Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light

In this paper I argue that discussion about the ‘technosphere’ as an emergent new Earth system needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage linear assumptions about the preconditions and emergence of technospheres. Exploring earlier major transitions in Earth’s evolution can shed light on the shifting distribution of metabolic and reproductive powers between the human and technological parts of the contemporary technosphere. The long-term evolution of technical objects also suggests that they have shown a tendency to pass through their own major transitions in their relation to animality. Such reflection can shed new light on the nature and likely future development of the Earth’s technosphere

The reformation of place:religion, space and power

In this chapter I reflect on the role played by the Protestant Reformation in shaping the western experience of place. First I examine the idea that the Reformation helps to effect a shift from absolute to abstract space, or from place to space, by purging the landscape of the dramatic highs and lows of spiritual intensity characteristic of Catholicism. I further explore this claim by situating this development within the longue durée of western religious history, a succession of distinctive ‘orderings of the sacred’ which together I term the ‘long arc of monotheism’. Second, however, I argue that the Reformation did not automatically lead to the hypermodern dissolution of space and the emergence of non-places but, more positively, constituted a final overcoming of archaic religion, and the possibility of a new experience of space and place. Thirdly I thus argue for a distinctive mode of placing, one suspended between the archaic and the modern, between belonging and not belonging

From the Anthropocene epoch to a new Axial Age:using theory fictions to explore geo-spiritual futures

In this chapter, Szerszynski discusses how he used a series of linked ‘theory-fictions’ to explore possible futures for religion in a new geological epoch, using the notion of a possible ‘Second Axial Age’ based on a radically different metaphysics. Szerszynski first explores Karl Jaspers’ idea of the ‘Axial Age’. In a 1949 book, Jaspers proposed that around the middle of the first millennium BCE a revolutionary shift occurred in cultures across Eurasia, as spiritual teachers arose who promoted ideas of a cosmological gap between the mundane and transcendent realms, and a distinction between relative local cultures and universal truths. Szerszynski argues that any understanding of paths to the Anthropocene has to take account of the emergence of Axial cultures, but cautions that this has to be done with care. He then introduces the concept of theory fictions and summarizes his own use of the genre: in three pieces all set in a fictional future in which Earth religions and cultures undergo a Second Axial Age in response to the encounter with extraterrestrial cultures and a growing understanding of the interconnectedness of living and non-living systems. Szerszynski explains how he develops in some detail one particular example of this imagined cultural shift, an offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism: Mangalayana or ‘Mars-Vehicle’ Buddhism, involving a form of geological mysticism and a new understanding of cosmic human destiny. Critically exploring contemporary claims that a Second Axial Age is emerging in the twenty-first century, Szerszynski points out, that the Second Axial Age described in his own theory-fictions is not a renewal of First-Axial-Age themes of transcendence and universality, but a turning towards a radically new metaphysics. Szerszynski finally develops the idea of ‘sacred work’. In his fictions, the activity of Martian settlers in making the red planet habitable is not understood as a secular, technological act of humanization but as a spiritual vocation involving the balancing of landscape energies and forces in the tradition of Tibetan geomancy. He concludes by suggesting that such experimental fusions between literary genres can help us to understand what it might mean to escape the limitations of First-Axial-Age thinking, and imagine different futures for religion in the Anthropocene

The Martian Book of the Dead

It is 2197. The Earth has entered the ‘Suryamandalan’ or ‘solar-system’ geological period—the period in which the becoming of the planet has escaped its own boundaries and became fully incorporated into a larger, evolving star system. In response to massive environmental change, scientific and technological developments and extra-terrestrial contact, Earth religions and cultures have gone through an upheaval known as the Second Axial Age, which has involved embracing a radical new metaphysics of matter, time and space. Mars has been settled and terraformed, and a new branch of Buddhism established there: Mangalayana or ‘Mars-vehicle’ Buddhism. This new religion builds on the Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) tradition of the Nyingma school of Buddhism with its fusion of the individual’s narrative of birth and rebirth with the cosmological story of the emergence and development of the cosmos from an undifferentiated pure ground. It also introduces a new mythos of the relationship between Mars and Earth, personified as bodhisattva and consort, in terms of the mutual gifting of life and animacy across billion-year time scales. Mangalayana Buddhism provides a synthesis of religion, science and practical activity, a new understanding of the relation between personal being and cosmic realities. It spreads amongst the humans, artificial intelligences and human-machine hybrids that work in the extractive industries and terraforming activities of Mars. This text is the introduction to an edition of the Mangalayana text popularly known as the ‘Martian Book of the Dead’, which is used to prepare the dying for the experience of ‘interval-being’ and the possibility of liberation into the deep becoming of their planet, and thus of the cosmos

Praise be to you, earth-beings

This essay appeared in the journal Environmental Humanities in a special commentary section on the papal encyclical Laudato Si’

Gods of the Anthropocene:geo-spiritual formations in the earth’s new epoch

In this paper I argue that we need not only to ‘decolonise’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularise’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, I start to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit, and use this to speak of both the ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. I suggest that what might once have been distinct territorialised ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system, what we might call a ‘combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation’

Drift as a planetary phenomenon

In this paper I situate the Situationists' derive within an analysis of drift as a planetary phenomenon. Using the concept of the middle voice', I suggest that drifting can lead us to a deeper understanding of the way that all things move, that move within the extended body of the Earth. I develop the idea of driftwork', in which drift is subsumed within a wider set of purposes or functions, and describe different forms of more-than-human driftwork, with different political implications. I conclude by suggesting that things adrift can help us trace the lineaments of a planetary ethic: an ethic that extends beyond the human, the animal, and the living to the whole extended body of the Earth; that allows us to recontextualize human practices of drifting within a planetary context; that is sensitive to the debt that all moving things owe to the planetary mobility commons that enables their motion; and that helps us to recognize our obligations of care towards all drifting things

Cosmic hail

This poem takes the form of an ode to a speck of cosmic dust, tracking its journey across deep time and orbital space to its encounter with a living Earth