Google signed a deal this week to buy the output of nuclear reactors for twenty years, just to feed its AI. In this segment we reflect, calmly, on what happens in the half-second between your question and the answer: the nuclear plant being upgraded, the grid straining, the billions moving, all so a weightless little reply can appear on your screen. Why “the cloud” turns out to have cooling towers and the magic runs on megawatts, why the point isn’t guilt — your single query uses almost nothing, and the clean-energy path is one of the better choices — but awareness: that we increasingly live at the end of long invisible chains of energy and consequence, and that occasionally picturing the power plant behind the prompt, staying connected to where things really come from, might be one of the most quietly human things we can still do.
