed by the production quality, he won’t dispute how important the satellite internet service has been to his country’s defense.

Starlink is absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to continue in the fight against Russia: It’s how troops in battle zones stay connected with faraway HQs; it’s how many of the drones essential to Ukraine’s survival hit their targets; it’s even how soldiers stay in touch with spouses and children back home.

At the time of my visit to Kovalskyy in March 2025, however, it had begun to seem like this vital support system may suddenly disappear. Reuters had just broken news that suggested Musk, who was then still deeply enmeshed in Trump world, would remove Ukraine’s access to the service should its government fail to toe the line in US-led peace negotiations. Musk denied the allegations shortly afterward, but given Trump’s fickle foreign policy and inconsistent support of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the uncertainty of the technology’s future had become—and remains—impossible to ignore.

a view down at the back of a volunteer working in a corner workbench. Tools and components are piled on every bit of the surface as well as the shelves in front of him.

a carboard box stuffed with grey cylinders

Kovalskyy’s unofficial Starlink repair shop may be the biggest of its kind in the world. Ordered chaos is the best way to describe it.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: Another Reuters report in late July revealed that Musk had ordered the restriction of Starlink in parts of Ukraine during a critical counteroffensive back in 2022. “Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout,” the story explains. “Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets.”

None of this is lost on Kovalskyy—and for now Starlink access largely comes down to the unofficial community of users and engineers of which Kovalskyy is just one part: Narodnyi Starlink.

The group, whose name translates to “The People’s Starlink,” was created back in March 2022 by a tech-savvy veteran of the previous battles against Russia-backed militias in Ukraine’s east. It started as a Facebook group for the country’s infant yet burgeoning community of Starlink users—a forum to share guidance and swap tips—but it very quickly emerged as a major support system for the new war effort. Today, it has grown to almost 20,000 members, including the unofficial expert “Dr. Starlink”—famous for his creative ways of customizing the systems—and other volunteer engineers like Kovalskyy and his men. It’s a prime example of the many informal, yet highly effective, volunteer networks that have kept Ukraine in the fight, both on and off the front line.

A repaired and mounted Starlink terminal standing on a cobbled road

a Starlink unit mounted to the roof of a vehicle with pink tinted windows

Kovalskyy and his crew of eight volunteers have repaired or customized more than 15,000 terminals since the war began in February 2022. Here, they test repaired units in a nearby parking lot.

Kovalskyy gave MIT Technology Review exclusive access to his unofficial Starlink repair workshop in the city of Lviv, about 300 miles west of Kyiv. Ordered chaos is the best way to describe it: Spread across a few small rooms in a nondescript two-story building behind a tile shop, sagging cardboard boxes filled with mud-splattered Starlink casings form alleyways among the rubble of spare parts. Like flying buttresses, green circuit boards seem to prop up the walls, and coils of cable sprout from every crevice.

Those acquainted with the workshop refer to it as the biggest of its kind in Ukraine—and, by extension, maybe the world. Official and unofficial estimates suggest that anywhere from 42,000 to 160,000 Starlink terminals operate in the country. Kovalskyy says he and his crew of eight volunteers have repaired or customized more than 15,000 terminals since the war began.

a surface scattered with pieces of used blue tape of various colors and sizes. Two ziploc bags with small metal parts are also taped up. — The informal, accessible nature of the Narodnyi Starlink community has been critical to its success. One military communications officer was inspired by Kovalskyy to set up his own repair workshop as part of Ukraine’s armed forces, but he says that official processes can be slower than private ones by a factor of 10.

Despite the pressure, the chance that they may lose access to Starlink was not worrying volunteers like Kovalskyy at the time of my visit; in our conversations, it was clear they had more pressing concerns than the whims of a foreign tech mogul. Russia continues to launch frequent aerial bombardments of Ukrainian cities, sometimes sending more than 500 drones in a single night. The threat of involuntary mobilization to the front line looms on every street corner. How can one plan for a hypothetical future crisis when crisis defines every minute of one’s day?

Almost every inch of every axis of the battlefield in Ukraine is enabled by Starlink. It connects pilots near the trenches with reconnaissance drones soaring kilometers above them. It relays the video feeds from those drones to command centers in rear positions. And it even connects soldiers, via encrypted messaging services, with their family and friends living far from the front.

Although some soldiers and volunteers, including members of Narodnyi Starlink, refer to Starlink as a luxury, the reality is that it’s an essential utility; without it, Ukrainian forces would need to rely on other, often less effective means of communication. These include wired-line networks, mobile internet, and older geostationary satellite technology—all of which provide connectivity that is either slower, more vulnerable to interference, or more difficult for untrained soldiers to set up.

“If not for Starlink, we would already be counting rubles in Kyiv,” Kovalskyy says.

close up of a Starlink unit on the lap of a volunteer, who is writing notes in a gridded notebook

The workshop’s crew has learned to perform adjustments to terminals, especially in adapting them for battlefield conditions. At right, a volunteer engineer shows the fragments of shrapnel he has extracted from the terminals.

Despite being designed primarily for commercial use, Starlink provides a fantastic battlefield solution. The low-latency, high-bandwidth connection its terminals establish with its constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites can transmit large streams of data while remaining very difficult for the enemy to jam—in part because the satellites, unlike geostationary ones, are in constant motion.

It’s also fairly easy to use, so that soldiers with little or no technical knowledge can connect in minutes. And the system costs much less than other military technology; while the US and Polish governments pay business rates for many of Ukraine’s Starlink systems, individual soldiers or military units can purchase the hardware at the private rate of about $500, and subscribe for just $50 per month.

No alternatives match Starlink for cost, ease of use, or coverage—and none will in the near future. Its constellation of 8,000 satellites dwarfs that of its main competitor, a service called OneWeb sold by the French satellite operator Eutelsat, which has only 630 satellites. OneWeb’s hardware costs about 20 times more, and a subscription can run significantly higher, since OneWeb targets business customers. Amazon’s Project Kuiper, the most likely future competitor, started putting satellites in space only this year.

Volodymyr Stepanets, a 51-year-old Ukrainian self-described “geek,” had been living in Krakow, Poland, with his family when Russia invaded in 2022. But before that, he had volunteered for several years on the front lines of the war against Russian-supported paramilitaries that began in 2014.

He recalls, in those early months in eastern Ukraine, witnessing troops coordinating an air strike with rulers and a calculator; the whole process took them between 30 and 40 minutes. “All these calculations can be done in one minute,” he says he told them. “All we need is a very stupid computer and very easy software.” (The Ukrainian military declined to comment on this issue.)

Stepanets subsequently committed to helping this brigade, the 72nd, integrate modern technology into its operations. He says that within one year, he had taught them how to use modern communication platforms, positioning devices, and older satellite communication systems that predate Starlink.

a Starlink terminal with leaves inside the housing, seen lit in silhouette and numbered 5566 — Narodnyi Starlink members ask each other for advice about how to adapt the systems: how to camouflage them from marauding Russian drones or resolve glitches in the software, for example.

So after Russian tanks rolled across the border, Stepanets was quick to see how Starlink’s service could provide an advantage to Ukraine’s armed forces. He also recognized that these units, as well as civilian users, would need support in utilizing the new technology. And that’s how he came up with the idea for Narodnyi Starlink, an open Facebook group he launched on March 21, just a few weeks after the full invasion began and the Ukrainian government requested the activation of Starlink.

Over the past few years, the Narodnyi Starlink digital community has grown to include volunteer engineers, resellers, and military service members interested in the satellite comms service. The group’s members post roughly three times per day, often sharing or asking for advice about adaptations, or seeking volunteers to fix broken equipment. A user called Igor Semenyak recently asked, for example, whether anyone knew how to mask his system from infrared cameras. “How do you protect yourself from heat radiation?” he wrote, to which someone suggested throwing special heat-proof fabric over the terminal.

Its most famous member is probably a man widely considered the brains of the group: Oleg Kutkov, a 36-year-old software engineer otherwise known to some members as “Dr. Starlink.” Kutkov had been privately studying Starlink technology from his home in Kyiv since 2021, having purchased a system to tinker with when service was still unavailable in the country; he believes that he may have been the country’s first Starlink user. Like Stepanets, he saw the immense potential for Starlink after Russia broke traditional communication lines ahead of its attack.

“Our infrastructure was very vulnerable because we did not have a lot of air defense,” says Kutkov, who still works full time as an engineer at the US networking company Ubiquiti’s R&D center in Kyiv. “Starlink quickly became a crucial part of our survival.”

Stepanets contacted Kutkov after coming across his popular Twitter feed and blog, which had been attracting a lot of attention as early Starlink users sought help. Kutkov still publishes the results of his own research there—experiments he performs in his spare time, sometimes staying up until 3 a.m. to complete them. In May, for example, he published a blog post explaining how users can physically move a user account from one terminal to another when the printed circuit board in one is “so severely damaged that repair is impossible or impractical.”

“Oleg Kutkov is the coolest engineer I’ve met in my entire life,” Kovalskyy says.

a volunteer holding a Starlink vertically to pry it open

two volunteers at workbenches repairing terminals

When the fighting is at its worst, the workshop may receive 500 terminals to repair every month. The crew lives and sometimes even sleeps there.

Supported by Kutkov’s technical expertise and Stepanets’s organizational prowess, Kovalskyy’s warehouse became the major repair hub (though other volunteers also make repairs elsewhere). Over time, Kovalskyy—who co-owned a regional internet service provider before the war—and his crew have learned to perform adjustments to Starlink terminals, especially to adapt them for battlefield conditions. For example, they modified them to receive charge at the right voltage directly from vehicles, years before Starlink released a proprietary car adapter. They’ve also switched out Starlink’s proprietary SPX plugs—which Kovalskyy criticized as vulnerable to moisture and temperature changes—with standard ethernet ports.

Together, the three civilians—Kutkov, Stepanets, and Kovalskyy—effectively lead Narodnyi Starlink. Along with several other members who wished to remain anonymous, they hold meetings every Monday over Zoom to discuss their activities, including recent Starlink-related developments on the battlefield, as well as information security.

While the public group served as a suitable means of disseminating information in the early stages of the war when speed was critical, they have had to move a lot of their communications to private channels after discovering Russian surveillance; Stepanets says that at least as early as 2024, Russians had translated a 300-page educational document they had produced and shared online. Now, as administrators of the Facebook group, the three men block the publication of any posts deemed to reveal information that might be useful to Russian forces.

Stepanets believes the threat extends beyond the group’s intel to its members’ physical safety. When we talked, he brought up the attempted assassination of the Ukrainian activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko in May this year. Although Sternenko was unaffiliated with Narodnyi Starlink, the event served as a clear reminder of the risks even civilian volunteers undertake in wartime Ukraine. “The Russian FSB and other [security] services still understand the importance of participation in initiatives like [Narodnyi Starlink],” Stepanets says. He stresses that the group is not an organization with a centralized chain of command, but a community that would continue operating if any of its members were no longer able to perform their roles.

closeup of a Starlink board with light shining through the holes — “We have extremely professional engineers who are extremely intelligent,” Kovalskyy told me. “Repairing Starlink terminals for them is like shooting ducks with HIMARS [a vehicle-borne GPS-guided rocket launcher].”

The informal, accessible nature of this community has been critical to its success. Operating outside official structures has allowed Narodnyi Starlink to function much more efficiently than state channels. Yuri Krylach, a military communications officer who was inspired by Kovalskyy to set up his own repair workshop as part of Ukraine’s armed forces, says that official processes can be slower than private ones by a factor of 10; his own team’s work is often interrupted by other tasks that commanders deem more urgent, whereas members of the Narodnyi Starlink community can respond to requests quickly and directly. (The military declined to comment on this issue, or on any military connections with Narodnyi Starlink.)

Most of the Narodnyi Starlink members I spoke to, including active-duty soldiers, were unconcerned about the report that Musk might withdraw access to the service in Ukraine. They pointed out that doing so would involve terminating state contracts, including those with the US Department of Defense and Poland’s Ministry of Digitalization. Losing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars (the Polish government claims to pay $50 million per year in subscription fees), on top of the private subscriptions, would cost the company a significant amount of revenue. “I don’t really think that Musk would cut this money supply,” Kutkov says. “It would be quite stupid.” Oleksandr Dolynyak, an officer in the 103rd Separate Territorial Defense Brigade and a Narodnyi Starlink member since 2022, says: “As long as it is profitable for him, Starlink will work for us.”

Stepanets does believe, however, that Musk’s threats exposed an overreliance on the technology that few had properly considered. “Starlink has really become one of the powerful tools of defense of Ukraine,” he wrote in a March Facebook post entitled “Irreversible Starlink hegemony,” accompanied by an image of the evil Darth Sidious from Star Wars. “Now, the issue of the country’s dependence on the decisions of certain eccentric individuals … has reached [a] melting point.”

