the apocalypse, the challenger explosion, and cooperation

Originally sent November 26, 2025

Dear friends:

The apocalypse is small, when you think about it. 

It's a blip in time and space. Something that's a tipping point to one side or another in so many people all at once, and because it's such a significant tilt in each individual, it feels massive. A tidal wave in a bottle. 

So much has been happening at all levels of our worlds recently. I've had the blessing of having appropriate medical care to heal my nervous system lately, and I'm writing to you today from a place of optimism from outside the storm. In a lot of ways, this optimism is a privilege -- a sign that I'm comfortable enough in my life that I'm able to feel optimism at all. But I also see it as a responsibility to share that energy while I have it. 

I discovered this book a few weeks ago called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse by Athena Aktipis, a very busy psychology professor at Arizona State University who is super into cooperation -- so much so that she runs a bunch of organizations I didn't know existed, and they give me a lot of hope for the End Times(TM): 
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• the Cooperative Futures Institute (which has some very cool events coming up, including an AI and Cooperation Design Sprint in February 2026 and a Survival Festival for Community Engagement and Prototyping in March 2026 -- if you're anxious about tech takeover, this is for you)
• the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, 
• the Apocalypse Cafe (this video in particular is about AI)
• the Cooperation Science Network, and 
• the Human Generosity Project. 

​

I ended up starting to update a different book instead of working on Sapphic Space Aladdin (which is still forthcoming, don't worry!). It's a prequel of sorts to Vessel, but it's been living rent-free in my mind because instead of being a post-apocalyptic story like Vessel, it's a pre-apocalyptic one. The build-up to the apocalypse, if you will -- and what it's like to live as a young person in one. The lack of hope of any personal future, or even that there is a future at all. 

This lack of hope is what tends to lead to endless loops of doomscrolling -- which leads people further into the algorithm. 

Which is what leads people into cults. 

These cults aren't always visible, and they're not always organized. Mini-cults occur constantly with no formal agenda (remember, we call them 'cults' for short, but really they're high-control environments). Cults are often an endless loop of people constantly trying to chase some version of perfection, or resigning themselves to the inevitability of societal collapse while preparing themselves and their loved ones for surviving it. 

People fall prey to this kind of thinking because it feels like control over uncontrollable circumstances. It's visceral, inescapable, like it's the only thing that is possible to be experiencing. The trick of getting people out of that kind of mindset is incredibly difficult, and tends to really be 50-50 on whether it works, depending on how far the victim is at rock-bottom. So the real path forward here is prevention. 

And to get to prevention, we have to face the vague, intangible concept of apocalypse head-on. 

What I love about Dr Aktipis's work is that it offers practical advice on what apocalypses look like. Rome didn't fall in a day, much like the Challenger didn't explode randomly. Each of these failures were the result of collapses in systems, which were the result of dysfunctional cooperation.

As Michelle La Vone writes in Space Safety Magazine:  

[Richard] Feynman, a famous physicist and Nobel Prize laureate with a distinct distaste for corruption and red tape, was the subject of the 2013 movie “The Challenger Disaster.” Although he had little demonstrated knowledge of, or interest in, space, his motivation to uncover the truth about Challenger was palpable. Ignoring requests to remain in close proximity to the team in Washington, Feynman boarded a plane and visited unannounced the facilities of Morton Thiokol, the firm responsible for manufacturing the shuttle’s booster rockets. He interviewed Thiokol employees wherever he could—the lunchroom, the hallway, the manufacturing floor—and quickly realized a great fracture in communication between the engineers, manufacturers, and managers both at Morton Thiokol and NASA. As the investigation continued, he discovered a disturbing lack of technical understanding in some of NASA’s highest-ranking managers. The dots became increasingly easier to connect: recklessness and oversight were directly linked to the tragic accident, and Feynman would later demonstrate, on national television, just how much.

Side note: I actually worked with Richard Feynman's sister, Joan Feynman, in my early days at my company. She worked on some brilliant stuff -- including, apparently (because I was a lowly assistant and just made sure her computer was fine and she had office space and whatever), identifying the mechanism that leads to the formation of auroras and researching the role of climate stabilization in agriculture development. She doesn't get as much notice as Richard, so this is my effort to bring attention to the crucial work she did to discover the literal origins of the universe. 

And I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent for a minute here, but it'll come back around, I promise. Bear with me. 

It was at this same company where, a few years after I worked with Joan, I learned about the concept of process improvement. In my Lean Six Sigma training, I learned about how improving processes to eliminate repetitive human labor had nothing to do with removing jobs and everything to do with shifting human contributions to value-added skills. Meaning: instead of having people creating the same machine component over and over again, get them to work on the systems around that. Machines are great for repetitive work; humans are great for innovative work. (Generally speaking. Sometimes humans really like to do repetitive work and that is still incredibly valuable depending on the circumstance.) As we start to automate more and more tasks in our everyday lives, that doesn't reduce the value of human labor; it provides space for humans to work on new problems. 

