In what used to be a dry cleaner’s on Sunset Boulevard, Robert Lempert listened, hands clasped behind his back, as his neighbors finally took a moment to step away from recovery’s endless stream of paperwork, permits, bills and bureaucracy to, instead, envision a fire-resilient Pacific Palisades in 2035.

As a researcher at RAND, Lempert has spent decades studying how communities, corporations and governments can use computer simulations to understand complex problems with huge uncertainties — from how an Alaska town can better warn its residents about landslides to how climate change is worsening disasters and what strategies the United Nations can support to address them.

In January, one such complex problem ran straight through his neighborhood and burned down his house.

As Lempert and his wife process their own trauma forged by flames, Lempert has become fixated on capturing the flickers of insights from fellow survivors and, hopefully, eventually, transforming them into computer programs that could help the community rebuild the Palisades into a global leader in wildfire resilience.

“Otherwise, we won’t end up with a functional community that anybody wants to — or can — live in,” he said. “You can spin out all sorts of disaster scenarios” for the Pacific Palisades of 2035. If the community fails to confront them in rebuilding, “you make them a hell of a lot more likely.”

Lempert doesn’t see a mass exodus from high-fire-hazard areas as a viable solution. Out of the more than 12 million buildings the climate risk modeling company First Street studies in California, 4 in 10 have at least a 5% chance of facing a wildfire in the next 30 years. (Out of the nearly 10,000 buildings First Street studies in the Palisades, 82% carry that level of risk.) And the areas without significant fire risk have their own environmental challenges: flooding, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts. Learning to live with these risks, consequently, is part of the practice of living in California — and really, in most of the places humans have settled on Earth.

After two of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken — or not taken — to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.

So, Lempert has taken to the modus operandi he helped develop at RAND:

Identify the problem. In this case, living in Pacific Palisades carries a nonzero risk you lose your house or life to fire.

Define the goals. Perhaps it is that, in the next fire, the Palisades doesn’t lose any homes or lives (and, ideally, accomplishes this without spending billions).

Then, the real work: Code up a bunch of proposed solutions from all of the groups with wildly disparate views on how the system (i.e., Southern California wildfires) works.

Stress-test those solutions against a wide range of environmental conditions in the computer. Extreme winds, downed communication systems, closed evacuation routes — the list goes on.

Finally, sit back, and see what insights the computer spits out.

It’s easy enough to agree on the problem, goals and environmental factors. For the proposed solutions, Lempert set out to collect data.

Poster paper with residents’ handwritten ideas now fills the walls of the former dry cleaner’s, now the headquarters of the grassroots organization Palisades Recovery Coalition. It’s through these “visioning charrettes” that Lempert hopes his community can develop a magic solution capable of beating the computer’s trials.

Lempert holds a photo of his home as it looked before it was destroyed by the Palisades fire.

The streets could be lined with next-generation homes of concrete and steel where even the tiniest gaps are meticulously sealed up to keep embers from breaching the exterior. Each home could be equipped with rain-capture cisterns, hooked up to a neighborhood-wide system of sensors and autonomous fire hoses that intelligently target blazes in real time. One or two shiny new fire stations — maybe even serving as full-blown fire shelters for residents, equipped with food and oxygen to combat the smoke — might sit atop one of the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares, Palisades Drive. The street, formerly a bottleneck during evacuations, might now have a dedicated emergency lane.

Every year, the community could practice a Palisades-wide evacuation drill so the procedures are fresh in the mind. Community brigades might even train with the local fire departments so, during emergencies, they can effectively put out spot fires and ensure their elderly neighbors get out safely.

Lempert, who now lives in a Santa Monica apartment with his wife, doesn’t entertain speculation about whether the Palisades will ever reach this optimistic vision — even though his own decision to move back someday, in part, hinges on the answer.

Right now, all that matters is that change is possible.

He pointed to an anecdote he heard once from the fire historian Stephen Pyne: American cities used to burn down — from within — all the time in the 19th century. Portland, Maine, burned in 1866 thanks to a Fourth of July firecracker. Chicago in 1871, after a blaze somehow broke out in a barn. Boston the following year, this time starting in a warehouse basement. Eventually, we got fed up with our cities burning down, so we created professional fire departments, stopped building downtowns out of wood and bolstered public water systems with larger water mains and standardized fire hydrants. Then, it stopped happening.

Now we face a new fire threat — this time, from the outside. Maybe we’re fed up enough to do something about it.

“Cities shouldn’t burn down,” Lempert said with a chuckle, amused by the simplicity of his own words. “So let’s just design them so they don’t.”

As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.

But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.

If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.

These ideas, while ambitious, don’t always work smoothly, as I learned after taking a bullet train to Hefei, a city the size of Chicago, to see what it’s like to live in this vision of tomorrow. Hefei is one of many cities where technologies like these are getting prototyped in real time.

I checked them all out. The battery-swapping robots, the self-driving delivery trucks, the lunches from the sky. Starting with flying taxis, no pilot on board.

Battery-swapping robots for cars

Of course, far more people get around by car. And navigating Hefei’s city streets shows how China has radically transformed the driving experience.

Electric vehicles (including models with a tiny gasoline engine for extra range) have accounted for more than half of new-car sales in China every month since March. A subcompact can cost as little as $9,000.

They are quite advanced. New models can charge in as little as five minutes. China has installed 18.6 million public charging stations, making them abundant even in rural areas and all but eliminating the range anxiety holding back E.V. sales in the United States.

Essentially, China has turned cars into sophisticated rolling smartphones. Some have built-in karaoke apps so you can entertain yourself while your car does the driving.

You still need to charge, though.

Lunch from the sky

China’s goal with ideas like these is to power more of its economy on clean electricity, instead of costly imported fossil fuels. Beijing has spent vast sums of money, much of it borrowed, on efforts to combine its prowess in manufacturing, artificial intelligence and clean energy to develop entirely new products to sell to the rest of the world.

Drone delivery has a serious side. Hospitals in Hefei now use drones to move emergency supplies, including blood, swiftly around the city. Retailers have visions of fewer packages stuck in traffic.

But does the world need drone-delivered fast food? And how fast would it really be? As afternoon approached, we decided to put flying lunches to the test.

We decided to eat in a city park where a billboard advertised drone delivery of pork cutlets, duck wings and milk tea from local restaurants, or hamburgers from Burger King. Someone had scrawled in Chinese characters on the sign, “Don’t order, it won’t deliver.” A park worker offered us free advice: Get someone to deliver it on a scooter.

Undeterred, we used a drone-delivery app to order a fried pork cutlet and a small omelet on fried rice. Then, rather than wait in the park, we went to the restaurant to see how the system worked.

Very rapid transit

China’s bullet trains are famous for a reason. Many can go nearly 220 miles per hour — so fast that when you blast past a highway in one of these trains, cars look like they’re barely moving.

In less than two decades China has built a high-speed rail network some 30,000 miles long, two-thirds the length of the U.S. Interstate highway system. As many as 100 trains a day connect China’s biggest cities.

Building anything this enormous creates pollution in its initial construction, of course, using lots of concrete and steel. Construction was expensive and the system has racked up nearly $900 billion in debt, partly because it’s politically hard to raise ticket prices.

But the trains themselves are far less polluting than cars, trucks or planes. And they make day trips fast and easy. So we decided to hop over to Wuhan, more than 200 miles away.

Taxis that drive themselves