Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The distant horizon is always murky, the minute details obscured by sheer distance and atmospheric haze. This is why forecasting the future is so imprecise: We cannot clearly see the outlines of the shapes and events ahead of us. Instead, we take educated guesses.  The newly published AI 2027 scenario, developed by a team of AI researchers and forecasters with experience at institutions like OpenAI and The Center for AI Policy, offers a detailed 2 to 3-year forecast for the future that includes specific technical milestones. Being near-term, it speaks with great clarity about our AI near future. Informed by extensive expert feedback and scenario planning exercises, AI 2027 outlines a quarter-by-quarter progression of anticipated AI capabilities, notably multimodal models achieving advanced reasoning and autonomy. What makes this forecast particularly noteworthy is both its specificity and the credibility of its contributors, who have direct insight into current research pipelines. The most notable prediction is that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be achieved in 2027, and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will follow months later. AGI matches or exceeds human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks, from scientific research to creative endeavors, while demonstrating adaptability, common sense reasoning and self-improvement. ASI goes further, representing systems that dramatically surpass human intelligence, with the ability to solve problems we cannot even comprehend. Like many predictions, these are based on assumptions, not the least of which is that AI models and applications will continue to progress exponentially, as they have for the last several years. As such, it is plausible, but not guaranteed to expect exponential progress, especially as scaling of these models may now be hitting diminishing returns. Not everyone agrees with these predictions. Ali Farhadi, the

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is undergoing a sweeping cybersecurity transformation under CIO Alex Philips, embracing a Zero Trust architecture, strengthening identity defenses and infusing AI into security operations. While the journey is not complete, the results, by all accounts, are dramatic – a 35-fold drop in security events, the elimination of malware-related PC reimaging and millions saved by scrapping legacy “appliance hell” hardware. VentureBeat recently sat down (virtually) for this in-depth interview where Philips details how NOV achieved these outcomes with Zscaler’s Zero Trust platform, aggressive identity protections and a generative AI “co-worker” for its security team. He also shares how he keeps NOV’s board engaged on cyber risk amid a global threat landscape where 79% of attacks to gain initial access are malware-free, and adversaries can move from breach to break out in as little as 51 seconds. Below are excerpts of Philips’ recent interview with VentureBeat: VentureBeat: Alex, NOV went “all in” on Zero Trust a number of years ago – what were the standout gains? Alex Philips: When we started, we were a traditional castle-and-moat model that wasn’t keeping up. We didn’t know what Zero Trust was, we just knew that we needed identity and conditional access at the core of everything. Our journey began by adopting an identity-driven architecture on Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange and it changed everything. Our visibility and protection coverage dramatically increased while simultaneously experiencing a 35x reduction in the number of security incidents. Before, our team was chasing thousands of malware incidents; now, it’s a tiny fraction of that. We also went from reimaging about 100 malware-infected machines each month to virtually zero now. That’s saved a considerable amount of time and money. And since the

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-­mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa’s pools, marble hammams, and showers.  When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse’s first location in Williamsburg in 2019, he used conventional pool heaters. But after diving deep into the world of bitcoin, he realized he could fit cryptocurrency mining seamlessly into his business. That’s because the process, where special computers (called miners) make trillions of guesses per second to try to land on the string of numbers that will earn a bitcoin, consumes tremendous amounts of electricity—which in turn produces plenty of heat that usually goes to waste.   “I thought, ‘That’s interesting—we need heat,’” Goodman says of Bathhouse. Mining facilities typically use fans or water to cool their computers. And pools of water, of course, are a prominent feature of the spa.  It takes six miners, each roughly the size of an Xbox One console, to maintain a hot tub at 104 °F. At Bathhouse’s  Williamsburg location, miners hum away quietly inside two large tanks, tucked in a storage closet among liquor bottles and teas. To keep them cool and quiet, the units are immersed directly in non-conductive oil, which absorbs the heat they give off and is pumped through tubes beneath Bathhouse’s hot tubs and hammams. 
