¶ It’s not easy to take Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Initiative seriously — not least because we’ll be too old to care by then. (If!) We could not tell from David Segal’s story whether Itskov is thinking about uploading consciousness (shifting the sense of self from a mortal body to something else, without a blink) or simple copying/cloning (in which case “you still die”). But we agree with George Church.

“I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics,” Professor Church says, adding about Mr. Itskov: “I just think that there’s a lot of dots that aren’t connected in his plans. It’s not a real road map.”

¶ We used to call it the Middle Kingdom, but the characters that denote China signify something much more like “Central Country.” Which certainly seems apt and likely to be apter. Heriberto Araújo and Juan Pablo Cardenal have written a book about China’s pursuit of supremacy, and the Times published a sample in the Sunday Review. If what they have to say about Greenland is true, then the madness of granting tax breaks &c to bring in business development has reached a new depth.

Greenland, a massive resource-rich territory largely controlled by Denmark, is a case in point. Last year, it passed legislation to allow foreign workers into the country who earned salaries below the local legal minimum wage (the minimum wage there is one of the highest in the world). Chinese representatives had made it clear that Chinese state-owned banks and companies would invest in the high-risk, costly exploitation of Greenland’s vast mining resources only if the modification of local regulations would allow the arrival of thousands of low-wage Chinese workers.

The Arctic territory didn’t have too many alternatives. No other country is in a position to become Greenland’s strategic partner for its future development, given the business risks involved in the Arctic region and the scale of the investment needed in a territory bigger than Mexico but without a single highway. An American oil company couldn’t have handled the task alone. The Chinese state capitalist system, by contrast, allows multiple state-owned companies to work together, making it possible for the China National Petroleum Corporation, for instance, to extract oil while China Railway builds basic infrastructure.

Greenland’s leaders accepted China’s terms because they likely believed these costly projects might never go ahead if the Chinese didn’t get involved; only China has the money, the demand, the experience and the political will to proceed. Moreover, there are not enough skilled workers in Greenland for such projects, so the Greenlandic government made an exception to the law, allowing Chinese laborers to earn less than minimum wage figuring that local residents would benefit from new infrastructure and royalties.

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