Charles C. Mann: Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signa...

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

Charles C. Mann

aztec russia powerful

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

Charles C. Mann

different would-be air

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Charles C. Mann

technology ordinary people

Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.

Charles C. Mann

light home long

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

Charles C. Mann

flukes ends believe

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

Charles C. Mann

cities matter helping

The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa.

Charles C. Mann

intellectual two thinking

Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.

Charles C. Mann

dna links numbers

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

Charles C. Mann

complex-systems visitors explaining

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

Charles C. Mann

textbooks party two

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

Charles C. Mann

innovation paper europe

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

Charles C. Mann

streets names sides

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

Charles C. Mann

smartphones doctors data

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Charles C. Mann

maps variety two

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.

Charles C. Mann

smartphones doctors hands

Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze with neon - all were built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.

Charles C. Mann

skyscrapers rice streets foundation

The legal fight over climate change begins in the United States with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. Under the Act, the E.P.A. is required to publish a list of 'stationary sources' of air pollution, of which the most important are power plants.

Charles C. Mann

fight climate-change change power

Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Charles C. Mann

africa being farmers plant

There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important.

Charles C. Mann

the-most-important carbon important

Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under lease arrangements that can continue in force for decades.

Charles C. Mann

turn big force water

Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signatories issues what is called an 'intended nationally determined contribution' (INDC), which amounts to a promise that the nation will take certain actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a certain date.