Mirror Worlds
12/12/24 - information is not enough
Hello everyone:
Last week I offered a deep dive into one of the most pervasive but least discussed sources of pollution in our lives - tires - that I hope you’ll take the time for, if you haven’t already. This week I’m following another path, something a bit quieter and more speculative. Enjoy.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to the writing:
I’ve been reading recently about biological viruses and artificial cognition, about anti-environmental jurisprudence and compassionate conservation, about people like you and me who are either wrecking or saving the world, about tens of thousands of species on the brink, about life and death. And so much more. Why? Because that’s an average tasting menu for my Field Guide media diet. It can be a lot of work, and it can be a lot to digest.
But it’s what we all take in, to one degree or another. And in my case it’s entirely self-inflicted, a necessary part of the job description I wrote for myself to become a narrator of the Anthropocene. Much of the information is difficult (e.g. the estimated 1.6 trillion toxic nanoparticles spewed from our car’s four tires during every mile of travel), some of it is beautiful (the return of salmon to the Klamath watershed and its people), and all of it is helpful in understanding who and where we are at this point in both human and planetary history.
As strange as it is to say, this is arguably the most important time to be alive since the earliest peoples began narrating what it means to exist. (By “important” I mean existential rather than good.) So, each week I dive into the flood of information because I feel compelled to do so. But I like to occasionally come up for air and think for a bit about our relationship to the flood. The flood, after all, is us.
The idea that we have a relationship to information - as if it were an entity existing independent of us - is itself an artifact of this strange age, an image in the dark mirror of an alternate world we’ve made alongside the real one.
And yet this age of information (verbal, visual, digital) is so strange, and growing so much stranger, that it may be more accurate to speak of information’s relationship to us. Information was once only network and library - spoken and written, shared and stored - but in an age soon to be (mis)managed by AIs as flawed as they are powerful, it is becoming a cognitive force at the center of human affairs.
And anything at the center of human affairs is by definition a determinant of the Earth’s fate. Information for information’s sake is already a force and a rationale - more electricity, more water, more profit - for erasing more of the living world.
Where does that leave us, the 8.2 billion tiny gods who created this alternate reality? We seem to live on the mirror’s threshold, adrift in two worlds but at home in neither.
In the mirror world it is understood that the opposite of information is ignorance. But information is so pervasive now that it seems to have no opposite. No one is ignorant; they simply have different information. Who among us escapes the flow? We even carry it with us - calling, texting, searching, listening - like a parasite.
The only alternative is the screenless hush and hum of the natural world, though we all know how rarely in the marketplace of our lives such silence is either offered or chosen. (Even our dialogue here in the Field Guide is making the silence a little rarer and the flood a little deeper.) The silence between notes gives meaning to music, but silence in the Anthropocene often make the strange self-obsessed machinery of change seem all the more meaningless.
As I read more fully into the details of this new world, I’m often reminded that the deepest relationship between knowledge and ignorance is not zero-sum - where one displaces the other - but additional, where each expands the other. Ignorance, after all, often becomes a quest to know more. And as for knowledge, the more we learn, the more we realize is unknown. The well becomes deeper each time we look.
This dynamic seems true in love, as those beloved people we are closest to somehow grow more mysterious by the year. It seems true as well for self-knowledge, as we realize more and more that our selves are nodes in networks rather than islands in a void. And the rule certainly holds for the ever-widening and ever-sharpening civilizational sensory apparatus we call science. Look intimately at any species, for example, and there is no end to its complexity, on its own and in its relationships.
To bring all of this speculation into the real world, let’s look at a couple of my readings this week:
One was a fascinating article about work being done by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (just down the road here in Maine) to understand marine viruses. You might think this a niche topic, but the oceans cover 70% of Earth and viruses make up most of their genetic diversity. There are an estimated “billion trillion stars in the known universe,” the article notes, but marine viruses may outnumber them “by as much as 10 million times” and may be the most abundant biological entity on Earth.
It’s complicated, though. Viruses aren’t considered living organisms. They have genetic material and they shape the existence of every life form on Earth, but rely entirely on who they infect to survive. They are DNA shapeshifters, too, leaving some of theirs behind with their host or taking some of the host’s with them, so that no two viruses are genetically the same.
In another article, Google announced with fanfare the construction of a small quantum computing chip that can calculate in minutes what an ordinary computer would need 10 septillion years to do. We may be, the article explains, a mere five years away from an era in which quantum computing transforms society. (Again, I want to remind you that whatever transforms society transforms the planet.)
I really don’t have the foggiest idea how a quantum computer works, but the basic idea seems to be that the basic computation unit - a qubit - can be in two places at once and this capacity essentially eliminates time as a limit to calculation. One of the people behind the Google effort says their success “lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.”
I could write an essay or two on how annoyed I am with the chatter about a multiverse and the way the idea has been represented, but let’s go back to viruses to make my point. My friend Julie, one of the scientists interviewed about the marine virus research, says that “the thing about viruses is that they’re kind of meaningless without the context of who they’re infecting.” The same is true for AI. It’s meaningless without us. For now, at least.
The nature of the infection is crucial too, since many viruses are beneficial or even essential for their host’s existence. Unfortunately, most Anthropocene precedent (e.g. internal combustion, petrochemicals, the internet) suggests that whatever intensifies our current behaviors on a large scale will also intensify the scale of our future impacts. If quantum-equipped AIs aren’t instructed to redesign civilization along ecological principles, they’ll probably be more ecocidal than helpful.
We don’t need these artificial mirror worlds. We already live in world that contains innumerable mirrors and countless other worlds. For fun, start by looking in a calm puddle or pond. Water was the first mirror. Then, look to the life around us. Look your dog in the eye and ask what she thinks. Spend enough time with a daisy or a dung beetle that you realize their lives are a complete and complex mystery. In the beautiful, joyous, and bewildering multiplicity of species, each has their own umwelts and communities and needs.
