“There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.”

American journalist, editor, and author

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They have worked across technology, culture, and media since the late 1990s, and are known for writing, editing, and shaping coverage at several major outlets. From 1999 to 2008, Newitz wrote the weekly syndicated column Techsploitation. They were culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2000 to 2004, later became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2004, and co-founded Other magazine with Charlie Jane Anders. Newitz went on to lead io9 from 2008 to 2015, then its successor Gizmodo, and has also written for Popular Science, Film Quarterly, and Wired.