In celebration of Earth Day 2023, Inverse looks ahead to the future of our home planet and some of the most ambitious and exciting ideas and innovations driving our lives on Earth forward.

Ariel Ekblaw remembers the moment when her future crystallized. She was 18, floating upside-down inside the hollowed-out hull of an airplane, more than 30,000 feet in the air.

At the time an undergrad at Yale University, Ekblaw’s brief moment of reduced-gravity flight came courtesy of a now-defunct NASA program that let students ride the fabled “vomit comet,” as astronauts dubbed it after these unique plane trips started being used for zero-G training back in the 1970s.

Ekblaw, now 30, recalls how the flight coach told her to actively create a memory inside her mind, to focus on the moment, because the sheer physical rarity of the situation — floating freely in air — is so foreign that, as Ekblaw explains, “you’re going to forget it in six months if you don’t crystallize an embodied memory in that moment. And I did. And it was stunning.”

“That was when I was like, okay, I’m going to work in space exploration,” Ekblaw says. “I’m going to get other people to experience space. Because it's so different. So different.”

In 2019, Matthew Kochmann was thinking about death. Specifically his own death, and whether it would be possible for him, upon the occasion of his demise, to be a tree.

An entrepreneur, environmentalist, Transcendentalist, and Uber employee number seven, Kochmann isn’t one to sit around and wait for someone else to have a winning idea. Instead, he began Transcend, a company that aspires to preserve acres of nature through conservation easement and reforest land domestically and abroad by giving paying customers the chance to “be the trees you want to see in the world.”

Transcend promises that when you die — for an undisclosed fee — you will be buried in a bed of carbon-rich wood chips or hay, two hours outside the major metropolitan area of your choice and three-and-a-half feet beneath a layer of mycorrhizal-fungi-enriched soil where your body will provide nutrients to the roots of an adolescent tree in a green burial ground called a Transcend Grove.