The problem is: the people at the top of these systems really like having unchecked power. Doesn't even matter what the system is; the power itself is addictive. And the best way to keep that power unchecked is to prevent lateral cooperation. 

That is to say: cooperation = resistance. 

Challenger ultimately failed because of a toxic work environment. Work environments are just systems of human cooperation, and when I say "toxic," I mean environments where power dynamics and consolidated amongst a select few, and in which where people are afraid to upset that power dynamic because it would affect their direct livelihood. So people shut up and carry out whatever tasks they're given just so they can survive. Which -- if you've been following some of my previous newsletters, is how cults work. 

If people had had a work environment that had allowed people to speak freely and contribute as the common objective required, they would have been able to meet in the middle and troubleshoot in a way that would have resulted in all of the astronauts on that shuttle surviving. The entire story could have been different. Instead of American tragedy, it could have been American celebration. Massive national bragging rights cementing the US's rightfully earned place at the top of the era's shuttle ecosystem. 

But, as La Vone writes:

Blinded by the success of the early Shuttle flights, [NASA]'s management had developed a careless attitude towards warnings coming from the engineering community. NASA had committed the Shuttle to an impossible schedule even before it entered in service in order to ensure funding. 

​This also happened with Artemis in 2020 when the Trump administration committed to "boots on the moon by 2024," but luckily people managed to realize the impossibility of this demand and didn't risk human safety over an impossible schedule -- progress, I suppose. La Vone continues:

​Over time, NASA management had grown increasingly impatient with the technical delays that operating such a complex machine required.

All that ended on the bitter cold morning of January 28th 1986, when seven astronauts lost their lives in front of family, friends, and millions of TV viewers. A vehicle that was celebrated for its technical prowess broke up 73 seconds into the flight, burning nearly 2 million liters of fuel in just a few seconds, creating a sinister cloud of gas that still plagues the memory of anyone who saw it.

So--
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• Cooperation = the antidote to tyranny. 
• Cooperation = how we prevent disasters like Challenger. 
• Cooperation = how we work together, regardless of the situation. How we get ourselves out of the massive messes we get ourselves into. 
• Cooperation = how we get through the apocalypse. 

Now for those of you (okay, us) who are stressing out about the end of the American government, this is especially applicable. Especially in this time of misery and political divide, it's crucial to remember that ultimately, we are all neighbors working together to prevent our mutual demise. 

I came across this article talking about how we might "recode" our government systems and thought it was pretty interesting. This particularly resonated with me:

"Our politics have become so chaotic in part because the public has lost trust in the government’s ability to deliver on its promises. Restoring this public trust is both a moral and a political imperative for leaders who want to leave their mark."

The takeaway here is that people are thinking about how to make things better. Things aren't hopeless. When we start to work on problems, they tend to get ugly before they get better -- and friends, we are in the midst of ugly. But we're also at the tip of better. 

[Insert "just the tip" joke here] 

Things are connected. Losing a series of battles doesn't mean that idealism is dead. It just needs to be reinvented, and as Dr Aktipis recommends in her book (and her entire life's work), what we need most during the apocalypse (and in our government, and everywhere) is cooperation. 

When it comes to the US government, this means recognizing that the state of things is not static. I've been watching a lot of videos by YouTuber Zaid Tabani recently that have provided much reassurance in this arena with comparisons of the time we're in to the early aughts as a reminder that...

...there’s really nothing special about this point in time. People have been experiencing and preparing for disasters since the dawn of time. So yes, it may feel like we are experiencing an apocalypse right now, but it’s always felt that way.

--Athena Atkipis

All this said, I've been diving deep into revising a book I wrote originally during Covid lockdown. I'm looking forward to sharing some snippets of it when I get to my next newsletter, whenever the heck that'll be (these take me a long time to write, okay). But for now, the TL;DR is that there are many apocalypses, and if you're worried about them, that's a sign that you care, but make sure you're thinking about them in a practical manner instead of doomscrolling. 

Like reading speculative fiction and taking some great lessons-learned from that. 

From, you know. A certain spec-fic author you like. Whose book is on sale for 10% off for the rest of SCBWI's annual BookStop sale. 😁

from the archives

A huge part of my life is pacifism by way of community engagement. I run an organization called Voting Study Party (https://www.votingstudyparty.org/) with some friends, which aims to de-escalate and depolarize political conversations among neighbors and friends by guiding individuals on how to make studying down-ballot issues a fun, social activity. The materials on our website emphasize learning together and guiding people on how to ask questions with an intent to gather knowledge and not to challenge someone else’s deeply held belief.

- from How to Prevent Extremism: Information Access as a Method of De-escalation

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