Even if telecommunications experts both inside and outside the military agree that Starlink has no direct substitute, Stepanets believes that Ukraine needs to diversify its portfolio of satellite communication tools anyway, integrating additional high-speed satellite communication services like OneWeb. This would relieve some of the pressure caused by Musk’s erratic, unpredictable personality and, he believes, give Ukraine some sense of control over its wartime communications. (SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Ukrainian military seems to agree with this notion. In late March, at a closed-door event in Kyiv, the country’s then-deputy minister of defense Kateryna Chernohorenko announced the formation of a special Space Policy Directorate “to consolidate internal and external capabilities to advance Ukraine’s military space sector.” The announcement referred to the creation of a domestic “satellite constellation,” which suggests that reliance on foreign services like Starlink had been a catalyst. “Ukraine needs to transition from the role of consumer to that of a full-fledged player in the space sector,” a government blog post stated. (Chernohorenko did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ukraine isn’t alone in this quandary. Recent discussions about a potential Starlink deal with the Italian government, for example, have stalled as a result of Musk’s behavior. And as Juliana Süss, an associate fellow at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, points out, Taiwan chose SpaceX’s competitor Eutelsat when it sought a satellite communications partner in 2023.

“I think we always knew that SpaceX is not always the most reliable partner,” says Süss, who also hosts RUSI’s War in Space podcast, citing Musk’s controversial comments about the country’s status. “The Taiwan problems are a good example for how the rest of the world might be feeling about this.”

Nevertheless, Ukraine is about to become even more deeply enmeshed with Starlink; the country’s leading mobile operator Kyivstar announced in July that Ukraine will soon become the first European nation to offer Starlink direct-to-mobile services. Süss is cautious about placing too much emphasis on this development though. “This step does increase dependency,” she says. “But that dependency is already there.” Adding an additional channel of communications as a possible backup is otherwise a logical action for a country at war, she says.

These issues can feel far away for the many Ukrainians who are just trying to make it through to the next day. Despite its location in the far west of Ukraine, Lviv, home to Kovalskyy’s shop, is still frequently hit by Russian kamikaze drones, and local military-affiliated sites are popular targets.

Still, during our time together, Kovalskyy was far more worried by the prospect of his team’s possible mobilization. In March, the Ministry of Defense had removed the special status that had otherwise protected his people from involuntary conscription given the nature of their volunteer activities. They’re now at risk of being essentially picked up off the street by Ukraine’s dreaded military recruitment teams, known as the TCK, whenever they leave the house.

A room with walls covered by a grid of patches and Ukrainian flags, and stacks of grey boxes on the floor — The repair shop displays patches from many different Ukrainian military units—each given as a gift for their services. “We sometimes perform miracles with Starlinks,” Kovalskyy said.

This is true even though there’s so much demand for the workshop’s services that during my visit, Kovalskyy expressed frustration at the vast amount of time they’ve had to dedicate solely to basic repairs. “We have extremely professional engineers who are extremely intelligent,” he told me. “Repairing Starlink terminals for them is like shooting ducks with HIMARS [a vehicle-borne GPS-guided rocket launcher].”

At least the situation seemed to have become better on the front over the winter, Kovalskyy added, handing me a Starlink antenna whose flat, white surface had been ripped open by shrapnel. When the fighting is at its worst, the team might receive 500 terminals to repair every month, and the crew lives in the workshop, sometimes even sleeping there. But at that moment in time, it was receiving only a couple of hundred.

We ended our morning at the workshop by browsing its vast collection of varied military patches, pinned to the wall on large pieces of Velcro. Each had been given as a gift by a different unit as thanks for the services of Kovalskyy and his team, an indication of the diversity and size of Ukraine’s military: almost 1 million soldiers protecting a 600-mile front line. At the same time, it’s a physical reminder that they almost all rely on a single technology with just a few production factories located on another continent nearly 6,000 miles away.

“We sometimes perform miracles with Starlinks,” Kovalskyy says.

He and his crew can only hope that they will still be able to for the foreseeable future—or, better yet, that they won’t need to at all.

Charlie Metcalfe is a British journalist. He writes for magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Guardian, and MIT Technology Review.

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Jul 9 2025

Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever

If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it really wouldn’t seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet, it was huge.

On February 18, astronomers determined that a 130- to 300-foot-long asteroid had a 3.1% chance of crashing into Earth in 2032. Never had an asteroid of such dangerous dimensions stood such a high chance of striking the planet. For those following this developing story in the news, the revelation was unnerving. For many scientists and engineers, though, it turned out to be—despite its seriousness—a little bit exciting.

While possible impact locations included patches of empty ocean, the space rock, called 2024 YR4, also had several densely populated cities in its possible crosshairs, including Mumbai, Lagos, and Bogotá. If the asteroid did in fact hit such a metropolis, the best-case scenario was severe damage; the worst case was outright, total ruin. And for the first time, a group of United Nations–backed researchers began to have high-level discussions about the fate of the world: If this asteroid was going to hit the planet, what sort of spaceflight mission might be able to stop it? Would they ram a spacecraft into it to deflect it? Would they use nuclear weapons to try to swat it away or obliterate it completely?

At the same time, planetary defenders all over the world crewed their battle stations to see if we could avoid that fate—and despite the sometimes taxing new demands on their psyches and schedules, they remained some of the coolest customers in the galaxy. “I’ve had to cancel an appointment saying, I cannot come—I have to save the planet,” says Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and one of those who tracked down 2024 YR4.

Then, just as quickly as history was made, experts declared that the danger had passed. On February 24, asteroid trackers issued the all-clear: Earth would be spared, just as many planetary defense researchers had felt assured it would.

How did they do it? What was it like to track the rising (and rising and rising) danger of this asteroid, and to ultimately determine that it’d miss us?

This is the inside story of how, over a span of just two months, a sprawling network of global astronomers found, followed, mapped, planned for, and finally dismissed 2024 YR4, the most dangerous asteroid ever found—all under the tightest of timelines and, for just a moment, with the highest of stakes.

“It was not an exercise,” says Hainaut. This was the real thing: “We really [had] to get it right.”

IN THE BEGINNING

December 27, 2024

THE ASTEROID TERRESTRIAL-IMPACT LAST ALERT SYSTEM, HAWAII

Long ago, an asteroid in the space-rock highway between Mars and Jupiter felt a disturbance in the force: the gravitational pull of Jupiter itself, king of the planets. After some wobbling back and forth, this asteroid was thrown out of the belt, skipped around the sun, and found itself on an orbit that overlapped with Earth’s own.

“I was the first one to see the detections of it,” Larry Denneau, of the University of Hawai‘i, recalls. “A tiny white pixel on a black background.”

Denneau is one of the principal investigators at the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescopic network. It may have been just two days after Christmas, but he followed procedure as if it were any other day of the year and sent the observations of the tiny pixel onward to another NASA-funded facility, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There’s an alternate reality in which none of this happened. Fortunately, in our timeline, various space agencies—chiefly NASA, but also the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency—invest millions of dollars every year in asteroid-spotting efforts.

And while multiple nations host observatories capable of performing this work, the US clearly leads the way: Its planetary defense program provides funding to a suite of telescopic facilities solely dedicated to identifying potentially hazardous space rocks. (At least, it leads the way for the moment. The White House’s proposal for draconian budget cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation mean that several observatories and space missions linked to planetary defense are facing funding losses or outright terminations.)

Astronomers working at these observatories are tasked with finding threatening asteroids before they find us—because you can’t fight what you can’t see. “They are the first line of planetary defense,” says Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office in Washington, DC.

ATLAS is one part of this skywatching project, and it consists of four telescopes: two in Hawaii, one in Chile, and another in South Africa. They don’t operate the way you’d think, with astronomers peering through them all night. Instead, they operate “completely robotically and automatically,” says Denneau. Driven by coding scripts that he and his colleagues have developed, these mechanical eyes work in harmony to watch out for any suspicious space rocks. Astronomers usually monitor their survey of the sky from a remote location.

ATLAS telescopes are small, so they can’t see particularly distant objects. But they have a wide field of view, allowing them to see large patches of space at any one moment. “As long as the weather is good, we’re constantly monitoring the night sky, from the North Pole to the South Pole,” says Denneau.

Larry Denneau is a principal investigator at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescopic network.

If they detect the starlight reflecting off a moving object, an operator, such as Denneau, gets an alert and visually verifies that the object is real and not some sort of imaging artifact. When a suspected asteroid (or comet) is identified, the observations are sent to the MPC, which is home to a bulletin board featuring (among other things) orbital data on all known asteroids and comets.

If the object isn’t already listed, a new discovery is announced, and other astronomers can perform follow-up observations.

In just the past few years, ATLAS has detected more than 1,200 asteroids with near-Earth orbits. Finding ultimately harmless space rocks is routine work—so much so that when the new near-Earth asteroid was spotted by ATLAS’s Chilean telescope that December day, it didn’t even raise any eyebrows.

Denneau had simply been sitting at home, doing some late-night work on his computer. At the time, of course, he didn’t know that his telescope had just spied what would soon become a history-making asteroid—one that could alter the future of the planet.

The MPC quickly confirmed the new space rock hadn’t already been “found,” and astronomers gave it a provisional designation: 2024 YR4.

CATALINA SKY SURVEY, ARIZONA

Around the same time, the discovery was shared with another NASA-funded facility: the Catalina Sky Survey, a nest of three telescopes in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson that works out of the University of Arizona. “We run a very tight operation,” says Kacper Wierzchoś, one of its comet and asteroid spotters. Unlike ATLAS, these telescopes (although aided by automation) often have an in-person astronomer available to quickly alter the surveys in real time.

“We run a very tight operation,” says Kacper Wierzchoś, one of the comet and asteroid spotters at the Catalina Sky Survey north of Tucson, Arizona.

So when Catalina was alerted about what its peers at ATLAS had spotted, staff deployed its Schmidt telescope—a smaller one that excels at seeing bright objects moving extremely quickly. As they fed their own observations of 2024 YR4 to the MPC, Catalina engineer David Rankin looked back over imagery from the previous days and found the new asteroid lurking in a night-sky image taken on December 26. Around then, ATLAS also realized that it had caught sight of 2024 YR4 in a photograph from December 25.

The combined observations confirmed it: The asteroid had made its closest approach to Earth on Christmas Day, meaning it was already heading back out into space. But where, exactly, was this space rock going? Where would it end up after it swung around the sun?

CENTER FOR NEAR-EARTH OBJECT STUDIES, CALIFORNIA

If the answer to that question was Earth, Davide Farnocchia would be one of the first to know. You could say he’s one of NASA’s watchers on the wall.

And he’s remarkably calm about his duties. When he first heard about 2024 YR4, he barely flinched. It was just another asteroid drifting through space not terribly far from Earth. It was another box to be ticked.

Once it was logged by the MPC, it was Farnocchia’s job to try to plot out 2024 YR4’s possible paths through space, checking to see if any of them overlapped with our planet’s. He works at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in California, where he’s partly responsible for keeping track of all the known asteroids and comets in the solar system. “We have 1.4 million objects to deal with,” he says, matter-of-factly.

In the past, astronomers would have had to stitch together multiple images of this asteroid and plot out its possible trajectories. Today, fortunately, Farnocchia has some help: He oversees the digital brain Sentry, an autonomous system he helped code. (Two other facilities in Italy perform similar work: the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, or NEOCC, and the privately owned Near-Earth Objects Dynamics Site, or NEODyS.)

To chart their courses, Sentry uses every new observation of every known asteroid or comet listed on the MPC to continuously refine the orbits of all those objects, using the immutable laws of gravity and the gravitational influences of any planets, moons, or other sizable asteroids they pass. A recent update to the software means that even the ever-so-gentle push afforded by sunlight is accounted for. That allows Sentry to confidently project the motions of all these objects at least a century into the future.

Davide Farnocchia helps track all the known asteroids and comets in the solar system at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.

Almost all newly discovered asteroids are quickly found to pose no impact risk. But those that stand even an infinitesimally small chance of smashing into our planet within the next 100 years are placed on the Sentry Risk List until additional observations can rule out those awful possibilities. Better safe than sorry.

In late December, with just a limited set of data, Sentry concluded that there was a non-negligible chance 2024 YR4 would strike Earth in 2032. Aegis, the equivalent software at Europe’s NEOCC site, agreed. No bother. More observations would very likely remove 2024 YR4 from the Risk List. Just another day at the office for Farnocchia.

It’s worth noting that an asteroid heading toward Earth isn’t always a problem. Small rocks burn up in the planet’s atmosphere several times a day; you’ve probably seen one already this year, on a moonless night. But above a certain size, these rocks turn from innocuous shooting stars into nuclear-esque explosions.