Mining boilers, which cool the computers by pumping in cold water that comes back out at 170 °F, are now also being used at the site. A thermal battery stores excess heat for future use.  Goodman says his spas aren’t saving energy by using bitcoin miners for heat, but they’re also not using any more than they would with conventional water heating. “I’m just inserting miners into that chain,” he says. 
Goodman isn’t the only one to see the potential in heating with crypto. In Finland, Marathon Digital Holdings turned fleets of bitcoin miners into a district heating system to warm the homes of 80,000 residents. HeatCore, an integrated energy service provider, has used bitcoin mining to heat a commercial office building in China and to keep pools at a constant temperature for fish farming. This year it will begin a pilot project to heat seawater for desalination. On a smaller scale, bitcoin fans who also want some extra warmth can buy miners that double as space heaters.  Crypto enthusiasts like Goodman think much more of this is coming—especially under the Trump administration, which has announced plans to create a bitcoin reserve. This prospect alarms environmentalists.  The energy required for a single bitcoin transaction varies, but as of mid-March it was equivalent to the energy consumed by an average US household over 47.2 days, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, run by the economist Alex de Vries.  Among the various cryptocurrencies, bitcoin mining gobbles up the most energy by far. De Vries points out that others, like ethereum, have eliminated mining and implemented less energy-­intensive algorithms. But bitcoin users resist any change to their currency, so de Vries is doubtful a shift away from mining will happen anytime soon.  One key barrier to using bitcoin for heating, de Vries says, is that the heat can only be transported short distances before it dissipates. “I see this as something that is extremely niche,” he says. “It’s just not competitive, and you can’t make it work at a large scale.”  The more renewable sources that are added to electric grids to replace fossil fuels, the cleaner crypto mining will become. But even if bitcoin is powered by renewable energy, “that doesn’t make it sustainable,” says Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. Mining burns through valuable resources that could otherwise be used to meet existing energy needs, Madani says.  For Goodman, relaxing into bitcoin-heated water is a completely justifiable use of energy. It soothes the muscles, calms the mind, and challenges current economic structures, all at the same time.  Carrie Klein is a freelance journalist based in New York City.

Americans don’t agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity.  We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why wouldn’t we? Most of us are taught from a young age that creativity is the key to everything from finding personal fulfillment to achieving career success to solving the world’s thorniest problems. Over the years, we’ve built creative industries, creative spaces, and creative cities and populated them with an entire class of people known simply as “creatives.” We read thousands of books and articles each year that teach us how to unleash, unlock, foster, boost, and hack our own personal creativity. Then we read even more to learn how to manage and protect this precious resource.  Given how much we obsess over it, the concept of creativity can feel like something that has always existed, a thing philosophers and artists have pondered and debated throughout the ages. While it’s a reasonable assumption, it’s one that turns out to be very wrong. As Samuel Franklin explains in his recent book, The Cult of Creativity, the first known written use of creativity didn’t actually occur until 1875, “making it an infant as far as words go.” What’s more, he writes, before about 1950, “there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of ‘creativity.’” This raises some obvious questions. How exactly did we go from never talking about creativity to always talking about it? What, if anything, distinguishes creativity from other, older words, like ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry? Maybe most important: How did everyone from kindergarten teachers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and starving artists come to believe that creativity isn’t just good—personally, socially, economically—but the answer to all life’s problems?
Thankfully, Franklin offers some potential answers in his book. A historian and design researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he argues that the concept of creativity as we now know it emerged during the post–World War II era in America as a kind of cultural salve—a way to ease the tensions and anxieties caused by increasing conformity, bureaucracy, and suburbanization. “Typically defined as a kind of trait or process vaguely associated with artists and geniuses but theoretically possessed by anyone and applicable to any field, [creativity] provided a way to unleash individualism within order,” he writes, “and revive the spirit of the lone inventor within the maze of the modern corporation.”
