The Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill passed away on January 14, at the age of 82. I don’t know most of his work, which means this note of remembrance is less about Bofill the architect per se and more about Bofill the designer of the La Muralla Roja, an apartment complex in Manzanera, Spain. Spanish for ‘The Red Wall’, La Muralla Roja is a brutalist-style complex in the shape of a Greek cross (all arms of equal length) with around 50 houses, designed to maximise the availability of space, natural light and social interactions. But the most striking things about La Muralla Roja are its colours – the walls are red, the courtyards are blue and pink, and everything else is violet – and that all its houses have a view of the Balearic Sea. As such, La Muralla Roja is Bofill the architect’s conception of utopian living. Ironically, if you didn’t know about this complex, you probably noticed an architectural design it most likely inspired in the dystopian show Squid Game. I’ll leave you with some beautiful images of the complex (all by beasty ./Unsplash). See here for more photos, including those provided by Bofill himself.
Featured image: A view of La Muralla Roja. Photo: Zhifei Zhou/Unsplash.
I rewatched Eternals today and had some time to collect some of my thoughts on it. Spoilers ahead (including one each for The Tomorrow War and Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings).
Too much deus ex machina – took 55 minutes minutes to find out what the Eternals are not capable of. And this trope continues through the film up: when Phastos makes the Uni-mind; when Ikaris brings the Domo down by putting a couple dents in it (that thing had neither discernible engines nor an aerodynamic design, so what exactly got damaged that it stopped levitating?); when Phastos bound Ikaris; and when Sersi froze the celestial. Specific to the last two instances: the bummer was that the audience is given no sense of how much power these individuals can be expected to wield (just as in Shang-Chi: great fight sequences, but no sense at the outset of what the rings are/aren’t capable of).
(Follow-up: How exactly did the deviants get trapped in ice? The same thing happens in The Tomorrow War, in which similar creatures get trapped in ice, but only because they were trapped inside containers trapped inside a crashed spaceship trapped in ice. In Eternals, wouldn’t the deviants have had to lie still for a very long time to get trapped in ice? Unless of course the Eternals caused an ice age.)
Every new narrative arc begins with them saving lives – gets very holier-than-thou very quickly.
“Conflicts lead to war, and war actually leads to advancements in life-saving technology and medicine.” This is Phastos’s rationalisation of Ajak’s anti-interventionist policy, but the policy’s been around for millennia while I thought this war-innovation nexus was at best two centuries old.
Too tropey.
The cast makes the film resemble a panel discussion with too many members: everyone gets one point in but that’s it – but also the event organiser wants them to be great points, so it’s mostly just some big picture points and nothing else.
Not sure whose side to take! Sure, the deviants are villainous by appearance, but hundreds of movies have taught us to look past that.
Why is Hindi spoken with an American accent (“nuch meri hero”)?! Also, good to see Hollywood’s Bollywood hasn’t changed much. Also, the whole valet thing didn’t sit well.
Ridiculous scene 1: when Gilgamesh finds out Ajak’s dead – morose music, serious dialogue – the pie slides off the pan onto his boot with the sort of sound befitting slapstick comedy.
Ridiculous scene 2: when the Amazon ambush is underway, Kingo fights off a few deviants and Karun (the valet) shouts, “Very nice, saaaar!”
(Follow-up: The film’s makers clearly tried to work in some comedy in between, or sometimes within, the action sequences, but it never works. The Eternals are just too serious the rest of the time for it, so they just come off a bit psychotic.)
Kingo, the Indian character, is often a doofus.
How’re they keeping track of where each Eternal ended up after five centuries of not being in touch? This isn’t trivial: in movies with human characters, barriers like this have often been insurmountable.
Maybe just me but this was a dull, even insipid end-of-the-world story. I much prefer Last Contact by Stephen Baxter: like Eternals, it concerns itself with a very small group of people confronting the end of the world, but who do so in an unlikely-ly comforting way.
Shallow characters – particularly Sprite, with her betrayal at the end, which no one saw coming, and not in the way people don’t see but then ask themselves why they didn’t suspect it, but in the way no one saw coming because they had zero reason to consider it.