Reflected starlight is great for initially spotting asteroids, but it’s a terrible way to determine how big they are. A large, dull rock reflects as much light as a bright, tiny rock, making them appear the same to many telescopes. And that’s a problem, considering that a rock around 30 feet long will explode loudly but inconsequentially in Earth’s atmosphere, while a 3,000-foot-long asteroid would slam into the ground and cause devastation on a global scale, imperiling all of civilization. Roughly speaking, if you double the size of an asteroid, it becomes eight times more energetic upon impact—so finding out the size of an Earthbound asteroid is of paramount importance.

In those first few hours after it was discovered, and before anyone knew how shiny or dull its surface was, 2024 YR4 was estimated by astronomers to be as small as 65 feet across or as large as 500 feet. An object of the former size would blow up in mid-air, shattering windows over many miles and likely injuring thousands of people. At the latter size it would vaporize the heart of any city it struck, turning solid rock and metal into liquid and vapor, while its blast wave would devastate the rest of it, killing hundreds of thousands or even millions in the process.

So now the question was: Just how big was 2024 YR4?

REFINING THE PICTURE

Mid-January 2025

VERY LARGE TELESCOPE, CHILE

Understandably dissatisfied with that level of imprecision, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), high up on the Cerro Paranal mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert, entered the chat. As the name suggests, this flagship facility is vast, and it’s capable of really zooming in on distant objects. Or to put it another way: “The VLT is the largest, biggest, best telescope in the world,” says Hainaut, one of the facility’s operators, who usually commands it from half a world away in Germany.

In reality, the VLT—which lends a hand to the European Space Agency in its asteroid-hunting duties—is actually made up of four massive telescopes, each fixed on four separate corners of the sky. They can be combined to act as a huge light bucket, allowing astronomers to see very faint asteroids. Four additional, smaller, movable telescopes can also team up with their bigger siblings to provide remarkably high-resolution images of even the stealthiest space rocks.

In this sequence of infrared images taken by ESO’s VLT, the individual image frames have been aligned so that the asteroid remains in the center as other stars appear to move around it.

ESO/O. HAINAUT ET AL.

With so much tech to oversee, the control room of the VLT looks a bit like the inside of the Death Star. “You have eight consoles, each of them with a dozen screens. It’s big, it’s large, it’s spectacular,” says Hainaut.

In mid-January, the European Space Agency asked the VLT to study several asteroids that had somewhat suspicious near-Earth orbits—including 2024 YR4. With just a few lines of code, the VLT could easily train its sharp eyes on an asteroid like 2024 YR4, allowing astronomers to narrow down its size range. It was found to be at least 130 feet long (big enough to cause major damage in a city) and as much as 300 feet (able to annihilate one).

January 29, 2025

INTERNATIONAL ASTEROID WARNING NETWORK

By the end of the month, there was no mistaking it: 2024 YR4 stood a greater than 1% chance of impacting Earth on December 22, 2032.

“It’s not something you see very often,” says Marco Fenucci, a near-Earth-object dynamicist at NEOCC. He admits that although it was “a serious thing,” this escalation was also “exciting to see”—something straight out of a sci-fi flick.

Sentry and Aegis, along with the systems at NEODyS, had been checking one another’s calculations. “There was a lot of care,” says Farnocchia, who explains that even though their programs worked wonders, their predictions were manually verified by multiple experts. When a rarity like 2024 YR4 comes along, he says, “you kind of switch gears, and you start being more cautious. You start screening everything that comes in.”

At this point, the klaxon emanating from these three data centers pushed the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a UN-backed planetary defense awareness group, to issue a public alert to the world’s governments: The planet may be in peril. For the most part, it was at this moment that the media—and the wider public—became aware of the threat. Earth, we may have a problem.

Denneau, along with plenty of other astronomers, received an urgent email from Fast at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, requesting that all capable observatories track this hazardous asteroid. But there was one glaring problem. When 2024 YR4 was discovered on December 27, it was already two days after it had made its closest approach to Earth. And since it was heading back out into the shadows of space, it was quickly fading from sight.

Once it gets too faint, “there’s not much ATLAS can do,” Denneau says. By the time of IAWN’s warning, planetary defenders had just weeks to try to track 2024 YR4 and refine the odds of its hitting Earth before they’d lose it to the darkness.

And if their scopes failed, the odds of an Earth impact would have stayed uncomfortably high until 2028, when the asteroid was due to make another flyby of the planet. That’d be just four short years before the space rock might actually hit.

“In that situation, we would have been … in trouble,” says NEOCC’s Fenucci.

The hunt was on.

PREPARING FOR THE WORST

February 5 and February 6, 2025

SPACE MISSION PLANNING ADVISORY GROUP, AUSTRIA

In early February, spaceflight mission specialists, including those at the UN-supported Space Mission Planning Advisory Group in Vienna, began high-level talks designed to sketch out ways in which 2024 YR4 could be either deflected away from Earth or obliterated—you know, just in case.

A range of options were available—including ramming it with several uncrewed spacecraft or assaulting it with nuclear weapons—but there was no silver bullet in this situation. Nobody had ever launched a nuclear explosive device into deep space before, and the geopolitical ramifications of any nuclear-armed nations doing so in the present day would prove deeply unwelcome. Asteroids are also extremely odd objects; some, perhaps including 2024 YR4, are less like single chunks of rock and more akin to multiple cliffs flying in formation. Hit an asteroid like that too hard and you could fail to deflect it—and instead turn an Earthbound cannonball into a spray of shotgun pellets.

It’s safe to say that early on, experts were concerned about whether they could prevent a potential disaster. Crucially, eight years was not actually much time to plan something of this scale. So they were keen to better pinpoint how likely, or unlikely, it was that 2024 YR4 was going to collide with the planet before any complex space mission planning began in earnest.

The people involved with these talks—from physicists at some of America’s most secretive nuclear weapons research laboratories to spaceflight researchers over in Europe—were not feeling close to anything resembling panic. But “the timeline was really short,” admits Hainaut. So there was an unprecedented tempo to their discussions. This wasn’t a drill. This was the real deal. What would they do to defend the planet if an asteroid impact couldn’t be ruled out?

Luckily, over the next few days, a handful of new observations came in. Each helped Sentry, Aegis, and the system at NEODyS rule out more of 2024 YR4’s possible future orbits. Unluckily, Earth remained a potential port of call for this pesky asteroid—and over time, our planet made up a higher proportion of those remaining possibilities. That meant that the odds of an Earth impact “started bubbling up,” says Denneau.

a telescope in each of the four corners points to an asteroid

By February 6, they jumped to 2.3%—a one-in-43 chance of an impact.

“How much anxiety someone should feel over that—it’s hard to say,” Denneau says, with a slight shrug.

In the past, several elephantine asteroids have been found to stand a small chance of careening unceremoniously into the planet. Such incidents tend to follow a pattern. As more observations come in and the asteroid’s orbit becomes better known, an Earth impact trajectory remains a possibility while other outlying orbits are removed from the calculations—so for a time, the odds of an impact rise. Finally, with enough observations in hand, it becomes clear that the space rock will miss our world entirely, and the impact odds plummet to zero.

Astronomers expected this to repeat itself with 2024 YR4. But there was no guarantee. There’s no escaping the fact that one day, sooner or later, scientists will discover a dangerous asteroid that will punch Earth in the face—and raze a city in the process.

After all, asteroids capable of trashing a city have found their way to Earth plenty of times before, and not just in the very distant past. In 1908, an 800-square-mile patch of forest in Siberia—one that was, fortunately, very sparsely populated—was decimated by a space rock just 180 feet long. It didn’t even hit the ground; it exploded in midair with the force of a 15-megaton blast.

But only one other asteroid comparable in size to 2024 YR4 had its 2.3% figure beat: in 2004, Apophis—capable of causing continental-scale damage—had (briefly) stood a 2.7% chance of impacting Earth in 2029.

Rapidly approaching uncharted waters, the powers that be at NASA decided to play a space-based wild card: the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.

THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, DEEP SPACE, ONE MILLION MILES FROM EARTH

A large dull asteroid reflects the same amount of light as a small shiny one, but that doesn’t mean astronomers sizing up an asteroid are helpless. If you view both asteroids in the infrared, the larger one glows brighter than the smaller one no matter the surface coating—making infrared, or the thermal part of the electromagnetic spectrum, a much better gauge of a space rock’s proportions.

Observatories on Earth do have infrared capabilities, but our planet’s atmosphere gets in their way, making it hard for them to offer highly accurate readings of an asteroid’s size.

But the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), hanging out in space, doesn’t have that problem.

A collage of three images showing the black expanse of space. Two-thirds of the collage is taken up by the black background sprinkled with small, blurry galaxies in orange, blue, and white. There are two images in a column at the right side of the collage. On the right side of the main image, not far from the top, a very faint dot is outlined with a white square. At the right, there are two zoomed in views of this area. The top box is labeled NIRCam and shows a fuzzy dot at the center of the inset. The bottom box is labeled MIRI and shows a fuzzy pinkish dot. — Asteroid 2024 YR4 is the smallest object targeted by JWST to date, and one of the smallest objects to have its size directly measured. Observations were taken using both its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to study the thermal properties of the asteroid.

This observatory, which sits at a gravitationally stable point about a million miles from Earth, is polymathic. Its sniper-like scope can see in the infrared and allows it to peer at the edge of the observable universe, meaning it can study galaxies that formed not long after the Big Bang. It can even look at the light passing through the atmospheres of distant planets to ascertain their chemical makeups. And its remarkably sharp eye means it can also track the thermal glow of an asteroid long after all ground-based telescopes lose sight of it.

In a fortuitous bit of timing, by the moment 2024 YR4 came along, planetary defenders had recently reasoned that JWST could theoretically be used to track ominous asteroids using its own infrared scope, should the need arise. So after IAWN’s warning went out, operators of JWST ran an analysis: Though the asteroid would vanish from most scopes by late March, this one might be able to see the rock until sometime in May, which would allow researchers to greatly refine their assessment of the asteroid’s orbit and its odds of making Earth impact.

Understanding 2024 YR4’s trajectory was important, but “the size was the main motivator,” says Andy Rivkin, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the proposal to use JWST to observe the asteroid. The hope was that even if the impact odds remained high until 2028, JWST would find that 2024 YR4 was on the smaller side of the 130-to-300-feet size range—meaning it would still be a danger, but a far less catastrophic one.

The JWST proposal was accepted by NASA on February 5. But the earliest it could conduct its observations was early March. And time really wasn’t on Earth’s side.

February 7, 2025

GEMINI SOUTH TELESCOPE, CHILE

“At this point, [2024 YR4] was too faint for the Catalina telescopes,” says Catalina’s Wierzchoś. “In our opinion, this was a big deal.”

So Wierzchoś and his colleagues put in a rare emergency request to commandeer the Gemini Observatory, an internationally funded and run facility featuring two large, eagle-eyed telescopes—one in Chile and one atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. Their request was granted, and on February 7, they trained the Chile-based Gemini South telescope onto 2024 YR4.

This composite image was captured by a team of astronomers using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS). The hazy dot at the center is asteroid 2024 YR4.

The odds of Earth impact dropped ever so slightly, to 2.2%—a minor, but still welcome, development.

Mid-February 2025

MAGDALENA RIDGE OBSERVATORY, NEW MEXICO

By this point, the roster of 2024 YR4 hunters also included the tiny team operating the Magdalena Ridge Observatory (MRO), which sits atop a tranquil mountain in New Mexico.

“It’s myself and my husband,” says Eileen Ryan, the MRO director. “We’re the only two astronomers running the telescope. We have a daytime technician. It’s kind of a mom-and-pop organization.”

Still, the scope shouldn’t be underestimated. “We can see maybe a cell-phone-size object that’s illuminated at geosynchronous orbit,” Ryan says, referring to objects 22,000 miles away. But its most impressive feature is its mobility. While other observatories have slowly swiveling telescopes, MRO’s scope can move like the wind. “We can track the fastest objects,” she says, with a grin—noting that the telescope was built in part to watch missiles for the US Air Force. Its agility and long-distance vision explain why the Space Force is one of MRO’s major clients: It can be used to spy on satellites and spacecraft anywhere from low Earth orbit right out to the lunar regions. And that meant spying on the super-speedy, super-sneaky 2024 YR4 wasn’t a problem for MRO, whose own observations were vital in refining the asteroid’s impact odds.

Dr Eileen Ryan — Eileen Ryan is the director of the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico.