Brainstorming, a new method for encouraging creative thinking, swept corporate America in the 1950s. A response to pressure for new products and new ways of marketing them, as well as a panic over conformity, it inspired passionate debate about whether true creativity should be an individual affair or could be systematized for corporate use.INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS I spoke to Franklin about why we continue to be so fascinated by creativity, how Silicon Valley became the supposed epicenter of it, and what role, if any, technologies like AI might have in reshaping our relationship with it.  I’m curious what your personal relationship to creativity was growing up. What made you want to write a book about it? Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing. For me—and I imagine for a lot of other people who, like me, weren’t particularly athletic or good at math and science—being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the time I got into college and beyond, the conventional wisdom among the TED Talk register of thinkers—people like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was actually the most important trait to have for the future. Basically, the creative people were going to inherit the Earth, and society desperately needed them if we were going to solve all of these compounding problems in the world.  On the one hand, as someone who liked to think of himself as creative, it was hard not to be flattered by this. On the other hand, it all seemed overhyped to me. What was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order. What’s more, some of the values embedded in what I call the cult of creativity seemed increasingly problematic—specifically, the focus on self-­realization, doing what you love, and following your passion. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a beautiful vision, and I saw it work out for some people. But I also started to feel like it was just a cover for what was, economically speaking, a pretty bad turn of events for many people.   Staff members at the University of California’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research simulate a situational procedure involving group interaction, called the Bingo Test. Researchers of the 1950s hoped to learn how factors in people’s lives and environments shaped their creative aptitude.INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS Nowadays, it’s quite common to bash the “follow your passion,” “hustle culture” idea. But back when I started this project, the whole move-fast-and-break-things, disrupter, innovation-economy stuff was very much unquestioned. In a way, the idea for the book came from recognizing that creativity was playing this really interesting role in connecting two worlds: this world of innovation and entrepreneurship and this more soulful, bohemian side of our culture. I wanted to better understand the history of that relationship. When did you start thinking about creativity as a kind of cult—one that we’re all a part of?  Similar to something like the “cult of domesticity,” it was a way of describing a historical moment in which an idea or value system achieves a kind of broad, uncritical acceptance. I was finding that everyone was selling stuff based on the idea that it boosted your creativity, whether it was a new office layout, a new kind of urban design, or the “Try these five simple tricks” type of thing.  You start to realize that nobody is bothering to ask, “Hey, uh, why do we all need to be creative again? What even is this thing, creativity?” It had become this unimpeachable value that no one, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they fell on, would even think to question. That, to me, was really unusual, and I think it signaled that something interesting was happening.

Your book highlights midcentury efforts by psychologists to turn creativity into a quantifiable mental trait and the “creative person” into an identifiable type. How did that play out?  The short answer is: not very well. To study anything, you of course need to agree on what it is you’re looking at. Ultimately, I think these groups of psychologists were frustrated in their attempts to come up with scientific criteria that defined a creative person. One technique was to go find people who were already eminent in fields that were deemed creative—writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, architects like Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen—and just give them a battery of cognitive and psychoanalytic tests and then write up the results. This was mostly done by an outfit called the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at Berkeley. Frank Barron and Don MacKinnon were the two biggest researchers in that group. Another way psychologists went about it was to say, all right, that’s not going to be practical for coming up with a good scientific standard. We need numbers, and lots and lots of people to certify these creative criteria. This group of psychologists theorized that something called “divergent thinking” was a major component of creative accomplishment. You’ve heard of the brick test, where you’re asked to come up with many creative uses for a brick in a given amount of time? They basically gave a version of that test to Army officers, schoolchildren, rank-and-file engineers at General Electric, all kinds of people. It’s tests like those that ultimately became stand-ins for what it means to be “creative.” Are they still used?  