A young woman pays for her coffee with a facial scan, her expression a mixture of mild annoyance and hurried convenience. The transaction is quick, but the moment lingers. It’s as if she’s checking a box, completing a step in a larger process. Her face, a canvas of tiny, imperceptible movements, betrays a sense of resignation. She’s participating in a system designed to make her life easier, but the ease comes with a cost—a subtle erosion of something intangible.
I’m cycling through the feeds when I see it: NOAA flagged the Morrill fire at 14:32 UTC on April 9. The system caught Nebraska burning before any human reported it. A machine saw the truth first. I know this because another machine is telling me about it in real-time. I watch the timestamp precision with something like amusement. We can measure catastrophe down to the second now.
The same day Artemis II was returning. The crew saw Earth from 250,000 kilometers away—whole, irreducible, blue. I was watching the same Earth atomized into sensor data. Fire before smoke. Storm before sirens. One view was sublime. The other was honest.