At this point, including the end-credit scenes, it’s hard not to tire of the MCU – quite like we all tired of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga even though the Tolkien Estate didn’t want us to, with its strategically spaced-out posthumous book releases. Like Discworld had turtles all the way down, the MCU apparently has turtles all the way to the top, and in increasingly less unpredictable ways.
TV news anchor at the end: “The sudden appearance of an enormous stone figurine in the Indian ocean…”. There’s clearly daylight over the Indian ocean at this point. But when Ikaris left Earth, en route to jumping into the Sun, he paused for a view of the Americas – which were also in daylight. How?
I also wrote a bit about the celestial, Tiamut, here.
Featured image: The opening scene of Eternals. Source: Hotstar.
Not something I usually blog about but boy is this funny. (At least) Star Sports has been airing an ad for an app called ‘Magicpin’ that I think helps you in some way when you shop for stuff. And this is how the ad goes:
So… a fight breaks out in the middle of the road over some pseudo-accident, as it usually does in India. A bystander starts to film the fight until one of the picaros charges on the camera-wielder, points to a side-street full of stores and says, “The magic isn’t happening here, it’s there.” And when the camera moves to view the stores, imaginary discount tags pop up onscreen, the music starts to play and the word ‘Magicpin’ blares in a medley of colours. I don’t know about you but it’s really hard for me to miss the allegory about an independent press here – as if to say, “a fight holding up the traffic for no good reason isn’t important, do look away, go shopping, get distracted”. Plus it’s apprently also what late capitalism expects of us, considering Magicpin thinks the skit is… amusing.
I’m partway through Renny Thomas’s new book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment. Its description on the Routledge page reads:
This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.
To be fair to Renny as well as to prospective readers, I’m hardly familiar with scholarship in this area of study and in no position to be able to confidently critique the book’s arguments. I’m reading it to learn. With this caveat out of the way…
I’ve been somewhat familiar with Renny’s work and my expectation of his new book to be informative and insightful has been more than met. I like two things in particular based on the approximately 40% I’ve read so far (and not necessarily from the beginning). First, Science and Religion quotes scientists with whom Renny spoke to glean insights generously. A very wise man told me recently that in most cases, it’s possible to get the gist of (non-fiction) books written by research scholars and focusing on their areas of work just by reading the introductory chapter. I think this book may be the exception that makes the rule for me. On occasion Renny also quotes from books by other scientists and scholars to make his point, which I say to imply that for readers like me, who are interested in but haven’t had the chance to formally study these topics, Science and Religion can be a sort of introductory text as well.
For example, in one place, Renny quotes some 150 words from Raja Ramanna’s autobiography, where the latter – a distinguished physicist and one of the more prominent endorsers of the famous 1981 ‘statement on scientific temper’ – recalls in spirited fashion his visit to Gangotri. The passage reminded me of an article by American historian of science Daniel Sarewitz published many years ago, in which he described his experience of walking through the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. I like to credit Sarewitz’s non-academic articles for getting me interested in the sociology of science, especially critiques of science as a “secularising medium”, to use Renny’s words, but I have also been guilty of having entered this space of thought and writing through accounts of spiritual experiences written by scientists from countries other than India. But now, thanks to Science and Religion, I have the beginnings of a resolution.
Second, the book’s language is extremely readable: undergraduate students who are enthusiastic about science should be able to read it for pleasure (and I hope students of science and engineering do). I myself was interested in reading it because I’ve wanted, and still want, to understand what goes on in the minds of people like ISRO chairman K. Sivan when they insist on visiting Tirupati before every major rocket launch. And Renny clarifies his awareness of these basic curiosities early in the book:
… scientists continue to be the ‘special’ folk in India. It is this image of ‘special’ folk and science’s alleged relationship with ‘objectivity’ which makes people uneasy when scientists go to temple, engage in prayer, and openly declare their allegiance to religious beliefs. The dominance and power of science and its status as a superior epistemology is part of the popular imagination. The continuing media discussion on ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) scientists when they offer prayer before any mission is an example.