Then, in mid-February, MRO and all ground-based observatories came up against an unsolvable problem: The full moon was out, shining so brightly that it blinded any telescope that dared point at the night sky. “During the full moon, the observatories couldn’t observe for a week or so,” says NEOCC’s Fenucci. To most of us, the moon is a beautiful silvery orb. But to astronomers, it’s a hostile actor. “We abhor the moon,” says Denneau.

All any of them could do was wait. Those tracking 2024 YR4 vacillated between being animated and slightly trepidatious. The thought that the asteroid could still stand a decent chance of impacting Earth after it faded from view did weigh a little on their minds.

Nevertheless, Farnocchia maintained his characteristic sangfroid throughout. “I try to stress about the things I can control,” he says. “All we can do is to explain what the situation is, and that we need new data to say more.”

February 18, 2025

CENTER FOR NEAR-EARTH OBJECT STUDIES, CALIFORNIA

As the full moon finally faded into a crescent of light, the world’s largest telescopes sprang back into action for one last shot at glory. “The dark time came again,” says Hainaut, with a smile.

New observations finally began to trickle in, and Sentry, Aegis, and NEODyS readjusted their forecasts. It wasn’t great news: The odds of an Earth impact in 2032 jumped up to 3.1%, officially making 2024 YR4 the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered.

This declaration made headlines across the world—and certainly made the curious public sit up and wonder if they had yet another apocalyptic concern to fret about. But, as ever, the asteroid hunters held fast in their prediction that sooner or later—ideally sooner—more observations would cause those impact odds to drop.

“We kept at it,” says Ryan. But time was running short; they started to “search for out-of-the-box ways to image this asteroid,” says Fenucci.

Planetary defense researchers soon realized that 2024 YR4 wasn’t too far away from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, a planetary science mission making a series of flybys of various asteroids. If Lucy could be redirected to catch up to 2024 YR4 instead, it would give humanity its best look at the rock, allowing Sentry and company to confirm or dispel our worst fears.

Sadly, NASA ran the numbers, and it proved to be a nonstarter: 2024 YR4 was too speedy and too far for Lucy to pursue.

It was really starting to look as if JWST would be the last, best hope to track 2024 YR4.

A CHANGE OF FATE

February 19, 2025

VERY LARGE TELESCOPE, CHILE and MAGDALENA RIDGE OBSERVATORY, NEW MEXICO

Just one day after 2024 YR made history, the VLT, MRO, and others caught sight of it again, and Sentry, Aegis, and NEODyS voraciously consumed their new data.

The odds of an Earth impact suddenly dropped to 1.5%.

Astronomers didn’t really have time to react to the possibility that this was a good sign—they just kept sending their observations onward.

February 20, 2025

SUBARU TELESCOPE, HAWAII

Yet another observatory had been itching to get into the game for weeks, but it wasn’t until February 20 that Tsuyoshi Terai, an astronomer at Japan’s Subaru Telescope, sitting atop Mauna Kea, finally caught 2024 YR4 shifting between the stars. He added his data to the stream.

And all of a sudden, the asteroid lost its lethal luster. The odds of its hitting Earth were now just 0.3%.

At this point, you might expect that all those tracking it would be in a single control room somewhere, eyes glued to their screens, watching the odds drop before bursting into cheers and rapturous applause. But no—the astronomers who had spent so long observing this asteroid remained scattered across the globe. And instead of erupting into cheers, they exchanged modestly worded emails of congratulations—the digital equivalent of a nod or a handshake.

Dr. Tsuyoshi Tera at a workstation with many monitors — In late February, data from Tsuyoshi Terai, an astronomer at Japan’s Subaru Telescope, which sits atop Mauna Kea, confirmed that 2024 YR4 was not so lethal after all.

“It was a relief,” says Terai. “I was very pleased that our data contributed to put an end to the risk of 2024 YR4.”

February 24, 2025

INTERNATIONAL ASTEROID WARNING NETWORK

Just a few days later, and thanks to a litany of observations continuing to flood in, IAWN issued the all-clear. This once-ominous asteroid’s odds of inconveniencing our planet were at 0.004%—one in 25,000. Today, the odds of an Earth impact in 2032 are exactly zero.

“It was kinda fun while it lasted,” says Denneau.

Planetary defenders may have had a blast defending the world, but these astronomers still took the cosmic threat deeply seriously—and never once took their eyes off the prize. “In my mind, the observers and orbit teams were the stars of this story,” says Fast, NASA’s acting planetary defense officer.

Farnocchia shrugs off the entire thing. “It was the expected outcome,” he says. “We just didn’t know when that would happen.”

Looking back on it now, though, some 2024 YR4 trackers are allowing themselves to dwell on just how close this asteroid came to being a major danger. “It’s wild to watch it all play out,” says Denneau. “We were weeks away from having to spin up some serious mitigation planning.” But there was no need to work out how the save the world. It turned out that 2024 YR4 was never a threat to begin with—it just took a while to check.

And these experiences in handling a dicey space rock will only serve to make the world a safer place to live. One day, an asteroid very much like 2024 YR4 will be seen heading straight for Earth. And those tasked with tracking it will be officially battle-tested, and better prepared than ever to do what needs to be done.

A POSTSCRIPT

March 27, 2025

JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, DEEP SPACE, ONE MILLION MILES FROM EARTH

But the story of 2024 YR4 is not quite over—in fact, if this were a movie, it would have an after-credits scene.

After the Earth-impact odds fell off a cliff, JWST went ahead with its observations in March anyway. It found out that 2024 YR4 was 200 feet across—so large that a direct strike on a city would have proved horrifically lethal. Earth just didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

But the moon might. Thanks in part to JWST, astronomers calculated a 3.8% chance that 2024 YR4 will impact the lunar surface in 2032. Additional JWST observations in May bumped those odds up slightly, to 4.3%, and the orbit can no longer be refined until the asteroid’s next Earth flyby in 2028.

“It may hit the moon!” says Denneau. “Everybody’s still very excited about that.”

A lunar collision would give astronomers a wonderful opportunity not only to study the physics of an asteroid impact, but also to demonstrate to the public just how good they are at precisely predicting the future motions of potentially lethal space rocks. “It’s a thing we can plan for without having to defend the Earth,” says Denneau.

If 2024 YR4 is truly going to smash into the moon, the impact—likely on the side facing Earth—would unleash an explosion equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs. An expansive crater would be carved out in the blink of an eye, and a shower of debris would erupt in all directions.

None of this supersonic wreckage would pose any danger to Earth, but it would look spectacular: You’d be able to see the bright flash of the impact from terra firma with the naked eye.

“If that does happen, it’ll be amazing,” says Denneau. It will be a spectacular way to see the saga of 2024 YR4—once a mere speck on his computer screen—come to an explosive end, from a front-row seat.

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Jun 12 2025

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

This story is a partnership between MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and Trouw, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Two futures

Hans de Zwart, a gym teacher turned digital rights advocate, says that when he saw Amsterdam’s plan to have an algorithm evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud, he nearly fell out of his chair.

It was February 2023, and de Zwart, who had served as the executive director of Bits of Freedom, the Netherlands’ leading digital rights NGO, had been working as an informal advisor to Amsterdam’s city government for nearly two years, reviewing and providing feedback on the AI systems it was developing.

According to the city’s documentation, this specific AI model—referred to as “Smart Check”—would consider submissions from potential welfare recipients and determine who might have submitted an incorrect application. More than any other project that had come across his desk, this one stood out immediately, he told us—and not in a good way. “There’s some very fundamental [and] unfixable problems,” he says, in using this algorithm “on real people.”

From his vantage point behind the sweeping arc of glass windows at Amsterdam’s city hall, Paul de Koning, a consultant to the city whose résumé includes stops at various agencies in the Dutch welfare state, had viewed the same system with pride. De Koning, who managed Smart Check’s pilot phase, was excited about what he saw as the project’s potential to improve efficiency and remove bias from Amsterdam’s social benefits system.

A team of fraud investigators and data scientists had spent years working on Smart Check, and de Koning believed that promising early results had vindicated their approach. The city had consulted experts, run bias tests, implemented technical safeguards, and solicited feedback from the people who’d be affected by the program—more or less following every recommendation in the ethical-AI playbook. “I got a good feeling,” he told us.

These opposing viewpoints epitomize a global debate about whether algorithms can ever be fair when tasked with making decisions that shape people’s lives. Over the past several years of efforts to use artificial intelligence in this way, examples of collateral damage have mounted: nonwhite job applicants weeded out of job application pools in the US, families being wrongly flagged for child abuse investigations in Japan, and low-income residents being denied food subsidies in India.

Proponents of these assessment systems argue that they can create more efficient public services by doing more with less and, in the case of welfare systems specifically, reclaim money that is allegedly being lost from the public purse. In practice, many were poorly designed from the start. They sometimes factor in personal characteristics in a way that leads to discrimination, and sometimes they have been deployed without testing for bias or effectiveness. In general, they offer few options for people to challenge—or even understand—the automated actions directly affecting how they live.

The result has been more than a decade of scandals. In response, lawmakers, bureaucrats, and the private sector, from Amsterdam to New York, Seoul to Mexico City, have been trying to atone by creating algorithmic systems that integrate the principles of “responsible AI”—an approach that aims to guide AI development to benefit society while minimizing negative consequences.

Developing and deploying ethical AI is a top priority for the European Union, and the same was true for the US under former president Joe Biden, who released a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. That plan was rescinded by the Trump administration, which has removed considerations of equity and fairness, including in technology, at the national level. Nevertheless, systems influenced by these principles are still being tested by leaders in countries, states, provinces, and cities—in and out of the US—that have immense power to make decisions like whom to hire, when to investigate cases of potential child abuse, and which residents should receive services first.

Amsterdam indeed thought it was on the right track. City officials in the welfare department believed they could build technology that would prevent fraud while protecting citizens’ rights. They followed these emerging best practices and invested a vast amount of time and money in a project that eventually processed live welfare applications. But in their pilot, they found that the system they’d developed was still not fair and effective. Why?

Lighthouse Reports, MIT Technology Review, and the Dutch newspaper Trouw have gained unprecedented access to the system to try to find out. In response to a public records request, the city disclosed multiple versions of the Smart Check algorithm and data on how it evaluated real-world welfare applicants, offering us unique insight into whether, under the best possible conditions, algorithmic systems can deliver on their ambitious promises.

The answer to that question is far from simple. For de Koning, Smart Check represented technological progress toward a fairer and more transparent welfare system. For de Zwart, it represented a substantial risk to welfare recipients’ rights that no amount of technical tweaking could fix. As this algorithmic experiment unfolded over several years, it called into question the project’s central premise: that responsible AI can be more than a thought experiment or corporate selling point—and actually make algorithmic systems fair in the real world.

A chance at redemption

Understanding how Amsterdam found itself conducting a high-stakes endeavor with AI-driven fraud prevention requires going back four decades, to a national scandal around welfare investigations gone too far.

In 1984, Albine Grumböck, a divorced single mother of three, had been receiving welfare for several years when she learned that one of her neighbors, an employee at the social service’s local office, had been secretly surveilling her life. He documented visits from a male friend, who in theory could have been contributing unreported income to the family. On the basis of his observations, the welfare office cut Grumböck’s benefits. She fought the decision in court and won.

Albine Grumböck in the courtroom with her lawyer and assembled spectators — Albine Grumböck, whose benefits had been cut off, learns of the judgement for interim relief.

Despite her personal vindication, Dutch welfare policy has continued to empower welfare fraud investigators, sometimes referred to as “toothbrush counters,” to turn over people’s lives. This has helped create an atmosphere of suspicion that leads to problems for both sides, says Marc van Hoof, a lawyer who has helped Dutch welfare recipients navigate the system for decades: “The government doesn’t trust its people, and the people don’t trust the government.”

Harry Bodaar, a career civil servant, has observed the Netherlands’ welfare policy up close throughout much of this time—first as a social worker, then as a fraud investigator, and now as a welfare policy advisor for the city. The past 30 years have shown him that “the system is held together by rubber bands and staples,” he says. “And if you’re at the bottom of that system, you’re the first to fall through the cracks.”

Making the system work better for beneficiaries, he adds, was a large motivating factor when the city began designing Smart Check in 2019. “We wanted to do a fair check only on the people we [really] thought needed to be checked,” Bodaar says—in contrast to previous department policy, which until 2007 was to conduct home visits for every applicant.

But he also knew that the Netherlands had become something of a ground zero for problematic welfare AI deployments. The Dutch government’s attempts to modernize fraud detection through AI had backfired on a few notorious occasions.

