There’s also obviously still a lot of people who have complicated feelings about what this all means for Lenny—like, whether it’s ethical to be raised in front of the cameras from basically age one—but I’ve honestly come to think of it like: Lenny was never gonna have a “normal” life, you know? That was never in the cards for him. Not with these parents. Not with this brother. And what the fuck is a normal life anyway? Maybe the most normal life you could have, the most normal life possible, is one where you’ve got cameras shoved in your face right from the start. Maybe it’ll actually be good for Lenny to have all these memes being made about him before he’s even conscious, before he even understands what it means to be alive. The only difference between Lenny and anyone else is that he won’t ever be able to pretend it’s not happening, you know? He won’t ever be able to pretend that it doesn’t come naturally. By the time he grows up, it’ll just be part of the environment, part of the air. And maybe it’ll eventually just be nothing. What kind of freedom would that be? What kind of power is that? Maybe Lenny is the prototype for a whole new kind of human. Maybe when people say they’re worried about him, all they really mean is that they’re afraid of evolving as a species.

Oddvar emailed me today.

They had a big flood at the seed vault, and they had to move some of the seeds around and reseal the entryway. He wanted to let me know that all of the seeds are safe—including the ones they named after me—but they might have to rework the structure of the building and maybe even think about moving it somewhere else to prevent this from happening again. The seed vault was supposed to last forever—you know, like, even in the case of some crazy emergency where there was like, a worldwide power outage or a nuclear war or something, the permafrost in the mountain was supposed to naturally keep the building frozen at a certain temperature until the end of time—but now the world is heating up so fast that the permafrost is actually melting, and so Oddvar and his team are just like: WTF? Two days ago, they woke up, and there was just this river of ice water gushing into the entryway. All of these alarms started going off, and this one dude almost drowned.

NONE of these guys thought this was possible, you know? Like, these are the guys who are supposed to know more about this shit than anybody else, and even they were just like: Whoa. Shit. I’ve honestly never heard Oddvar so bummed. I mean, it was just an email and like, usually his emails are kind of formal and serious-sounding, but this one was really sort of hopeless, and like, actually sort of sad. I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like Oddvar’s depressed or something, because like, he’s one of the most optimistic people I know—I mean, when you think about it, his whole project is one big bet on the future—but reading his email today—like, seeing the way he was describing everything—he just seemed like the kind of sad that you can only really get if you’re also sort of shocked, you know what I mean? I could just feel him coming to accept the possibility that maybe we really are all doomed and that maybe there really isn’t anything we can do about it.