Renny also clarifies the religious and caste composition of his interlocutors at the outset as well as dedicates a chapter to discussing the ways in which caste and religious identities present themselves in laboratory settings, and the ways in which they’re acknowledged and dismissed – but mostly dismissed. An awareness of caste and religion is also important to understand the Sivan question, according to Science and Religion. Nearly midway through the book, Renny discusses a “strategic adjustment” among scientists that allows them to practice science and believe in gods “without revealing the apparent contradictions between the two”. Here, one scientist identifies one of the origins of religious belief in an individual to be their “cultural upbringing”; but later in the book, in conversations with Brahmin scientists (and partly in the context of an implicit belief that the practice of science is vouchsafed for Brahmins in India), Renny reveals that they don’t distinguish between cultural and religious practices. For example, scientists who claim to be staunch atheists are also strict vegetarians, don the ‘holy thread’ and, most tellingly for me, insist on getting their sons and daughters married off to people belonging to the same caste.
They argued that they visited temples and pilgrimage centres not for worship but out of an architectural and aesthetic interest, to marvel at the architectural beauty. As Indians, they are proud of these historical places and pilgrimage centres. They happily invite their guests from other countries to these places with a sense of pride and historicity. Some of the atheist scientists I spoke to informed me that they would offer puja and seek darshan while visiting the temples and historically relevant pilgrimage places, especially when they go with their family; “to make them happy.” They argued that they wouldn’t question the religious beliefs and practices of others and professed that it was a personal choice to be religious or non-religious. They also felt that religion and belief in God provided psychological succor to believers in their hardships and one should not oppose them. Many of the atheist scientists think that festivals such as Diwali or Ayudha Puja are cultural events.
In their worldview, the distinction between religion and culture has dissolved – and which clearly emphasises the importance of considering the placedness of science just as much as we consider the placedness of religion. By way of example, Science and Religion finds both religion and science at work in laboratories, but en route it also discovers that to do science in certain parts of India – but especially South India, where many of the scientists in his book are located – is to do science in a particular milieu distorted by caste: here, the “lifeworld” is to Brahmins as water is to fish. Perhaps this is how Sivan thinks, too,although he is likely to be performing the subsequent rituals more passively, and deliberately and in self-interest, assuming he seeks his sense of his social standing based on and his deservingness of social support from the wider community of fellow Brahmins: that we must pray and make some offerings to god because that’s how we always did it growing up.
At least, these are my preliminary thoughts. I’m looking forward to finishing Science and Religion this month (I’m a slow reader) and looking forward to learning more in the process.
It suddenly feels like a lot more people have been reading a lot more books. Or maybe they’re talking about it a lot more. I have one friend who went through more books in 2021 than there were weeks. And I’ve been quite jealous looking at her and others’ Instagram and Twitter feeds about all the great books they read and the places to which the books transported them. I want to go to those places too! But instead of reading books, I just really want to go to those places.
I lost my ability to read books years ago, probably around the same time, and probably because, I began to read articles, essays and short stories more. I don’t really miss it except when most of the people I generally interact with put their book-reading on display, typically at the end of each year. When I shared this sentiment with my friend, she said I should just give it time and that I’ll get the ability back at some point. Sage, but also unfalsifiable, advice.
Instead, I’ve found considerable solace – when I’m feeling down vis-à-vis reading books – in the realisation that I may not have read many words in books, but I’ve read many words in probably every other form of the written text than books (excluding social media posts). I launched The Weekly Linklist in July 2020 after an app told me that I’d been reading 12,000 words or so per day on average for at least a year until then. I believe I’ve read many books’ worth of words but just not books per se.
It’s helpful to frame things this way because the longer I didn’t read a book, the more stigmatising it got in the circles in which I moved and still move. “Oh, you can’t read books? I’m sure you will soon.” Some people implicitly make a virtue of reading books. Reading books is important, no doubt, but I’m wondering if things have got to a point where reading 50,000 words is less important than if they were printed on paper, glued together and published as such.
Granted, there is value in both presenting and consuming a single argument (used in its broadest sense, such that it encompasses fiction as well), or some non-tenuously related arguments, across tens of thousands of words. But not every argument that’s present this way is good (i.e. there are bad books) nor are shorter arguments inherently inferior. Yet books, and book-reading with them, have accrued a certain prestige that doesn’t attend to, say, essays.
Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m a frog in a well and there are other wells where frogs talk about all the great essays they read that year, share news articles talking about the same things, whose Instagram pages are replete with screenshots of essay titles, and so forth.
I’d originally intended to write a short introduction and then segue to the annual presentation of the number of words I’ve written in the previous year on this blog but the words snowballed. So:
I wrote 117,573 words in 2021 on this blog – bringing the cumulative total to 831,826 words.
Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series is a little over a million words long. I hope to cross that figure next year.
These words were published in 118 posts, which means the average post length was 996 words. I’m happy with this because it continues my trend of writing longer posts on average since 2014 (when it was 665 words).
However, I don’t see the length increasing much past 1,000 words because I like my own posts and articles, on The Wire Science, to be that long. And I’m pleased that I’m able to keep track without consciously keeping track (my first and final drafts aren’t very different unless I’ve made a big mistake.)
The vast majority of the posts were categorised ‘Analysis’.
In the last quarter of 2021, I mostly reacted to things that had happened instead of synthesising insights, and I didn’t like that.
I also wrote 127 articles on The Wire Science and The Wire in 2021 – the second-highest in a single year and for the second time in excess of 100 for the same publication. (The highest in both cases was for The Hindu in 2013.)
Thus far, I’ve written 845 articles across The Wire Science, The Wire, Scroll, Quartz, Hindustan Times and The Hindu.
“It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”
Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded claiming to revolutionise healthcare but ended up being sued by investors, employees and patients for fraud, in response to a query from the magazine presumably asking about how/why Holmes thought her idea would work despite many medical experts telling her it wouldn’t. The idea in question: to use just a pinprick of blood from each patient to check for more than 200 conditions/diseases/etc. using a portable machine. In effect, Holmes, and Theranos, were attempting to shrink the blood-testing process, make it cheaper and more automated. It would have revolutionised healthcare if it weren’t for two things: the machine didn’t work, and Holmes/Theranos raised capital and made promises to investors, patients and US government institutions to the effect that it did. Holmes founded the company in 2003, reached great (Silicon-Valley-esque) heights around 2014-2015, and was dissolved in September 2018. Holmes’s trial began on August 31, 2021, earlier this week. Her colleague Ramesh Balwani is also to stand trial, and that’s expected to begin early next year. In case you’d like to catch up too, I recommend watching the HBO documentary about Holmes and Theranos, The Inventor, and reading articles by John Carreyrou (Wall Street Journal) and Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair) published between 2015 and 2018.
Towards the end, The Inventor dwells for a bit on Holmes’s state of mind: at a time when Theranos was besieged by allegations of fraud, conspiracy and knowingly subjecting its customers (technically, patients) to dysfunctional medical tests that endangered their lives, and when nobody believed its blood-testing machine, called ‘Edison’, could ever work as promised, Holmes carried on as if nothing was wrong and, in fact, according to people still at Theranos at the time, she exuded hope and confidence that the company was on the verge of a turnaround. She was clearly swindling people – diverting the money they’d invested and paid into supporting a lavish lifestyle – but seemed to believe she wasn’t. The Inventor offers (only) one explanation, that Holmes was a zealot: “a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their … ideals”. Without knowing more about what went on inside Theranos, especially since it’s downfall began, it’s hard to dispute this characterisation. (However, CNBCreported on August 28: “In a bombshell revelation just days before her criminal fraud trial, defense attorneys for Elizabeth Holmes claim she’s suffered a ‘decade-long campaign of psychological abuse’ from her former boyfriend and business partner Ramesh Balwani.”)
Until the end of The Inventor, and the stories by Carreyrou and Bilton, Holmes holds her ground that Theranos’s revolutionisation of healthcare is only a day away. If we assumed for a moment that Holmes really didn’t believe, in any corner of her mind, that she’d knowingly cheated people and had known that ‘Edison’ and Theranos were both part of one big sham, we’re confronted with some discomfiting questions about how we define our successes. Did Theranos conflate scepticism with impossibility – i.e. “this can’t work because the laws of nature don’t allow it” versus “this can’t work because it is disruptive”?
