I’m sharing a little fragment of The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds. This particular piece comes close to the beginning of the “Theoscene” chapter (reader’s guide here), where I make the case for a broadened understanding of the “more-than-human worlds” of the book’s subtitle. This version omits the notes and adds some paragraphing for online readability. The book can be ordered here. Write to me if you cannot afford to buy it.
Are we alone yet?
Insofar as the very notion of an Anthropocene represents the culmination of an onto-epistemological humanism, a centering of collective humanity as the leading actor on the world stage, this question “Are we alone?” haunts the Anthropocenic imagination. Logically speaking, the question invites a series of answers, each of which has emerged in different guises.
Blaise Pascal’s famous line “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces,” that is, of the heavens, “frightens” or “terrifies me” exemplifies an affirmative response to the question: yes, we humans are alone in this universe. For whatever reason, there is no other species that is our kin. We stand alone, and this marks our significance, our greatness, or perhaps our tragedy. We have no one to turn to except the figments of our own imagination and the results of our own creativity. (Presumably, AI would lie within that span.) Pascal went on to reason that the benefits of believing in a God, one whose inhabitation of those spaces would temper that fear, outweigh the benefits of disbelieving in such a God. But the very fact that he was able to raise the question tells us how far down the road of a species solipsism elite European thinking had reached by the seventeenth century.
Indigenous cultures around the world would likely recoil at the very question. Who is “we,” they might ask? Do we not already inhabit a world rich with kin of many kinds? Setting these two in dialogue with each other suggests a range of other potential responses. At one end, then, we could simply answer yes and accept our human aloneness with solemnity, grace, befuddlement, or arrogant pretense; let’s call this the ultra-humanist option. Secondly, we could answer no, that there are others out there and that we might one day, or have already, been in contact with them; the only thing preventing us from knowing this is the distance of Pascal’s heavens. Let’s call this the extraterrestrial, or distant more-than-human, option. The very fact that there are hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our own galaxy, not to mention the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, suggests that the chances of us being alone in the universe are astronomical (no pun intended).
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