When you see a headline about AI making people more creative, or actually being more creative than humans, the tests they are basing that assertion on are almost always some version of a divergent thinking test. It’s highly problematic for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that these tests have never been shown to have predictive value—that’s to say, a third grader, a 21-year-old, or a 35-year-old who does really well on divergent thinking tests doesn’t seem to have any greater likelihood of being successful in creative pursuits. The whole point of developing these tests in the first place was to both identify and predict creative people. None of them have been shown to do that.  Reading your book, I was struck by how vague and, at times, contradictory the concept of “creativity” was from the beginning. You characterize that as “a feature, not a bug.” How so? Ask any creativity expert today what they mean by “creativity,” and they’ll tell you it’s the ability to generate something new and useful. That something could be an idea, a product, an academic paper—whatever. But the focus on novelty has remained an aspect of creativity from the beginning. It’s also what distinguishes it from other similar words, like imagination or cleverness. But you’re right: Creativity is a flexible enough concept to be used in all sorts of ways and to mean all sorts of things, many of them contradictory. I think I write in the book that the term may not be precise, but that it’s vague in precise and meaningful ways. It can be both playful and practical, artsy and technological, exceptional and pedestrian. That was and remains a big part of its appeal.  The question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming [AI] into our lives as advisors and assistants. Is that emphasis on novelty and utility a part of why Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as the new nexus for creativity?
Absolutely. The two criteria go together. In techno-solutionist, hypercapitalist milieus like Silicon Valley, novelty isn’t any good if it’s not useful (or at least marketable), and utility isn’t any good (or marketable) unless it’s also novel. That’s why they’re often dismissive of boring-but-important things like craft, infrastructure, maintenance, and incremental improvement, and why they support art—which is traditionally defined by its resistance to utility—only insofar as it’s useful as inspiration for practical technologies. At the same time, Silicon Valley loves to wrap itself in “creativity” because of all the artsy and individualist connotations. It has very self-consciously tried to distance itself from the image of the buttoned-down engineer working for a large R&D lab of a brick-and-mortar manufacturing corporation and instead raise up the idea of a rebellious counterculture type tinkering in a garage making weightless products and experiences. That, I think, has saved it from a lot of public scrutiny.
Up until recently, we’ve tended to think of creativity as a human trait, maybe with a few exceptions from the rest of the animal world. Is AI changing that? When people started defining creativity in the ’50s, the threat of computers automating white-collar work was already underway. They were basically saying, okay, rational and analytical thinking is no longer ours alone. What can we do that the computers can never do? And the assumption was that humans alone could be “truly creative.” For a long time, computers didn’t do much to really press the issue on what that actually meant. Now they’re pressing the issue. Can they do art and poetry? Yes. Can they generate novel products that also make sense or work? Sure. I think that’s by design. The kinds of LLMs that Silicon Valley companies have put forward are meant to appear “creative” in those conventional senses. Now, whether or not their products are meaningful or wise in a deeper sense, that’s another question. If we’re talking about art, I happen to think embodiment is an important element. Nerve endings, hormones, social instincts, morality, intellectual honesty—those are not things essential to “creativity” necessarily, but they are essential to putting things out into the world that are good, and maybe even beautiful in a certain antiquated sense. That’s why I think the question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming them into our lives as advisors and assistants.  This interview is based on two conversations and has been edited and condensed for clarity. Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should be fairly obvious that a healthy, plant-rich diet and moderate exercise will help keep you in good shape. And no drugs or supplements have yet been proved to extend human lifespan. The growing field of longevity medicine is apparently aiming for something in between these two ends of the wellness spectrum. By combining the established tools of clinical medicine (think blood tests and scans) with some more experimental ones (tests that measure your biological age), these clinics promise to help their clients improve their health and longevity. But a survey of longevity clinics around the world, carried out by an organization that publishes updates and research on the industry, is revealing a messier picture. In reality, these clinics—most of which cater only to the very wealthy—vary wildly in their offerings.
