Tagged: essay
7 thoughts
We Have Pierced the Dark
A revised edition of a 2007 essay on black holes — from Thales fallen down his well to the telescopes that finally photographed the dark — on the gravitational well as both the commandment and the commencement of nature.
The Beam Goes Level
Comparison is the oldest instrument of thought — to weigh the unknown against a known measure. GLOBAÏA's Sfera gathers Earth's water, air, life, and human-made mass into spheres at true scale, and somewhere around 2020 the two pans — the born world and the made world — went level.
The Anthropocene Strait
Fourteen named rocks — Monomorphia, Pleonexia, Hyperbasis, and the others — that lie between us and a safe and just harbour. An allegorical wink at Homer, on the eve of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
The Sphere of Stranger-Minds
On the Xenoösphere — the planetary stratum where non-human intellect now takes shape — and the physical infrastructure that gives it body.
The Temperature the Body Reads
On wet-bulb globe temperature — the metric that decides whether a human can still work in the sun — and why a new, bias-corrected projection of it deserves to enter the public conversation.
Earth Is the Training Distribution
On why the Earth system and artificial intelligence are no longer distinct emergencies — and on the constitutional constraints a coupled future will require.
One World or None
On two photographs of Earth taken half a century apart, and what they ask of us.