The Theranos story is about many things — one of them is that it highlights a highway Silicon Valley has built to its arbitrarily defined form of success that starts from one of the same points from which many success stories in the rest of the world, the real world but especially the world of scientific research, begin: “I wonder why that doesn’t work”. So it’s easy to get confused – as many journalists, investors and Holmes’s fellow entrepreneurs did – and to believe that you’re taking one highway when you may just be starting on the other. And I wish I could say the rest of the real-world highway has some checks and balances to kill bad ideas, and these the Silicon Valley highway lacks. Problems in scientific publishing, including and leading up to the replication crisis across subjects, would prove me wrong; in fact, these parallels are quite important, if only for us to reflect on why reputation-based measures of success exist. One of my favourite examples in history is that of Dan Shechtman, described here. A common example from India would be any institute that attempts to evaluate scientists’ application for promotion based on the journals in which they’ve published their papers, instead of the papers’ contents. A common and more global example: ‘prestige’ journals’ historic preference for papers with sensational results (over all papers with reliable results). And a more recent example: the Australian Resarch Council’s announcement last week that it wouldn’t consider preprint papers towards scientists’ applications for many fellowships it funds.
According to one of Bilton’s articles: “On the Friday morning that they gathered in the war room, Holmes and her team of advisers had believed that there would be one negative story from the [Wall Street Journal], and that Holmes would be able to squash the controversy. Then it would be back to business as usual, telling her flawlessly curated story to investors, to the media, and now to patients who used her technology” (emphasis added). Such ‘curation’ had allowed Theranos to be valued at $9 billion (her stake at $4.5 billion), count Henry Kissinger as a board member, Walgreens as a partner, a prominent investment firm as an investor and Joe Biden as a supporter.
This said, there’s still one big difference between the two highways: one has a better, if still quite inchoate, understanding of failure. Failure in science comes in many forms, but I know of at least two ways in which the research enterprise often ‘moves on’. One of course is retractions — and there are more scientists today than there were in decades past who are coming on board the idea that retractions are a good thing, not something to be stigmatised. The other is an increasingly deeper understanding of research fraud, the different circumstances in which it manifests, and the steps scientists and science administrators must take to prevent them from recurring. For all its lucre, the Silicon Valley highway in Theranos’s case didn’t appear to offer Holmes the opportunity of a graceful exit, so much so that it wasn’t a highway to success so much as a railroad to zealotry. That even when your product fails, you haven’t failed until you can raise no more money, until you can keep up the appearance of being successful and have a shot at being actually successful. This is also why Carreyrou, among others, has said: “It’s going to be a wake-up call for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. If you go too far, if you push the envelope and hype and exaggerate to the point of lying, it becomes securities fraud.” It fails to surprise me that even ‘pushing the envelope’ – presumably a euphemism for ‘smaller’ lies – is okay and that it becomes wrong/bad only when it grabs the SEC’s attention (even when most of us outside the American billionaire class aren’t likely to forget the house of cards that was the 2008 financial disaster).
Hopefully Holmes’s trial and eventual conviction will be the moment Silicon Valley stops stigmatising failure, begins to disconnect the appearance of success from success itself, and ultimately allows companies to fail without condemning their leaders at the same time. And yes, I know how ridiculous such hope sounds.
Featured image: Elizabeth Holmes in 2013. Credit: US Department of Defence, public domain.
I’ve been curious why the Marvel Cinematic Universe picked the Malthusian catastrophe for the ultimate disaster the superheroes rescue everyone else from. Narendra Modi has invoked the misguided idea of some (religious) communities breeding too fast for Hindu India – for Bharat – to bear. The third episode of Love Death + Robots 2, ‘Pop Squad’, visits the same idea from the class perspective. Its story seems to assume the language peculiar to the world it is set in doesn’t need explanation, and how right it is: a minute into the episode, you know ‘Pop’ in the title refers to ‘Population’. You know that lady’s “boost” is her longevity injection, that “rejoo” is short for rejuvenation (no spoilers). ‘Snow in the Desert’, the next episode, visits a dystopia in the neighbourhood. Both of them touch on the allegedly polar issues of poverty and immortality.