Finally, if you feel the need to associate yourself with billion trillions and septillions, fill one cupped hand with seawater and the other with good soil. All of life is there, more or less.
We’re all stuck with the information mirror world that’s been built for us, and we seem to be stuck with the godlike calculators (and their profit-driven creators) that will soon be running it. We have become digital readers and writers, movie streamers and TikTok obsessives, gamers and online chatterers. Still, while we may be trapped on the mirror’s threshold, let’s remember that at heart we’re still primates who are happiest when existing solely in the messy, earthy now.
Put more simply, only one of the worlds we live in is home. And it’s mysterious enough.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From
in , “becoming,” another of her short, beautiful, astonishing essays, this one on a similar theme to my piece this week, though she does a better job. (Seriously: if you’re not reading Chloe, you should be.) Here she is helping us understand the true relationship between what we know and what is unknowable:When our species pretends that we have any significant comprehension of the colossal mystery that we’re all caught up in, it’s rather akin to when toddlers have miniature kitchens and they become Michelin-star serious about their make-believe culinary endeavours.
If you read nothing else, read this: From the excellent and vital work of Benji Jones at Vox, “This is How Many Animals Could Go Extinct from Climate Change,” an article explaining the stark and sobering findings of a recent extinction-rate assessment. The difference between 1.3C (the amount we’ve already warmed) and 2.7C (if we live up to our current pledges) is the difference between losing 1.6% of species and losing 5% of species. Assuming there are 10 million species on Earth, that’s the difference between 160,000 and 500,000 species. (How many of us understand that even if we stopped warming now we’re still on track to lose 160,000 species.) The bottom line is this: Every tenth of a degree of warming is likely to erase tens of thousands of species from the Earth. Every little bit we do to reduce warming by even a fraction of a degree makes a huge difference.
In related grief from Nautilus, “The Once and Future Woods,” an exploration of a fragment of ancient forest in England that, like the rest of the natural world, is changing rapidly, with tree species that have thrived in that landscape for millennia now dying off. The hotter world that’s here, and the even hotter one that’s coming, are shaking the biological dice every year. The author quotes an incisive decade-old essay by Christopher Mims that does not suffer fools. Here’s a line I wish I’d written:
Any attempt to talk about the 21st century without acknowledging that every living thing on the planet will be altered by humans is intellectually bankrupt.
And speaking of intellectual bankruptcy, from the editors of Scientific American, a scathing op-ed about this right-wing Supreme Court’s utter disregard for science and fact-based jurisprudence. This applies to cases outside my purview here, like abortion and gay rights, but it also applies to their absurd, ill-informed, and disastrous rulings on environmental issues, like the recent Ohio v. EPA decision that prevents the EPA from limiting downwind pollution from midwestern states; the Sackett v. EPA case that weakened the Clean Water Act so it no longer protects half of America’s wetlands; the West Virginia v. EPA decision that gutted the agency’s ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal power plants; and especially the Chevron decision which shifts regulatory decisions from experts and scientists to the (often ignorant) courts. As the editors explained, with some force:
The [Chevron] decision enthrones the high court—an unelected majority—as a group of technically incompetent, in some cases corrupt, politicos in robes with power over matters that hinge on vital facts about pollution, medicine, employment, and much else. These matters govern our lives.
From Waging Nonviolence, a well-written, empathetic, and comprehensive ten-step analysis of what opposition to the next Trump administration might look like. To be clear, this article is advice for everyone interested in reducing the harms of an administration that has clear goals to increase suffering in the human and more-than-human worlds. This is about activism, but it’s also about community and grieving and choosing a path that makes sense to each of us. I posted this right after the election, and I probably will again. It’s worth your time.
From the BBC, an example of what smart, top-down opposition to environmental crimes should look like: A proposed bill in the Scottish Parliament would make ecocide a crime and would specifically target the CEOs and other company leaders responsible for ecocidal damage.
In some quirky Anthropocene news from the Dec. 10th edition of SpaceWeather.com, increased solar flare activity in 2024 has been messing with GPS-reliant farm equipment, causing the machines to jerk left and right or stop altogether. During the impact period of major solar storms here on Earth, electromagnetic turbulence in the ionosphere disrupts GPS signals. Tractors and harvesters that determine their location to the inch suddenly don’t know where they are. It’s an indication of how reliant our entire agriculture system is on GPS:
This kind of precision agriculture has become widespread. "I would guess 80% or more of all farmers in the Midwest use at least basic GPS for something--whether it's auto-steer or yield mapping," says Ethan Smidt, a service manager for John Deere. "At least 50% of all farmers are VERY reliant on GPS and use it on every machine all year long."
From the Guardian, some new promising engineering for cleaning microplastics from water. The sponges are manufactured from cotton and squid bone, and in testing were able to absorb 99.9% of the microplastic pollution. It will be some years before scaling up is possible. This is good news, but in the big picture will be relatively meaningless unless global plastic production is limited and then reduced.
Thanks Jason for distilling the overwhelming ecosystem of (dis)information into your cogent, intelligible and eloquent columns.
Very fine essay as is your usual, Jason. I so look forward to your posts showing up in my mailbox each week. What a writer you are! I agree it is an important era in which to be alive- "the best of times, the worst of times." So many changes occuring so fast. Bewilderingly many possible futures. Never before has there been such turbulence in the smooth flow of human history. The world rivers are changing their flow patterns, computer scientists are on the verge of creating true AGI, biology scientists are on the verge of creating "mirror life bacteria" which might pose existential threats to all life. Meanwhile the poles melt and the sixth extinction is upon us. The Chinese curse of interesting times has come true.