I was on a flight from Helsinki to London when the 2026 solar eclipse occurred this week.
With uncharacteristic forethought I’d ordered, taken delivery of – and brought with me – eclipse glasses and a little accompanying cardboard filter for my phone camera.
I’d also researched (and paid a small fee for) a seat on the right side of the aircraft based on its flightpath back to London Heathrow.
I was not disappointed.
For about an hour of the flight I got a truly amazing view.
I was also able to pass the glasses around the cabin a bit so other folks could take a look safely.
I mean, it was a partial eclipse from my point of view – but still – the whole thing was the dictionary definition of awesome for me. I was getting my RDA of the awes, for sure. A fascinating thing perhaps unique to the situation was seeing the moon swing around over the disc of the sun as we travelled from east to west.
I read this story on Canary Media with interest – “Solarpunk is going mainstream. This couple’s $1M Kickstarter proves it. Canary chats with the co-creators of the forthcoming video game Loftia, set in a renewables-powered utopia that celebrates community and climate optimism.”
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say that Solarpunk is going mainstream – but “cosycore” meets Animal Crossing x Ghibli aesthetic seems to be attractive. I’ve talked about the ‘protopia’ I call the “Chobani Cinematic Universe” before, and it seems in that vein.
At the end of the article it mentions an existing game, Terra Nil, which is available on Netflix and steam.
I downloaded it and started playing, with headphones in as recommended by the authors.
Terra Nil Game Trailer on YT
Smash cut to… oh, 3 hours later? It had gone midnight and I hadn’t noticed at all.
It’s game mechanics will be fairly familiar to casual gamers – you are tasked with transforming a map by introducing various types of resource in turn, with constraints on your budget to do so. The choices you make encourage different biomes / ecosystems to emerge and flourish. So far so fun.
But I think the sound design is something else.
It is immensely calming. Gentle repetition and seeming evolution in the soundtrack puts one to mind of many ambient favourites of the past, and the eno-esque ‘music as furniture’ feel contributes to your occupation / immersion in making “another green world”.
Ahem.
Anyway.
This put me to thinking about the use of ‘generative music as macroscope’, i.e. using generated soundscapes to create impressionistic understanding of large scale ecologies or systems that you’re embedded in.
Could that connect you more profoundly – or just pleasurably to the energy systems around you?
I often say the most mind-bending fact about climate is that half of all emissions came in the last 25 years. Maybe even more startling: the weight of that carbon is more than the total mass of everything ever built by humans and still standing on earth. https://t.co/BOaPHQW0cr
Real-world RL: DeepMind controls a fusion reactor: …The era of the centaur scientist cometh… DeepMind researchers have trained a reinforcement learning agent to shape the distribution of plasma in a Tokamak fusion reactor. This requires training an agent that “can manipulate the magnetic field through a precise control of several coils that are magnetically coupled to the plasma to achieve the desired plasma current, position, and shape”. If that sounds complicated, that’s because it’s extremely complicated. The task is akin to being an octopus and needing to precisely shape a tube of clay that’s rotating at speeds faster than you can comprehend, and to never tear or destabilize the clay.
Flat holm island from Sandy Bay, North Somerset UK
When trying to understand the interactions of non-human organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behaviour of pre-programmed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived, human experience on the other. Framed as brainless organisms, lacking the basic apparatus required to have even a simple kind of ‘experience’, fungal interactions are no more than automatic responses to a series of biochemical triggers. Yet the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways. Their hyphae are chemically irritable, responsive, excitable. It is this ability to interpret the chemical emissions of others that allows fungi to negotiate a series of complex trading relationships with trees; to knead away at stores of nutrients in the soil; to have sex; to hunt; or to fend off attackers. Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice? The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of the Great Plains region of the United States, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for hill, for example, is a verb: ‘to be a hill’. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this ‘grammar of animacy’, it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an ‘it’, or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans. By contrast, in English, writes Kimmerer, there is no way to recognise the ‘simple existence of another living being’. If you’re not a human subject, by default you’re an inanimate object: an ‘it’, a ‘mere thing’. If you repurpose a human concept to help make sense of the life of a non-human organism, you’ve tumbled into the trap of anthropomorphism. Use ‘it’, and you’ve objectified the organism, and fallen into a different kind of trap.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills.