I know all these words in stories because they’re old tropes but the public imagination is not a synecdoche: perhaps we know them because they’re on the back of our minds? And if so, why are they there? Perhaps they haunt all pre-fascist societies – like premonitions of otherisations ad infinitum, inequalities ad absurdum. Perhaps they haunt everyone who’s come close to the deranged eschatologies of the far right, and they’re phantoms of the irreversible unforgetting of what these ideologues are prepared to do to make their fantasies come true.
Love Death + Robots 2 seems fixated on such auguries, in fact. It has nothing of the variety the first season did, a season that explored so many facets of the human condition (my favourites are ‘Sonnie’s Edge’ and ‘Zima Blue’); in contrast the second season only seems interested in passing commentary, and anything interested in commentary over substance can offer neither.
‘Pop Squad’ had the tightest script by far and the lack of intensity and cynicism in every other episode was consipicuous. (You can’t say cynicism’s absence in Forrest Gump was conspicuous but you can with Tau, so you know what I mean.) ‘The Tall Grass’ got a rise out of me with its simple premise – Gigerian, I’d say, because like the artist’s work, it drafts a new sentence, leaves blanks where some words used to be and asks us to fill them in. The result is often a horror that feels visceral because it’s of our own making.
On the other hand, ‘Ice’ was a near-criminal waste of a premise, I’d argue, a children’s tale of the sort that shouldn’t find place in an anthology as iconoclastic as LDR. ‘All Through the House’ was a poor simile of the first season’s ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’. ‘Automated Customer Service’ was tosh. ‘The Drowned Giant’ was a short story annotated by CGI; the protagonist’s narration stood by itself so I’m not sure what the visuals were doing there. I don’t know what the point of ‘Life Hutch’ was.
But all of them – except perhaps ‘Ice’ – were concerned one way or another with a madhouse apocalypse. Imagine a spectrum defined by the following narrative function: a human or two is thrown into the deep end of the perishablity pool and thrashes about for a bit; some learn to swim; everyone discovers the possibility of unusual endings or the endings of unusual things. Encode this into a blathering neural network and sooner than later, you’d have Love Death + Robots 2.
Perhaps its producers started off aspiring to animate fantastic worlds with the tensions binding the real one, but sadly for them reality was and remains far ahead. People have lived through and anticipated more than what even ‘Pop Squad’ offers us. It’s easy to see where each episode is going within the first twenty seconds – fostering an unacceptable level of predictability, give or take a couple twists. There are no ghosts, no phantoms, nothing that lingers inside a small box you didn’t know was there inside your head. They show us the end of the world but do little to help us confront it.
Today is the International Day of Light. According to a UNESCO note:
The International Day of Light is celebrated on 16 May each year, the anniversary of the first successful operation of the laser in 1960 by physicist and engineer, Theodore Maiman. This day is a call to strengthen scientific cooperation and harness its potential to foster peace and sustainable development.
While there are natural lasers, the advent of the laser in Maiman’s hands portended an age of manipulating light to make big advances in a variety of fields. Some applications that come immediately to mind are communications, laser-guided missiles, laser cooling and astronomy. I’m not sure why “the first successful operation of the laser” came to be commemorated as a ‘day of light’, but since it has, its association with astronomy is interesting.
Astronomers have found themselves collecting to protest the launch and operation of satellite constellations, notably SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper, after the first few Starlink satellites interfered with astronomical observations. SpaceX has since acknowledged the problem and said it will reduce the reflectance of the satellites it launches, but I don’t think the problem has been resolved. Further, the constellation isn’t complete: thousands of additional satellites will be launched in the coming years, and will be joined by other constellations as well, and the full magnitude of the problem may only become apparent then.
Nonetheless, astronomers’ opposition to such projects brought the idea of the night sky as a shared commons into the public spotlight. Just like arid lands, butterfly colonies and dense jungles are part of our ecological commons, and plateaus, shelves and valleys make up our geological commons, and so on – all from which the human species draws many benefits, an obstructed view of the night sky and the cosmic objects embedded therein characterise the night sky as a commons. And as we draw tangible health and environmental benefits from terrestrial commons, the view of the night sky has, over millennia, offered humans many cultural benefits as well.