In 2019, it was revealed that the national government had been using an algorithm to create risk profiles that it hoped would help spot fraud in the child care benefits system. The resulting scandal saw nearly 35,000 parents, most of whom were migrants or the children of migrants, wrongly accused of defrauding the assistance system over six years. It put families in debt, pushed some into poverty, and ultimately led the entire government to resign in 2021.

front page of Trouw from January 16, 2021

In Rotterdam, a 2023 investigation by Lighthouse Reports into a system for detecting welfare fraud found it to be biased against women, parents, non-native Dutch speakers, and other vulnerable groups, eventually forcing the city to suspend use of the system. Other cities, like Amsterdam and Leiden, used a system called the Fraud Scorecard, which was first deployed more than 20 years ago and included education, neighborhood, parenthood, and gender as crude risk factors to assess welfare applicants; that program was also discontinued.

The Netherlands is not alone. In the United States, there have been at least 11 cases in which state governments used algorithms to help disperse public benefits, according to the nonprofit Benefits Tech Advocacy Hub, often with troubling results. Michigan, for instance, falsely accused 40,000 people of committing unemployment fraud. And in France, campaigners are taking the national welfare authority to court over an algorithm they claim discriminates against low-income applicants and people with disabilities.

This string of scandals, as well as a growing awareness of how racial discrimination can be embedded in algorithmic systems, helped fuel the growing emphasis on responsible AI. It’s become “this umbrella term to say that we need to think about not just ethics, but also fairness,” says Jiahao Chen, an ethical-AI consultant who has provided auditing services to both private and local government entities. “I think we are seeing that realization that we need things like transparency and privacy, security and safety, and so on.”

The approach, based on a set of tools intended to rein in the harms caused by the proliferating technology, has given rise to a rapidly growing field built upon a familiar formula: white papers and frameworks from think tanks and international bodies, and a lucrative consulting industry made up of traditional power players like the Big 5 consultancies, as well as a host of startups and nonprofits. In 2019, for instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global economic policy body, published its Principles on Artificial Intelligence as a guide for the development of “trustworthy AI.” Those principles include building explainable systems, consulting public stakeholders, and conducting audits.

But the legacy left by decades of algorithmic misconduct has proved hard to shake off, and there is little agreement on where to draw the line between what is fair and what is not. While the Netherlands works to institute reforms shaped by responsible AI at the national level, Algorithm Audit, a Dutch NGO that has provided ethical-AI auditing services to government ministries, has concluded that the technology should be used to profile welfare recipients only under strictly defined conditions, and only if systems avoid taking into account protected characteristics like gender. Meanwhile, Amnesty International, digital rights advocates like de Zwart, and some welfare recipients themselves argue that when it comes to making decisions about people’s lives, as in the case of social services, the public sector should not be using AI at all.

Amsterdam hoped it had found the right balance. “We’ve learned from the things that happened before us,” says Bodaar, the policy advisor, of the past scandals. And this time around, the city wanted to build a system that would “show the people in Amsterdam we do good and we do fair.”

Finding a better way

Every time an Amsterdam resident applies for benefits, a caseworker reviews the application for irregularities. If an application looks suspicious, it can be sent to the city’s investigations department—which could lead to a rejection, a request to correct paperwork errors, or a recommendation that the candidate receive less money. Investigations can also happen later, once benefits have been dispersed; the outcome may force recipients to pay back funds, and even push some into debt.

Officials have broad authority over both applicants and existing welfare recipients. They can request bank records, summon beneficiaries to city hall, and in some cases make unannounced visits to a person’s home. As investigations are carried out—or paperwork errors fixed—much-needed payments may be delayed. And often—in more than half of the investigations of applications, according to figures provided by Bodaar—the city finds no evidence of wrongdoing. In those cases, this can mean that the city has “wrongly harassed people,” Bodaar says.

The Smart Check system was designed to avoid these scenarios by eventually replacing the initial caseworker who flags which cases to send to the investigations department. The algorithm would screen the applications to identify those most likely to involve major errors, based on certain personal characteristics, and redirect those cases for further scrutiny by the enforcement team.

If all went well, the city wrote in its internal documentation, the system would improve on the performance of its human caseworkers, flagging fewer welfare applicants for investigation while identifying a greater proportion of cases with errors. In one document, the city projected that the model would prevent up to 125 individual Amsterdammers from facing debt collection and save €2.4 million annually.

Smart Check was an exciting prospect for city officials like de Koning, who would manage the project when it was deployed. He was optimistic, since the city was taking a scientific approach, he says; it would “see if it was going to work” instead of taking the attitude that “this must work, and no matter what, we will continue this.”

It was the kind of bold idea that attracted optimistic techies like Loek Berkers, a data scientist who worked on Smart Check in only his second job out of college. Speaking in a cafe tucked behind Amsterdam’s city hall, Berkers remembers being impressed at his first contact with the system: “Especially for a project within the municipality,” he says, it “was very much a sort of innovative project that was trying something new.”

Smart Check made use of an algorithm called an “explainable boosting machine,” which allows people to more easily understand how AI models produce their predictions. Most other machine-learning models are often regarded as “black boxes” running abstract mathematical processes that are hard to understand for both the employees tasked with using them and the people affected by the results.

The Smart Check model would consider 15 characteristics—including whether applicants had previously applied for or received benefits, the sum of their assets, and the number of addresses they had on file—to assign a risk score to each person. It purposefully avoided demographic factors, such as gender, nationality, or age, that were thought to lead to bias. It also tried to avoid “proxy” factors—like postal codes—that may not look sensitive on the surface but can become so if, for example, a postal code is statistically associated with a particular ethnic group.

In an unusual step, the city has disclosed this information and shared multiple versions of the Smart Check model with us, effectively inviting outside scrutiny into the system’s design and function. With this data, we were able to build a hypothetical welfare recipient to get insight into how an individual applicant would be evaluated by Smart Check.

This model was trained on a data set encompassing 3,400 previous investigations of welfare recipients. The idea was that it would use the outcomes from these investigations, carried out by city employees, to figure out which factors in the initial applications were correlated with potential fraud.

But using past investigations introduces potential problems from the start, says Sennay Ghebreab, scientific director of the Civic AI Lab (CAIL) at the University of Amsterdam, one of the external groups that the city says it consulted with. The problem of using historical data to build the models, he says, is that “we will end up [with] historic biases.” For example, if caseworkers historically made higher rates of mistakes with a specific ethnic group, the model could wrongly learn to predict that this ethnic group commits fraud at higher rates.

The city decided it would rigorously audit its system to try to catch such biases against vulnerable groups. But how bias should be defined, and hence what it actually means for an algorithm to be fair, is a matter of fierce debate. Over the past decade, academics have proposed dozens of competing mathematical notions of fairness, some of which are incompatible. This means that a system designed to be “fair” according to one such standard will inevitably violate others.

Amsterdam officials adopted a definition of fairness that focused on equally distributing the burden of wrongful investigations across different demographic groups.

In other words, they hoped this approach would ensure that welfare applicants of different backgrounds would carry the same burden of being incorrectly investigated at similar rates.

Mixed feedback

As it built Smart Check, Amsterdam consulted various public bodies about the model, including the city’s internal data protection officer and the Amsterdam Personal Data Commission. It also consulted private organizations, including the consulting firm Deloitte. Each gave the project its approval.

But one key group was not on board: the Participation Council, a 15-member advisory committee composed of benefits recipients, advocates, and other nongovernmental stakeholders who represent the interests of the people the system was designed to help—and to scrutinize. The committee, like de Zwart, the digital rights advocate, was deeply troubled by what the system could mean for individuals already in precarious positions.

Anke van der Vliet, now in her 70s, is one longtime member of the council. After she sinks slowly from her walker into a seat at a restaurant in Amsterdam’s Zuid neighborhood, where she lives, she retrieves her reading glasses from their case. “We distrusted it from the start,” she says, pulling out a stack of papers she’s saved on Smart Check. “Everyone was against it.”

For decades, she has been a steadfast advocate for the city’s welfare recipients—a group that, by the end of 2024, numbered around 35,000. In the late 1970s, she helped found Women on Welfare, a group dedicated to exposing the unique challenges faced by women within the welfare system.

City employees first presented their plan to the Participation Council in the fall of 2021. Members like van der Vliet were deeply skeptical. “We wanted to know, is it to my advantage or disadvantage?” she says.

Two more meetings could not convince them. Their feedback did lead to key changes—including reducing the number of variables the city had initially considered to calculate an applicant’s score and excluding variables that could introduce bias, such as age, from the system. But the Participation Council stopped engaging with the city’s development efforts altogether after six months. “The Council is of the opinion that such an experiment affects the fundamental rights of citizens and should be discontinued,” the group wrote in March 2022. Since only around 3% of welfare benefit applications are fraudulent, the letter continued, using the algorithm was “disproportionate.”

De Koning, the project manager, is skeptical that the system would ever have received the approval of van der Vliet and her colleagues. “I think it was never going to work that the whole Participation Council was going to stand behind the Smart Check idea,” he says. “There was too much emotion in that group about the whole process of the social benefit system.” He adds, “They were very scared there was going to be another scandal.”

But for advocates working with welfare beneficiaries, and for some of the beneficiaries themselves, the worry wasn’t a scandal but the prospect of real harm. The technology could not only make damaging errors but leave them even more difficult to correct—allowing welfare officers to “hide themselves behind digital walls,” says Henk Kroon, an advocate who assists welfare beneficiaries at the Amsterdam Welfare Association, a union established in the 1970s. Such a system could make work “easy for [officials],” he says. “But for the common citizens, it’s very often the problem.”

Time to test

Despite the Participation Council’s ultimate objections, the city decided to push forward and put the working Smart Check model to the test.

The first results were not what they’d hoped for. When the city’s advanced analytics team ran the initial model in May 2022, they found that the algorithm showed heavy bias against migrants and men, which we were able to independently verify.

As the city told us and as our analysis confirmed, the initial model was more likely to wrongly flag non-Dutch applicants. And it was nearly twice as likely to wrongly flag an applicant with a non-Western nationality than one with a Western nationality. The model was also 14% more likely to wrongly flag men for investigation.

In the process of training the model, the city also collected data on who its human case workers had flagged for investigation and which groups the wrongly flagged people were more likely to belong to. In essence, they ran a bias test on their own analog system—an important way to benchmark that is rarely done before deploying such systems.

What they found in the process led by caseworkers was a strikingly different pattern. Whereas the Smart Check model was more likely to wrongly flag non-Dutch nationals and men, human caseworkers were more likely to wrongly flag Dutch nationals and women.

The team behind Smart Check knew that if they couldn’t correct for bias, the project would be canceled. So they turned to a technique from academic research, known as training-data reweighting. In practice, that meant applicants with a non-Western nationality who were deemed to have made meaningful errors in their applications were given less weight in the data, while those with a Western nationality were given more.

Eventually, this appeared to solve their problem: As Lighthouse’s analysis confirms, once the model was reweighted, Dutch and non-Dutch nationals were equally likely to be wrongly flagged.

De Koning, who joined the Smart Check team after the data was reweighted, said the results were a positive sign: “Because it was fair … we could continue the process.”

The model also appeared to be better than caseworkers at identifying applications worthy of extra scrutiny, with internal testing showing a 20% improvement in accuracy.

Buoyed by these results, in the spring of 2023, the city was almost ready to go public. It submitted Smart Check to the Algorithm Register, a government-run transparency initiative meant to keep citizens informed about machine-learning algorithms either in development or already in use by the government.

For de Koning, the city’s extensive assessments and consultations were encouraging, particularly since they also revealed the biases in the analog system. But for de Zwart, those same processes represented a profound misunderstanding: that fairness could be engineered.

In a letter to city officials, de Zwart criticized the premise of the project and, more specifically, outlined the unintended consequences that could result from reweighting the data. It might reduce bias against people with a migration background overall, but it wouldn’t guarantee fairness across intersecting identities; the model could still discriminate against women with a migration background, for instance. And even if that issue were addressed, he argued, the model might still treat migrant women in certain postal codes unfairly, and so on. And such biases would be hard to detect.

“The city has used all the tools in the responsible-AI tool kit,” de Zwart told us. “They have a bias test, a human rights assessment; [they have] taken into account automation bias—in short, everything that the responsible-AI world recommends. Nevertheless, the municipality has continued with something that is fundamentally a bad idea.”

Ultimately, he told us, it’s a question of whether it’s legitimate to use data on past behavior to judge “future behavior of your citizens that fundamentally you cannot predict.”

Officials still pressed on—and set March 2023 as the date for the pilot to begin. Members of Amsterdam’s city council were given little warning. In fact, they were only informed the same month—to the disappointment of Elisabeth IJmker, a first-term council member from the Green Party, who balanced her role in municipal government with research on religion and values at Amsterdam’s Vrije University.

“Reading the words ‘algorithm’ and ‘fraud prevention’ in one sentence, I think that’s worth a discussion,” she told us. But by the time that she learned about the project, the city had already been working on it for years. As far as she was concerned, it was clear that the city council was “being informed” rather than being asked to vote on the system.

