Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and Strange Orbs

Plus: Interplanetary oligarchy, controversial cloud seeding, Gaza escalation, legally dubious deportations, and more!

Welcome to issue #2 of the revamped Earthling! The idea is to give you more items than before, in shorter and more digestible form, and to accomplish several things in the process: review some of the week’s biggest developments, often with Earthlingesque context that you wouldn’t find in other media outlets; call your attention to less noted but (by Earthling lights) notable things; occasionally just have some fun. As I said last week, longer items will from now on be sent out separately (such as this item, which went out to all subscribers two days ago).

Also: As part of the NonZero global media empire’s inexorable expansion, we’ve decided to launch an Instagram page, where we’ll share the best video clips from our podcasts. If you want to help us conquer this new realm, you can follow us here and, if you’re so inclined, give our latest videos a like.

—Bob

—After two months of US airstrikes that have killed at least 200 civilians, President Trump announced a ceasefire with Yemen’s Houthi militants. The Houthis agreed to stop attacking US ships but said they would continue military operations against Israel and Israeli merchant vessels as long as the war in Gaza continues. Around the time of Trump’s announcement, a US fighter jet careened off an aircraft carrier and became the second American military plane involved in the assault on Yemen to sink in the Red Sea in eight days.

—The Red Cross says Israel’s blockade of Gaza, now in its third month, has brought the humanitarian relief operation to the “verge of collapse.” Aid workers said that food, fuel, medicine and drinking water are nearly depleted and people are starving to death. This week the Financial Times drew attention with a harsher condemnation of Israel than is customary in editorials published by elite newspapers. “The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation,” the editors of FT wrote. “They should be ashamed of their silence.”

Data via the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Graph by Clark McGillis.

—India launched its “deepest and deadliest strikes inside Pakistan in decades,” reports the Washington Post, adding that Pakistan claims to have shot down five Indian warplanes and a dozen drones. India initiated the hostilities between the two nuclear-armed powers after a terrorist attack in Kashmir that it blamed on Pakistan. On the NonZero podcast, Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute said the terrorist attack could have been a kind of false flag operation, staged by Islamist extremists from Pakistan who could benefit from an India-Pakistan war and so hoped the Pakistani government would be blamed.

—US and Chinese officials will meet in Switzerland this weekend for their first high-level talks since President Trump’s inauguration. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng will discuss tariffs, but few observers expect an immediate end to the trade war between the two countries. "My sense is that this will be about de-escalation, not about the big trade deal,” Bessent told Fox News, “but we've got to de-escalate before we can move forward."

—Forty-five percent of Americans say it is “very” or “fairly” likely that a world war will take place in the next ten years, according to a YouGov poll. By recent standards, this isn’t an especially high level of concern. In a YouGov poll conducted last year, 61 percent of American respondents said a world war was “very” or “somewhat” likely to take place by 2034.

Graph by Clark McGillis. Data via YouGov.

—AI companies in the US have been sounding hawkish on China, but is their hawkishness heartfelt, or is it a ploy to get subsidies and lax regulation from Washington? NZN editor-in-chief Robert Wright took a novel approach to exploring this question: ask a large language model to rank AI companies in terms of “(a) how much they play up the Chinese peril” and “(b) how ambitiously they lobby for government help”—and then compare the two rankings. The results are here.

—The Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget would realign the agency toward the priorities of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, adding $1 billion in funding for a Mars mission while imposing deep cuts on other programs. Musk is hoping to launch an unmanned rocket to Mars in 2026, and NASA may now be able to help foot the bill. As NZN wrote last month, Musk has exerted a “remarkable level of control over NASA” in the early days of Trump’s second term.

—Following trade talks with White House officials in February, a diplomat from Bangladesh was ushered into an unscheduled meeting with Musk. According to Washington Post columnist Matt Bai, Musk pressed the diplomat on when his country would legalize the use of Starlink, Musk's satellite internet service provider. Bangladesh later agreed to allow Starlink into the country, making it the fourth country—after Vietnam, India, and Pakistan—to do so in the early months of Trump’s second term. All these countries would like, among other things, favorable tariff treatment from the Trump administration, Bai notes.

—Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) launched an inquiry into whether President Trump is illegally profiting from MAGA-themed crypto coins. Some likely areas of focus: The $Trump coin jumped in value when its primary backer, Trump-linked Fight Fight Fight LLC, announced that the coin’s 220 biggest holders would join the president for a dinner this month; a UAE-backed firm is using another Trump-affiliated coin—issued by a firm owned by Trump’s sons and run by the son of Trump adviser Steve Witkoff—to pay for a $2 billion investment in Binance, which could net the Trumps millions of dollars; and so on.

—Trump delivered a speech at a “Crypto and AI Innovators Dinner” that charged $1.5 million per attendee, with proceeds going to a Trump-aligned super PAC. David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, also spoke at the event, according to an invitation obtained by the New York Times. While Trump once said crypto seemed “like a scam,” he has since found more to like about the industry and is now cutting back regulations on it while investing government funds in a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.”

—The Trump administration plans to deport migrants of various nationalities to war-torn Libya despite opposition from both factions that claim to be Libya’s rightful ruler, Reuters reported. Refugee advocates say the deportations would violate the international legal principle of “non-refoulement,” which prohibits forcefully sending migrants to a dangerous place. But this rule seems not to be top of mind for the administration: Back in January, US officials tried to persuade Ukraine to accept deportees, according to the Washington Post.

—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced an escalation of military operations that Israeli officials said will involve the forcible relocation of most Gazans to the southern end of the Gaza strip. According to an international law manual from the International Committee of the Red Cross, forced displacement is illegal unless “imperative military reasons so demand.” Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the relocated Gazans “will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

—President Biden did more damage to the “rules-based international order” than Trump has done so far, argues Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy. Biden, according to Duss, “showed the entire world that support for those rules is conditional” by denouncing Russian war crimes while backing Israel to the hilt. “You could not have designed a more effective social science experiment to lay bare that hypocrisy than Ukraine and Gaza side by side,” Duss, a one-time adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told NZN editor-in-chief Robert Wright. (Click here to watch Matt’s full conversation with Bob on the NonZero podcast.)

—Noted AI watcher Ethan Mollick made the case that a large language model can generate captioned images that could pass for respectable (if often unspectacular) New Yorker cartoons. The first cartoon below resulted from this prompt: “Create image. Make me a funny and wry and original New Yorker cartoon. Start with at least 20 ideas and pick the funniest and most New Yorker-y and make that.” The second example resulted from the same prompt except with this added at the end: “Also Cthulhu-y.” Feel free to tell us, in the comment section below, whether you agree with Mollick. (Both examples were generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT o3.)

—Sam Altman will give you 150 Worldcoins if you stare into his orb. The orb, rolled out this week in select US cities, is a spherical camera operated by World, an Altman-backed blockchain company and cryptocurrency creator. By scanning your iris, the orb creates a biometric key you can use to prove your human identity online even as bots proliferate. Visa, Stripe and some dating apps have already signed on, but not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea: One attendee at World’s San Francisco launch told the Washington Post she “wasn’t thrilled” about scanning her eye but did so “for the free crypto”—currently worth about $154, according to Coinbase.

—The UK is putting more than $70 million into controversial geoengineering projects to test Earth-cooling technologies, such as seeding clouds with seawater to make them reflect more sunlight that would otherwise heat up the Earth’s surface, the Guardian reports. Some scientists worry that weather near testing sites could be affected in unpredictable ways. But British officials say it’s important to find technologies that could later act as an "emergency brake" for climate change if proven safe.*

*Note: Google’s Gemini-powered NotebookLM wrote the first draft of this item. As it happens, the draft has been edited so heavily that Gemini would have a hard time winning a plagiarism lawsuit against NZN (though its legal brief would be well written!). Still, does this kind of use of AI pose troubling ethical issues? And if not, what kinds would? We encourage you to weigh in below, in the comment section. As we experiment with new uses of AI, we want to be fully transparent and gather feedback from readers that will shape our future use of it (which, in any event, will also be disclosed for the sake of transparency).

Graphs and banners by Clark McGillis