Today, the number of longevity clinics is thought to be somewhere in the hundreds. The proponents of these clinics say they represent the future of medicine. “We can write new rules on how we treat patients,” Eric Verdin, who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, said at a professional meeting last year. Phil Newman, who runs Longevity.Technology, a company that tracks the longevity industry, says he knows of 320 longevity clinics operating around the world. Some operate multiple centers on an international scale, while others involve a single “practitioner” incorporating some element of “longevity” into the treatments offered, he says. To get a better idea of what these offerings might be, Newman and his colleagues conducted a survey of 82 clinics around the world, including the US, Australia, Brazil, and multiple countries in Europe and Asia.
Some of the results are not all that surprising. Three-quarters of the clinics said that most of their clients were Gen Xers, aged between 44 and 59. This makes sense—anecdotally, it’s around this age that many people start to feel the effects of aging. And research suggests that waves of molecular changes associated with aging hit us in our 40s and again in our 60s. (Longevity influencers Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia all fall into this age group too.) And I wasn’t surprised to see that plenty of clinics are offering aesthetic treatments, focusing more on how old their clients look. Of the clinics surveyed, 28% said they offered Botox injections, 35% offered hair loss treatments, and 38% offered “facial rejuvenation procedures.”  “The distinction between longevity medicine and aesthetic medicine remains blurred,” Andrea Maier of the National University of Singapore, and cofounder of a private longevity clinic, wrote in a commentary on the report. Maier is also former president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, an organization that was set up with the aim of establishing clinical standards and credibility for longevity clinics. Other results from the survey underline how much of a challenge this will be; many clinics are still offering unproven treatments. Over a third of the clinics said they offered stem-cell treatments, for example. There is no evidence that those treatments will help people live longer—and they are not without risk, either. I was a little surprised to see that most of the clinics are also offering prescription medicines off label. In other words, drugs that have been approved for specific medical issues are apparently being prescribed for aging instead. This is also not without risks—all medicines have side effects. And, again, none of them have been proved to slow or reverse human aging. And these prescriptions are coming from certified medical doctors. More than 80% of clinics reported that their practice was overseen by a medical doctor with more than 10 years of clinical experience. It was also a little surprising to learn that despite their high fees, most of these clinics are not making a profit. For clients, the annual costs of attending a longevity clinic range between $10,000 and $150,000, according to Fountain Life, a company with clinics in Florida and Prague. But only 39% of the surveyed clinics said they were turning a profit and 30% said they were “approaching breaking even,” while 16% said they were operating at a loss. Proponents of longevity clinics have high hopes for the field. They see longevity medicine as nothing short of a revolution—a move away from reactive treatments and toward proactive health maintenance. But these survey results show just how far they have to go. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Forests are the second-largest carbon sink on the planet, after the oceans. To understand exactly how much carbon they trap, the European Space Agency and Airbus have built a satellite called Biomass that will use a long-prohibited band of the radio spectrum to see below the treetops around the world. It will lift off from French Guiana toward the end of April and will boast the largest space-based radar in history, though it will soon be tied in orbit by the US-India NISAR imaging satellite, due to launch later this year. Roughly half of a tree’s dry mass is made of carbon, so getting a good measure of how much a forest weighs can tell you how much carbon dioxide it’s taken from the atmosphere. But scientists have no way of measuring that mass directly.  “To measure biomass, you need to cut the tree down and weigh it, which is why we use indirect measuring systems,” says Klaus Scipal, manager of the Biomass mission.  These indirect systems rely on a combination of field sampling—foresters roaming among the trees to measure their height and diameter—and remote sensing technologies like lidar scanners, which can be flown over the forests on airplanes or drones and used to measure treetop height along lines of flight. This approach has worked well in North America and Europe, which have well-established forest management systems in place. “People know every tree there, take lots of measurements,” Scipal says. 