The city hoped the pilot could prove skeptics like her wrong.

Upping the stakes

The formal launch of Smart Check started with a limited set of actual welfare applicants, whose paperwork the city would run through the algorithm and assign a risk score to determine whether the application should be flagged for investigation. At the same time, a human would review the same application.

Smart Check’s performance would be monitored on two key criteria. First, could it consider applicants without bias? And second, was Smart Check actually smart? In other words, could the complex math that made up the algorithm actually detect welfare fraud better and more fairly than human caseworkers?

It didn’t take long to become clear that the model fell short on both fronts.

While it had been designed to reduce the number of welfare applicants flagged for investigation, it was flagging more. And it proved no better than a human caseworker at identifying those that actually warranted extra scrutiny.

What’s more, despite the lengths the city had gone to in order to recalibrate the system, bias reemerged in the live pilot. But this time, instead of wrongly flagging non-Dutch people and men as in the initial tests, the model was now more likely to wrongly flag applicants with Dutch nationality and women.

Lighthouse’s own analysis also revealed other forms of bias unmentioned in the city’s documentation, including a greater likelihood that welfare applicants with children would be wrongly flagged for investigation. (Amsterdam officials did not respond to a request for comment about this finding, nor other follow up questions about general critiques of the city’s welfare system.)

The city was stuck. Nearly 1,600 welfare applications had been run through the model during the pilot period. But the results meant that members of the team were uncomfortable continuing to test—especially when there could be genuine consequences. In short, de Koning says, the city could not “definitely” say that “this is not discriminating.”

He, and others working on the project, did not believe this was necessarily a reason to scrap Smart Check. They wanted more time—say, “a period of 12 months,” according to de Koning—to continue testing and refining the model.

They knew, however, that would be a hard sell.

In late November 2023, Rutger Groot Wassink—the city official in charge of social affairs—took his seat in the Amsterdam council chamber. He glanced at the tablet in front of him and then addressed the room: “I have decided to stop the pilot.”

The announcement brought an end to the sweeping multiyear experiment. In another council meeting a few months later, he explained why the project was terminated: “I would have found it very difficult to justify, if we were to come up with a pilot … that showed the algorithm contained enormous bias,” he said. “There would have been parties who would have rightly criticized me about that.”

Viewed in a certain light, the city had tested out an innovative approach to identifying fraud in a way designed to minimize risks, found that it had not lived up to its promise, and scrapped it before the consequences for real people had a chance to multiply.

But for IJmker and some of her city council colleagues focused on social welfare, there was also the question of opportunity cost. She recalls speaking with a colleague about how else the city could’ve spent that money—like to “hire some more people to do personal contact with the different people that we’re trying to reach.”

City council members were never told exactly how much the effort cost, but in response to questions from MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse, and Trouw on this topic, the city estimated that it had spent some €500,000, plus €35,000 for the contract with Deloitte—but cautioned that the total amount put into the project was only an estimate, given that Smart Check was developed in house by various existing teams and staff members.

For her part, van der Vliet, the Participation Council member, was not surprised by the poor result. The possibility of a discriminatory computer system was “precisely one of the reasons” her group hadn’t wanted the pilot, she says. And as for the discrimination in the existing system? “Yes,” she says, bluntly. “But we have always said that [it was discriminatory].”

She and other advocates wished that the city had focused more on what they saw as the real problems facing welfare recipients: increases in the cost of living that have not, typically, been followed by increases in benefits; the need to document every change that could potentially affect their benefits eligibility; and the distrust with which they feel they are treated by the municipality.

Can this kind of algorithm ever be done right?

When we spoke to Bodaar in March, a year and a half after the end of the pilot, he was candid in his reflections. “Perhaps it was unfortunate to immediately use one of the most complicated systems,” he said, “and perhaps it is also simply the case that it is not yet … the time to use artificial intelligence for this goal.”

“Niente, zero, nada. We’re not going to do that anymore,” he said about using AI to evaluate welfare applicants. “But we’re still thinking about this: What exactly have we learned?”

That is a question that IJmker thinks about too. In city council meetings she has brought up Smart Check as an example of what not to do. While she was glad that city employees had been thoughtful in their “many protocols,” she worried that the process obscured some of the larger questions of “philosophical” and “political values” that the city had yet to weigh in on as a matter of policy.

Questions such as “How do we actually look at profiling?” or “What do we think is justified?”—or even “What is bias?”

These questions are, “where politics comes in, or ethics,” she says, “and that’s something you cannot put into a checkbox.”

But now that the pilot has stopped, she worries that her fellow city officials might be too eager to move on. “I think a lot of people were just like, ‘Okay, well, we did this. We’re done, bye, end of story,’” she says. It feels like “a waste,” she adds, “because people worked on this for years.”

In abandoning the model, the city has returned to an analog process that its own analysis concluded was biased against women and Dutch nationals—a fact not lost on Berkers, the data scientist, who no longer works for the city. By shutting down the pilot, he says, the city sidestepped the uncomfortable truth—that many of the concerns de Zwart raised about the complex, layered biases within the Smart Check model also apply to the caseworker-led process.

“That’s the thing that I find a bit difficult about the decision,” Berkers says. “It’s a bit like no decision. It is a decision to go back to the analog process, which in itself has characteristics like bias.”

Chen, the ethical-AI consultant, largely agrees. “Why do we hold AI systems to a higher standard than human agents?” he asks. When it comes to the caseworkers, he says, “there was no attempt to correct [the bias] systematically.” Amsterdam has promised to write a report on human biases in the welfare process, but the date has been pushed back several times.

“In reality, what ethics comes down to in practice is: nothing’s perfect,” he says. “There’s a high-level thing of Do not discriminate, which I think we can all agree on, but this example highlights some of the complexities of how you translate that [principle].” Ultimately, Chen believes that finding any solution will require trial and error, which by definition usually involves mistakes: “You have to pay that cost.”

But it may be time to more fundamentally reconsider how fairness should be defined—and by whom. Beyond the mathematical definitions, some researchers argue that the people most affected by the programs in question should have a greater say. “Such systems only work when people buy into them,” explains Elissa Redmiles, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University who has studied algorithmic fairness.

No matter what the process looks like, these are questions that every government will have to deal with—and urgently—in a future increasingly defined by AI.

And, as de Zwart argues, if broader questions are not tackled, even well-intentioned officials deploying systems like Smart Check in cities like Amsterdam will be condemned to learn—or ignore—the same lessons over and over.

“We are being seduced by technological solutions for the wrong problems,” he says. “Should we really want this? Why doesn’t the municipality build an algorithm that searches for people who do not apply for social assistance but are entitled to it?”

Eileen Guo is the senior reporter for features and investigations at MIT Technology Review. Gabriel Geiger is an investigative reporter at Lighthouse Reports. Justin-Casimir Braun is a data reporter at Lighthouse Reports.

Additional reporting by Jeroen van Raalte for Trouw, Melissa Heikkilä for MIT Technology Review, and Tahmeed Shafiq for Lighthouse Reports. Fact checked by Alice Milliken.

You can read a detailed explanation of our technical methodology here. You can read Trouw‘s companion story, in Dutch, here.

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May 30 2025

This giant microwave may change the future of war

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.

Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night.

“I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023.

Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.

While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year.

The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side.

Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.

That’s where Epirus comes in.

When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)

Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.

Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software.

Leonidas device in a warehouse with the United States flag — The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.

Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes.

I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.

On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls.

Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives.

Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.”

Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.

Why zap?

Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says.

He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.

Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.

As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat.

Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them.

The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones.

In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control.

But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.)

Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added.

The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.

EPIRUS

Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo.

As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm.

Raytheon’s radar, reversed

Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget.

Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense.

Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)

While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world.

From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.

Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.)

By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances.

Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.

The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well.

Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project.

Waiting for the starting gun

On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.

Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.

The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”

But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.”

And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”

The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.

Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.

Epirus' drone defense unit — Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas.

While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018.

“If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.”

The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.

While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.

The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.

It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.

While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”

And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out.

Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.

In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan.

Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’”

“We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”

Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official.

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Apr 25 2025

Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest.

The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash.

Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus.

The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite.

Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful.

sun setting over the Cerrado with a flock of animals grazing in the foreground — Some locals say they like the order and eternal verdancy of the eucalyptus, which often stand in stark contrast to the Cerrado’s native savanna landscape.

Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see.

The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere.

But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because tech executives many thousands of miles away were racing toward, and in some cases stumbling, on their way to meet their climate promises—too little time, and too much demand for new devices and AI data centers. Not far from here, they had struck some of the largest-ever deals for carbon credits. They were asking something new of this tree: Could Latin America’s eucalyptus be a scalable climate solution?

On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.

At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.

Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the stars of the Southern Cross emerging and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees.

A big promise

My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress?

Apple CEO Tim Cook stares down Octavia Spencer as “Mother Nature” in their ad spot touting the company’s claims for carbon neutrality.

Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes.

Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch.

The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new.

Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.)

But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO₂, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million.

So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones.

To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, to invest in “high quality” projects that promoted reforestation on degraded lands.

Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice.

pedestrian walks past the Apple Store with reflection of branches in the glass

Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, a claim based in part on the use of carbon credits.

The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank.

Busch connected me with Mark Wishnie, head of sustainability for Timberland Investment Group, BTG’s US-based subsidiary, which acquires and manages properties on behalf of institutional investors. After years in the eucalyptus business, Wishnie, who lives in Seattle, was used to strong feelings about the tree. It’s just that kind of plant—heralded as useful, even ornamental; demonized as a fire starter, water-intensive, a weed. “Has the idea that eucalyptus is invasive come up?” he asked pointedly. (It’s an “exotic” species in Brazil, yes, but the risk of invasiveness is low for the varieties most commonly planted for forestry.) He invited detractors to consider the alternative to the scale and efficiency of eucalyptus, which, he pointed out, relieves the pressure that humans put on beloved old-growth forests elsewhere.

Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape.

When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.”

So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential.

“We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” Mark Wishnie says, promoting BTG’s plans to intermingle new farms alongside native preserves.

But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.

The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions.

Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box.

Complex calculations

In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria.

A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.)

The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term.

But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later.

Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron with shovels of dirt around a sapling. Melania Trump stands behind them watching. — During President Donald Trump’s first term, he and French president Emmanuel Macron planted an oak on the South Lawn of the White House.

To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long.

“The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy.

Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux.

Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles.

Pedro H.S. Brancalion — To Pedro Brancalion, a lot of tree-planting efforts are riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. He experiments with new ways to grow eucalyptus interspersed with native species.

Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built.

The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to maturity is standard for pulp. Trees planted today grow more than three times as fast as their ancestors.

If the goal is a trillion trees, or many millions of tons of carbon, no business is better suited to keeping count than timber. It might sound strange to claim carbon credits for trees that you plan to chop down and turn into toilet paper or chairs. Whatever carbon is stored in those ephemeral products is, of course, a blip compared with the millennia that CO₂ hangs in the atmosphere.

But these carbon projects take a longer view. While individual trees may go, more trees are planted. The forest constantly regrows and recaptures carbon from the air. Credits are issued annually over decades, so long as the long-term average of the carbon stored in the grove continues to increase. What’s more, because the timber is constantly being tracked, the carbon is easy to measure, solving a key problem with carbon credits.

Most mature native ecosystems, whether tropical forests or grasslands, will eventually store more carbon than a tree farm. But that could take decades. Eucalyptus can be planted immediately, with great speed, and the first carbon credits are issued in just a few years. “It fits a corporate model very well, and it fits the verification model very well,” said Robin Chazdon, a forest researcher at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast.

Today’s eucalyptus saplings—like those shown here in Brancalion’s lab—are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight.

Reliability and stability have also made eucalyptus, as well as pine, quietly dominant in global planting efforts. A 2019 analysis published in Nature found that 45% of carbon removal projects the researchers studied worldwide involved single-species tree farms. In Brazil, the figure was 82%. The authors called this a “scandal,” accusing environmental organizations and financiers of misleading the public and pursuing speed and convenience at the expense of native restoration.

In 2023, the nonprofit Verra, the largest bearer of carbon credit standards, said it would forbid projects using “non-native monocultures”—that is, plants like eucalyptus or pine that don’t naturally grow in the places where they’re being farmed. The idea was to assuage concerns that carbon credits were going to plantations that would have been built anyway given the demand for wood, meaning they wouldn’t actually remove any extra carbon from the atmosphere.

The uproar was immediate—from timber companies, but also from carbon developers and NGOs. How would it be possible to scale anything—conservation, carbon removal—without them?

