Alan Weisman

Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.

Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways: Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian__ Doug Erwin, is that we can__ predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors."There will be plenty of surprises. Let__ face it: who would__e predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn__ exist, no vertebrate biologist would__e suggested that anything would do that: he__ have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.