But most of the world’s trees are in less-mapped places, like the Amazon jungle, where less than 20% of the forest has been studied in depth on the ground. To get a sense of the biomass in those remote, mostly inaccessible areas, space-based forest sensing is the only feasible option. The problem is, the satellites we currently have in orbit are not equipped for monitoring trees.  Tropical forests seen from space look like green plush carpets, because all we can see are the treetops; from imagery like this, we can’t tell how high or thick the trees are. Radars we have on satellites like Sentinel 1 use short radio wavelengths like those in the C band, which fall between 3.9 and 7.5 centimeters. These bounce off the leaves and smaller branches and can’t penetrate the forest all the way to the ground. 
This is why for the Biomass mission ESA went with P-band radar. P-band radio waves, which are about 10 times longer in wavelength, can see bigger branches and the trunks of trees, where most of their mass is stored. But fitting a P-band radar system on a satellite isn’t easy. The first problem is the size.  “Radar systems scale with wavelengths—the longer the wavelength, the bigger your antennas need to be. You need bigger structures,” says Scipal. To enable it to carry the P-band radar, Airbus engineers had to make the Biomass satellite two meters wide, two meters thick, and four meters tall. The antenna for the radar is 12 meters in diameter. It sits on a long, multi-joint boom, and Airbus engineers had to fold it like a giant umbrella to fit it into the Vega C rocket that will lift it into orbit. The unfolding procedure alone is going to take several days once the satellite gets to space.  Sheer size, though, is just one reason we have generally avoided sending P-band radars to space. Operating such radar systems in space is banned by International Telecommunication Union regulations, and for a good reason: interference.  Workers roll the BIOMASS satellite out into a cleanroom to be inspected before the launchESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE/OPTIQUE VIDéO DU CSG–S. MARTIN “The primary frequency allocation in P band is for huge SOTR [single-object-tracking radars] Americans use to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. That was, of course, a problem for us,” Scipal says. To get an exemption from the ban on space-based P-band radars, ESA had to agree to several limitations, the most painful of which was turning the Biomass radar off over North America and Europe to avoid interfering with SOTR coverage. “This was a pity. It’s a European mission, so we wanted to do observations in Europe,” Scipal says. The rest of the world, though, is fair game. The Biomass mission is scheduled to last five years. Calibration of the radar and other systems is going to take the first five months. After that, Biomass will enter its tomography phase, gathering data to create detailed biomass maps of the forests in India, Australia, Siberia, South America, Africa—everywhere but North America and Europe. “Tomography will work like a CT scan in a hospital. We will take images of each area from various different positions and create the 3D map of the forests,” Scipal says.  Getting full, global coverage is expected to take 18 months. Then, for the rest of the mission, Biomass will switch to a different measurement method, capturing one full global map every nine months to measure how the condition of our forests changes over time.  “The scientific goal here is to really understand the role of forests in the global carbon cycle. The main interest is the tropics because it’s the densest forest which is under the biggest threat of deforestation and the one we know the least about,” Scipal says.

Biomass is going to provide hectare-scale-resolution 3D maps of those tropical forests, including everything from the tree heights to ground topography—something we’ve never had before. But there are limits to what it can do.  “One drawback is that we won’t get insights into seasonal deviations in forest throughout the year because of the time it takes for Biomass to do global coverage,” says Irena Hajnsek, a professor of Earth observation at ETH Zurich, who is not involved in the Biomass mission. And Biomass is still going to leave some of our questions about carbon sinks unanswered. “In all our estimations of climate change, we know how much carbon is in the atmosphere, but we do not know so much about how much carbon is stored on land,” says Hajnsek. Biomass will have its limits, she says, since significant amounts of carbon are trapped in the soil in permafrost areas, which the mission won’t be able to measure. “But we’re going to learn how much carbon is stored in the forests and also how much of it is getting released due to disturbances like deforestation or fires,” she says. “And that is going to be a huge contribution.”