Verra reversed course several months later. It would allow non-native monocultures so long as they grew in land that was deemed “degraded,” or previously cleared of vegetation—land like cattle pasture. And it took steps to avoid counting plantings in close proximity to other areas of fast tree growth, the idea being that they wanted to avoid rewarding purely industrial projects that would’ve been planted anyway.

Native trees surrounded by eucalyptus — Despite the potential benefits of intermixing them, foresters generally prefer to keep eucalyptus and native species separate.

Brancalion happened to agree with the criticisms of exotic monocultures. But all the same, he believed eucalyptus had been unfairly demonized. It was a marvelous genus, actually, with nearly 800 species with unique adaptations. Natives could be planted as monocultures too, or on stolen land, or tended with little care. He had been testing ways to turn eucalyptus from perceived foes into friends of native forest restoration.

His idea was to use rows of eucalyptus, which rocket above native species, as a kind of stabilizer. While these natives can be valuable—either as lumber or for biodiversity—they may grow slowly, or twist in ways that make their wood unprofitable, or suddenly and inexplicably die. It’s never like that with eucalyptus, which are wonderfully predictable growers. Eventually, their harvested wood would help pay for the hard work of growing the others.

In practice, foresters have generally preferred to keep things separate. Eucalyptus here; restoration there. It was far more efficient. The approach was emblematic, Brancalion thought, of letting the economics of the industry guide what was planted, how, and where, even with green finance involved. Though he admitted he was speaking as something of a competitor given his own carbon work, he was perplexed by Apple’s choices. The world’s richest company was doing eucalyptus? And with a bank better known locally as a major investor in industries, like beef and soy, that contributed to deforestation than any efforts for native restoration.

It also worried him to see the planting happening west of here, in the Cerrado, where land is cheaper and also, for much of the year, drier. “It’s like a bomb,” Brancalion told me. “You can come interview me in five, six years. You don’t have to be super smart to realize what will happen after planting too many eucalyptus in a dry region.” He wished me luck on my journey westward.

The sacrifice zone

Savanna implies openness, but the European settlers passing through the Cerrado called it the opposite; the name literally means “closed.” Grasses and shrubs grow to chest height, scaled as if to maximize human inconvenience. A machete is advised.

As I headed with Borzone toward a small nature preserve called Parque do Pombo, she told me that young Brazilians are often raised with a sense of dislike, if not fear, of this land. When Borzone texted her mother, a local biologist, to say where we were going, she replied: “I hear that place is full of ticks.” (Her intel, it turned out, was correct.)

At one point, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry to the Cerrado, invoking a myth about casting a cow into piranha-infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream.

What can be easy to miss is the fantastic variety of these plants, the result of natural selection cranked into overdrive. Species, many of which blew in from the Amazon, survived by growing deep roots through the acidic soil and thicker bark to resist regular brush fires. Many of the trees developed the ability to shrivel upon themselves and drop their leaves during the long, dry winter. Some call it a forest that has grown upside down, because much of the growth occurs in the roots. The Cerrado is home to 12,000 flowering plant species, 4,000 of which are found only there. In terms of biodiversity, it is second in the world only to its more famous neighbor, the Amazon.

Caryocar brasiliense flowers and fruits — Pequi is an edible fruit-bearing tree common in the Cerrado—one of the many unique species native to the area.

Each stop on our drive seemed to yield a new treasure for Borzone to show me: Guavira, a tree that bears fruit in grape-like bunches that appear only two weeks in a year; it can be made into a jam that is exceptionally good on toast. Pequi, more divisive, like fermented mango mixed with cheese. Others bear names Borzone can only faintly recall in the Indigenous Guaraní language and is thus unable to google. Certain uses are more memorable: Give this one here, a tiny frond that looks like a miniature Christmas fir, to make someone get pregnant.

Borzone had grown up in the heart of the savanna, and the land had changed significantly since she was a kid going to the river every weekend with her family. Since the 1970s, about half of the savanna has been cleared, mostly for ranching and, where the soil is good, soybeans. At that time, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry here, invoking what Brazilians call the boi de piranha—a myth about casting a cow into infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream.

Toby Pennington, a Cerrado ecologist at the University of Exeter, told me it remains a sacrificial zone, at times faring worse when environmentally minded politicians are in power. In 2023, when deforestation fell by half in the Amazon, it rose by 43% in the Cerrado. Some ecologists warn that this ecosystem could be entirely gone in the next decade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a certain prickliness among grassland researchers, who are, like their chosen flora, used to being trampled. In 2019, 46 of them authored a response in Science to Crowther’s trillion-trees study, arguing not about tree counting but about the land he proposed for reforestation. Much of it, they argued, including places like the Cerrado, was not appropriate for so many trees. It was too much biomass for the land to handle. (If their point was not already clear, the scientists later labeled the phenomenon “biome awareness disparity,” or BAD.)

“It’s a controversial ecosystem,” said Natashi Pilon, a grassland ecologist at the University of Campinas near São Paulo. “With Cerrado, you have to forget everything that you learn about ecology, because it’s all based in forest ecology. In the Cerrado, everything works the opposite way. Burning? It’s good. Shade? It’s not good.” The Cerrado contains a vast range of landscapes, from grassy fields to wooded forests, but the majority of it, she explained, is poorly suited to certain rules of carbon finance that would incentivize people to protect or restore it. While the underground forest stores plenty of carbon, it builds up its stock slowly and can be difficult to measure.

The result is a slightly uncomfortable position for ecologists studying and trying to protect a vanishing landscape. Pilon and her former academic advisor, Giselda Durigan, a Cerrado ecologist at the Environmental Research Institute of the State of São Paulo and one of the scientists behind BAD, have gotten accustomed to pushing back on people who arrived preaching “improvement” through trees—first from nonprofits, mostly of the trillion-trees variety, but now from the timber industry. “They are using the carbon discourse as one more argument to say that business is great,” Durigan told me. “They are happy to be seen as the good guys.”

Durigan saw tragedy in the way that Cerrado had been transformed into cattle pasture in just a generation, but there was also opportunity in restoring it once the cattle left. Bringing the Cerrado back would be hard work—usually requiring fire and hacking away at invasive grasses. But even simply leaving it alone could allow the ecosystem to begin to repair itself and offer something like the old savanna habitat. Abandoned eucalyptus farms, by contrast, were nightmares to return to native vegetation; the strange Cerrado plants refused to take root in the highly modified soil.

In recent years, Durigan had visited hundreds of eucalyptus farms in the area, shadowing her students who had been hired by timber companies to help establish promised corridors of native vegetation in accordance with federal rules. “They’re planting entire watersheds,” she said. “The rivers are dying.”

Durigan saw plants in isolated patches growing taller than they normally would, largely thanks to the suppression of regular brush fires. They were throwing shade on the herbs and grasses and drawing more water. The result was an environment gradually choking on itself, at risk of collapse during drought and retaining only a fraction of the Cerrado’s original diversity. If this was what people meant by bringing back the Cerrado, she believed it was only hastening its ultimate disappearance.

In a recent survey of the watershed around the Parque do Pombo, which is hemmed in on each side by eucalyptus, two other researchers reported finding “devastation” and turned to Plato’s description of Attica’s forests, cleared to build the city of Athens: “What remains now compared to what existed is like the skeleton of a sick man … All the rich and soft soil has dissolved, leaving the country of skin and bones.”

aerial view of the highway with trucks. On the right hand side trees are being felled and stacked by machines — A highway runs through the Cellulose Valley, connecting commercial eucalyptus farms and pulp factories.

After a long day of touring the land—and spinning out on the clay—we found that our fuel was low. The Parque do Pombo groundskeeper looked over at his rusting fuel tank and apologized. It had been spoiled by the last rain. At least, he said, it was all downhill to the highway.

The road of opportunity

We only made it about halfway down the eucalyptus-lined road. After the car huffed and left us stranded, Borzone and I started walking toward the highway, anticipating a long night. We remembered locals’ talk of jaguars recently pushed into the area by development.

But after only 30 minutes or so, a set of lights came into view across the plain. Then another, and another. Then the outline of a tractor, a small tanker truck, and, somewhat curiously, a tour bus. The gear and the vehicles bore the logo of Suzano, the world’s largest pulp and paper company.

After talking to a worker, we boarded the empty tour bus and were taken to a cluster of spotlit tents, where women prepared eucalyptus seedlings, stacking crates of them on white fold-out tables. A night shift like this one was unusual. But they were working around the clock—aiming to plant a million trees per day across Suzano’s farms, in preparation for opening the world’s largest pulp factory just down the highway. It would open in a few weeks with a capacity of 2.55 million metric tons of pulp per year.

Semi trucks laden with trees — Eucalyptus has become the region’s new lifeblood. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a local country duo.

The tour bus was standing by to take the workers down the highway at 1 a.m., arriving in the nearest city, Três Lagoas, by 3 a.m. to pick up the next shift. “You don’t do this work without a few birds at home to feed,” a driver remarked as he watched his colleagues filling holes in the field by the light of their headlamps. After getting permission from his boss, he drove us an hour each way to town to the nearest gas station.

This highway through the Cellulose Valley has become known as a road of opportunity, with eucalyptus as the region’s new lifeblood after the cattle industry shrank its footprint. Not far from the new Suzano factory, a popular roadside attraction is an oversize sculpture of a black bull at the gates of a well-known ranch. The ranch was recently planted, and the bull is now guarded by a phalanx of eucalyptus.

On TikTok, workers post selfies and views from tractors in the nearby groves, backed by a song from the local country music duo Jads e Jadson. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a down-on-his-luck man at risk of losing his fiancée. Later, when he cuts down the trees and becomes a wealthy man with better options, he cuts off his betrothed, too.

The race to plant more eucalyptus here is backed heavily by the state government, which last year waived environmental requirements for new farms on pasture and hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years. The trees were an important component of Brazil’s plan to meet its global climate commitments, and the timber industry was keen to cash in. Companies like Suzano have already proposed that tens of thousands of their hectares become eligible for carbon credits.

What’s top of mind for everyone, though, is worsening fires. Even when we visited in midwinter, the weather was hot and dry. The wider region was in a deep drought, perhaps the worst in 700 years, and in a few weeks, one of the worst fire seasons ever would begin. Suzano would be forced to make a rare pause in its planting when soil temperatures reached 154 °F.

Posted along the highway are constant reminders of the coming danger: signs, emblazoned with the logos of a dozen timber companies, that read “FOGO ZERO,” or “ZERO FIRE.”

land recently cleared on eucalyptus with the straight trunk stacked in piles along a dirt road for the machines to pass through — The race to plant more eucalyptus is backed heavily by the state government, which hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years.

In other places struck by megafires, like Portugal and Chile, eucalyptus has been blamed for worsening the flames. (The Chilean government has recently excluded pine and eucalyptus farms from its climate plans.) But here in Brazil, where climate change is already supersizing the blazes, the industry offers sophisticated systems to detect and suppress fires, argued Calmon of Conservation International. “You really need to protect it because that’s your asset,” he said. (BTG also noted that in parts of the Cerrado where human activity has increased, fires have decreased.)

Eucalyptus is often portrayed as impossibly thirsty compared with other trees, but Calmon pointed out it is not uniquely so. In some parts of the Cerrado, it has been found to consume four times as much water as native vegetation; in others, the two landscapes have been roughly in line. It depends on many factors—what type of soil it’s planted in, what Cerrado vegetation coexists with it, how intensely the eucalyptus is farmed. Timber companies, which have no interest in seeing their own plantations run dry, invest heavily in managing water. Another hope, Wishnie told me, is that by vastly increasing the forest canopy, the new eucalyptus will actually gather moisture and help produce rain.

Marine Dubos-Raoul has tracked waves of planting in the Cerrado for years and has spoken to residents who worry about how the trees strain local water supplies.

That’s a common narrative and one that’s been taught in schools here in Três Lagoas for decades, Borzone explained when we met up the day after our rescue with Marine Dubos-Raoul, a local geographer and university professor, and two of her students. Dubos-Raoul laughed uneasily. If this idea about rain was in fact true, they hadn’t seen it here. They crouched around the table at the cafe, speaking in a hush; their opinions weren’t particularly popular in this lumber town.

Dubos-Raoul had long tracked the impacts of the waves of planting on longtime rural residents, who complained that industry had taken their water or sprayed their gardens with pesticides.

The evidence tying the trees to water problems in the region, Dubos-Raoul admitted, is more anecdotal than data driven. But she heard it in conversation after conversation. “People would have tears in their eyes,” she said. “It was very clear to them that it was connected to the arrival of the eucalyptus.” (Since our meeting, a study, carried out in response to demands from local residents, has blamed the planting for 350 depleted springs in the area, sparking a rare state inquiry into the issue.) In any case, Dubos-Raoul thought, it didn’t make much sense to keep adding matches to the tinderbox.

