In 2015, I began a series of conversations with my friend Effie Weisstein about what was going on in the US and where we were headed. We were both struck by how climate change was now an emerging climate crisis, and both convinced that this would massively strain the political and economic fabric of the rich countries, and especially the US.
This led me to the bigger question: when an intelligent species reaches a point where it can destroy itself and perhaps all life on its world, what does it have to do to avoid that fate? Effie and I continued to discuss that issue and the result was me writing Replay Earth, which was published in 2018.
In Replay Earth, there are two main concepts. One is that this problem would have faced intelligent life before and elsewhere. So I posited the notion of The Guardians, a league of 20 such civilization scattered around the galaxy whose deeper knowledge of physics allows them to communicate over vast distances more or less instantly. Secondly, and more importantly, they all are very skilled at what I called entanglement, something like telepathy that allows them to both know the feelings and thoughts of others (if they so wish), and to communicate theirs as well.
You’ll have to read the book to find out how they make contact with humans and how entanglement begins to emerge among people in this century.