{"id":247108,"date":"2026-11-11T10:05:25","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T16:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/ada-palmer-on-viking-ethics-laws-of-history-and-terra-ignota"},"modified":"2026-11-11T10:05:25","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T16:05:25","slug":"ada-palmer-on-viking-ethics-laws-of-history-and-terra-ignota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/ada-palmer-on-viking-ethics-laws-of-history-and-terra-ignota","title":{"rendered":"Ada Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/846023038-singularity1on1-terra-ignota.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>In June 2020, I asked a historian whether the United States was heading toward civil war.<\/p>\n<p>Six years later, her answer is worth hearing again.<\/p>\n<p>Ada Palmer studies censorship, heresy, and how power shifts during information revolutions. Her research asks what the printing press can teach us about the choices we face in the digital one. She is also the author of Terra Ignota, the award-winning #ScienceFiction series set in a 25th-century world of borderless nations and voluntary citizenship.<\/p>\n<p>We talked for 3 hours and 7 minutes. We talked about Peter Turchin\u2019s laws of #History and whether the past can predict anything. About what popular science like Cosmos gets wrong about the Inquisition. About what she learned reenacting the papal election of 1,492 with her students. About Viking ethics, of all things. And about whether one person still matters when history seems to move on its own.<\/p>\n<p>One line from her has stayed with me:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYour choices aren\u2019t: keep the world I have or make a better one. Your choices are: let the world change towards the entrenchment of power\u2026 or work to shape that change.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/ada-palmer-on-viking-ethics-laws-of-history-and-terra-ignota\">Continue reading \u201cAda Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In June 2020, I asked a historian whether the United States was heading toward civil war. Six years later, her answer is worth hearing again. Ada Palmer studies censorship, heresy, and how power shifts during information revolutions. Her research asks what the printing press can teach us about the choices we face in the digital [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}