Shortly after talking with Dubos-Raoul, we ventured to the town of Ribas do Rio Pardo to meet Charlin Castro at his family’s river resort. Suzano’s new pulp factory stood on the horizon, surrounded by one of the densest areas of planting in the region.

The Suzano pulp factory—the world’s largest—has pulled the once-sleepy town of Ribas do Rio Pardo into the bustling hub of Brazil’s eucalyptus industry.

five people with a dog, seated outdoors under a pergola — Charlin Castro, his father Camilo, and other locals talk about how the area around the family’s river resort has changed since eucalyptus came to town.

two men in the river; the opposite bank has been cordoned off with caution tape. — The public area for bathing on the far side of the shrinking river was closed after the Suzano pulp factory was installed.

Charlin and Camilo admit they aren’t exactly sure what is causing low water levels—maybe it’s silt, maybe it’s the trees.

With thousands of workers arriving, mostly temporarily, to build the factory and plant the fields, the sleepy farming village had turned into a boomtown, and developed something of a lawless reputation—prostitution, homelessness, collisions between logging trucks and drunk drivers—and Castro was chronicling much of it for a hyperlocal Instagram news outlet, while also running for city council.

But overall, he was thankful to Suzano. The factory was transforming the town into a “a real place,” as he put it, even if change was at times painful.

His father, Camilo, gestured with a sinewy arm over to the water, where he recalled boat races involving canoes with crews of a dozen. That was 30 years ago. It was impossible to imagine now as I watched a family cool off in this bend in the river, the water just knee deep. But it’s hard to say what exactly is causing the low water levels. Perhaps it’s silt from the ranches, Charlin suggested. Or a change in the climate. Or, maybe, it could be the trees.

Upstream, Ana Cláudia (who goes by “Tica”) and Antonio Gilberto Lima were more certain what was to blame. The couple, who are in their mid-60s, live in a simple brick house surrounded by fruit trees. They moved there a decade ago, seeking a calm retirement—one of a hundred or so families taking part in land reforms that returned land to smallholders. But recently, life has been harder. To preserve their well, they had let their vegetable garden go to seed. Streams were dry, and the old pools in the pastures where they used to fish were gone, replaced by trees; tapirs were rummaging through their garden, pushed, they believed, by lack of habitat.

Antônio Gilberto Lima and Ana Cláudia Gregório Braguim standing in front of semi trucks — Ana Cláudia and Antonio Gilberto Lima have seen their land struggle since eucalyptus plantations took over the region.

close up of a hand touching a branch with numerous bite holes and brown spots on all the leaves — Plants have been attacked by hungry insects at their home.

closeup on a cluster of insects nesting in a plant — Pollinators like these stingless bees, faced with a lack of variety of native plant species, must fly greater distances to collect pollen they need.

They were surrounded by eucalyptus, planted in waves with the arrival of each new factory. No one was listening, they told me, as the cattle herd bellowed outside the door. “The trees are sad,” Gilberto said, looking out over his few dozen pale-humped animals grazing around scattered Cerrado species left in the paddock. Tica told me she knew that paper and pulp had to come from somewhere, and that many people locally were benefiting. But the downsides were getting overlooked, she thought. They had signed a petition to the government, organized by Dubos-Raoul, seeking to rein in the industry. Perhaps, she hoped, it could reach American investors, too.

The green halo

A few weeks before my trip, BTG had decided it was ready to show off Project Alpha. The visit was set for my last day in Brazil; the farm formerly known as Fazenda Engano was further upriver in Camapuã, a town that borders Ribas do Rio Pardo. It was a long, circuitous drive north to get out there, but it wouldn’t be that way much longer; a new highway was being paved that would directly connect the two towns, part of an initiative between the timber industry and government to expand the cellulose hub northward. A local official told me he expected tens of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus in the next few years.

For now, though, it was still the frontier. The intention was to plant “well outside the forest sector,” Wishnie told me—not directly in the shadow of a mill, but close enough for the operation to be practical, with access to labor and logistics. That distance was important evidence that the trees would store more carbon than what’s accounted for in a business-as-usual scenario. The other guarantee was the restoration. It wasn’t good business to buy land and not plant every acre you could with timber. It was made possible only with green investments from Apple and others.

That morning, Wishnie had emailed me a press release announcing that Microsoft had joined Apple in seeking help from BTG to help meet its carbon demands. The technology giant had made the largest-ever purchase of carbon credits, representing 8 million tons of CO₂, from Project Alpha, following smaller commitments from TSMC and Murata, two of Apple’s suppliers.

I was set to meet Carlos Guerreiro, head of Latin American operations for BTG’s timber subsidiary, at a gas station in town, where we would set off together for the 24,000-hectare property. A forester in Brazil for much of his life, he had flown in from his home near São Paulo early that morning; he planned to check out the progress of the planting at Project Alpha and then swing down to the bank’s properties across the Cellulose Valley, where BTG was finalizing a $376 million deal to sell land to Suzano.

BTG plans to mix preserves of native restoration and eucalyptus farms and eventually reach a 50-50 mix on their properties.

Guerreiro defended BTG’s existing holdings as sustainable engines of development in the region. But all the same, Project Alpha felt like a new beginning for the company, he told me. About a quarter of this property had been left untouched when the pasture was first cleared in the 1980s, but the plan now was to restore an additional 13% of the property to native Cerrado plants, bringing the total to 37%. (BTG says it will protect more land on future farms to arrive at its 50-50 target.) Individual patches of existing native vegetation would be merged with others around the property, creating a 400-meter corridor that largely followed the streams and rivers—beyond the 60 meters required by law.

The restoration work was happening with the help of researchers from a Brazilian university, though they were still testing the best methods. We stood over trenches that had been planted with native seeds just weeks before, shoots only starting to poke out of the dirt. Letting the land regenerate on its own was often preferable, Guerreiro told me, but the best approach would depend on the specifics of each location. In other places, assistance with planting or tending or clearing back the invasive grasses could be better.

The approach of largely letting things be was already yielding results, he noted: In parts of the property that hadn’t been grazed in years, they could already see the hardscrabble Cerrado clawing back with a vengeance. They’d been marveling at the fauna, caught on camera traps: tapirs, anteaters, all kinds of birds. They had even spotted a jaguar. The project would ensure that this growth would continue for decades. The land wouldn’t be sold to another rancher and go back to looking like other parts of the property, which were regularly cleared of native habitat. The hope, he said, was that over time the regenerating ecosystems would store more carbon, and generate more credits, than the eucalyptus. (The company intends to submit its carbon plans to Verra later this year.)

We stopped for lunch at the dividing line between the preserve and the eucalyptus, eating ham sandwiches in the shade of the oldest trees on the property, already two stories tall and still, by Guerreiro’s estimate, putting on a centimeter per day. He was planting at a rate of 40,000 seedlings per day in neat trenches filled with white lime to make the sandy Cerrado soil more inviting. In seven years or so, half of the trees will be thinned and pulped. The rest will keep growing. They’ll stand for seven years longer and grow thick and firm enough for plywood. The process will then start anew. Guerreiro described a model where clusters of farms mixed with preserves like this one will be planted around mills throughout the Cerrado. But nothing firm had been decided.

Eucalyptus tree seedlings — “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado,” says Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter.

This experiment, Wishnie told me later, could have a big payoff. The important thing, he reminded me, was that stretches of the Cerrado would be protected at a scale no one had achieved before—something that wouldn’t happen without eucalyptus. He strongly disagreed with the scientists who said eucalyptus didn’t fit here. The government had analyzed the watershed, he explained, and he was confident the land could support the trees. At the end of the day, the choice was between doing something and doing nothing. “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” he said.

When I asked Pilon to take a look at satellite imagery and photos of the property, she was unimpressed. It looked to her like yet another misguided attempt at planting trees in an area that had once naturally been a dense savanna. (Her assessment is supported by a land survey from the 1980s that classified this land as a typical Cerrado ecosystem—some trees, but mostly shrubbery. BTG responded that the survey was incorrect and the satellite images clearly showed a closed-canopy forest.)

As Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter and another BAD signatory, put it: “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado.”

Over months of reporting, the way that both sides spoke in absolutes about how to save this vanishing ecosystem had become familiar. Chazdon, the Australia-based forest researcher, told me she too felt that the tenor of the argument over how and where to grow has become more vehement as demand for tree-based carbon removal has intensified. “Nobody’s a villain,” she said. “There are disconnects on both sides.”

Chazdon had been excited to hear about BTG’s project. It was, she thought, the type of thing that was sorely needed in conservation—mixing profitable enterprises with an approach to restoration that considers the wider landscape. “I can understand why the Cerrado ecologists are up in arms,” she said. “They get the feeling that nobody cares about their ecosystems.” But demands for ecological purity could indeed get in the way of doing much of anything—especially in places like the Cerrado, where laws and financing favor destruction over restoration.

Still, thinking about the scale of the carbon removal problem, she considered it sensible to wonder about the future that was being hatched. While there is, in fact, a limit to how much additional land the world needs for pulp and plywood products in the near future, there is virtually no limit to how much land it could devote to sequestering carbon. Which means we need to ask hard questions about the best way to use it.

More eucalyptus may support claims about greener paper products, but some argue that it’s not so simple for laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT queries.

It was true, Chazdon said, that planting eucalyptus in the Cerrado was an act of destruction—it’d make that land nearly impossible to recover. The areas preserved in between them would also likely struggle to fully renew itself, without fire or clearing. She would feel more comfortable with such large-scale projects if the bar for restoration were much higher—say, 75% or more. But that almost certainly wouldn’t satisfy her grassland colleagues who don’t want any eucalyptus at all. And it might not fit the profit model—the flywheel that Apple and others are seeking in order to scale up carbon removal fast.

Barbara Haya, who studies carbon offsets at the University of California, Berkeley, encouraged me to think about all of it differently. The improvements to planting eucalyptus here, at this farm, could be a perfectly good thing for this industry, she said. Perhaps they merit some claim about greener toilet paper or plywood. Haya would leave that debate to the ecologists.

But we weren’t talking about toilet paper or plywood. We were talking about laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT. And the path to connecting those things to these trees was more convoluted. The carbon had to be disentangled first from the wood’s other profitable uses and then from the wider changes that were happening in this region and its industries. There seemed to be many plausible scenarios for where this land was heading. Was eucalyptus the only feasible route for carbon to find its way here?

Haya is among the experts who argue that the idea of precisely canceling out corporate emissions to reach carbon neutrality is a broken one. That’s not to say protecting nature can’t help fight climate change. Conserving existing forests and grasslands, for example, could often yield greater carbon and biodiversity benefits in the long run than planting new forests. But the carbon math used to justify those efforts was often fuzzier. This makes every claim of carbon neutrality fragile and drives companies toward projects that are easier to prove, she thinks, but perhaps have less impact.

One idea is that companies should instead shift to a “contribution” model that tracks how much money they put toward climate mitigation, without worrying about the exact amount of carbon removed. “Let’s say the goal is to save the Cerrado,” Haya said. “Could they put that same amount of money and really make a difference?” Such an approach, she pointed out, could help finance the preservation of those last intact Cerrado remnants. Or it could fund restoration, even if the restored vegetation takes years to grow or sometimes needs to burn.

The approach raises its own questions—about how to measure the impact of those investments and what kinds of incentives would motivate corporations to act. But it’s a vision that has gained more popularity as scrutiny of carbon credits grows and the options available to companies narrow. With the current state of the world, “what private companies do matters more than ever,” Haya told me. “We need them not to waste money.”

In the meantime, it’s up to the consumer reading the label to decide what sort of path we’re on.

A row of eucalyptus running horizontally across the frame in a pink and purple sky — “There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” geographer and translator Clariana Vilela Borzone says. “I have to remind myself of that.”

Before we left the farm, Borzone and I had one more task: to plant a tree. The sun was getting low over Project Alpha when I was handed an iron contraption that cradled a eucalyptus seedling, pulled from a tractor piled with plants.

“There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” Borzone had said earlier, squinting up at the row of 18-month-old eucalyptus, their fluttering leaves flashing in the hot wind as if in an ill-practiced burlesque show. “I have to remind myself of that.” But still it felt strange putting one in the ground. We were asking so much of it, after all. And we were poised to ask more.

I squeezed the handle, pulling the iron hinge taut and forcing the plant deep into the soil. It poked out at a slight angle that I was sure someone else would need to fix later, or else this eucalyptus tree would grow askew. I was slow and clumsy in my work, and by the time I finished, the tractor was far ahead of us, impossibly small on the horizon. The worker grabbed the tool from my hand and headed toward it, pushing seedlings down as he went, hurried but precise, one tree after another.

Gregory Barber is a journalist based in San Francisco.

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as well as support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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