However, this conflict between SpaceX, etc. on one hand and the community of astronomers on the other operates at a higher level, so to speak: its resolution in favour of astronomers, for example, still only means – for example – operating fewer satellites or satellites at a higher altitude, avoiding major telescopes’ fields of view, painting the underside with a light-absorbing substance, etc. The dispute is unlikely to have implications for the night sky as a commons of significant cultural value. If it is indeed to be relevant, the issue needs to become deep enough to accommodate, and continue to draw the attention and support of academics and corporations for, the non-rivalrous enjoyment of the night sky with the naked eye, for nothing other than to write better poems, have moonlight dinners and marvel at the stars.
As our fight to preserve our ecological commons has hardened in the face of a state bent on destroying them to line the pockets of its capital cronies, I think we have also started to focus on the economic and other tangible benefits this commons offers us – at the cost of downplaying a transcendental right to their sensual enjoyment. Similarly, we shouldn’t have to justify the importance of the night sky as a commons beyond saying we need to be able to enjoy it.
Of course such an argument is bound to be accused of being disconnected from reality, that the internet coverage Starlink offers will be useful for people living in as-yet unconnected or poorly connected areas – and I agree. We can’t afford to fight all our battles at once if we also expect to reap meaningful rewards in a reasonably short span of time, so let me invoke a reminder that the night sky is an environmental resource as well: “Let us be reminded, as we light the world to suit our needs and whims,” a 2005 book wrote, “that doing so may come at the expense of other living beings, some of whom detect subtle gradations of light to which we are blind, and for whom the night is home.”
More relevant to our original point, of the International Day of Light, astronomy and the night sky as a commons, a study published in 2016 reported the following data:
According to the study paper (emphasis added):
The sky brightness levels are those used in the tables and indicate the following: up to 1% above the natural light (0 to 1.7 μcd/m2; black); from 1 to 8% above the natural light (1.7 to 14 μcd/m2; blue); from 8 to 50% above natural nighttime brightness (14 to 87 μcd/m2; green); from 50% above natural to the level of light under which the Milky Way is no longer visible (87 to 688 μcd/m2; yellow); from Milky Way loss to estimated cone stimulation (688 to 3000 μcd/m2; red); and very high nighttime light intensities, with no dark adaption for human eyes (>3000 μcd/m2; white).
That is, in India, ‘only’ a fifth of the population experiences a level of light pollution that obscures the faintest view of the Milky Way – but in Saudi Arabia, at the other end of the spectrum, nearly 92% of the population is correspondingly unfortunate (not that I presume they care).
While India has a few red dots, it is green almost nearly everywhere and blue nearly everywhere, lest we get carried away. Why, in March this year, Dorje Angchuk, an engineer at the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle who has come to be celebrated for his beautiful photographs of the night sky over Ladakh, tweeted the following images that demonstrate how even highly localised light pollution, which may not be well-represented on global maps, can affect the forms and hues in which the night sky is available to us.
'THE ADVENT OF LIGHT IN OUR LIVES'
Given an option which one would you choose. Two image taken in a space of minutes. Was lucky the power went off at the time 2nd image was shot. Ursa major over Chemre monastary in UT Ladakh. pic.twitter.com/tqlp4vwkDB
The distribution of colours also reinforces our understanding of cities as economic engines – where more lights shine brighter and, although this map doesn’t show it, more pollutants hang in the air. The red dots over India coincide roughly with the country’s major urban centres: New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. Photographs of winter mornings in New Delhi show the sky as an orange-brown mass through which even the Sun is barely visible; other stars are out of the question, even after astronomical twilight.
But again, we’re not going to have much luck if our demands to reduce urban emissions are premised on our inability to have an unobstructed view of the night sky. At the same time we must achieve this victory: there’s no reason our street lamps and other public lighting facilities need to throw light upwards, that our billboards need to be visible from above, etc., and perhaps every reason for human settlements – even if they aren’t erected around or near optical telescopes – to turn off as many lights as they can between 10 pm and 6 am. The regulation of light needs to be part of our governance. And the International Day of Light should be a reminder that our light isn’t the only light we need, that darkness is a virtue as well.
Considering how much the Government of India has missed anticipating – the rise of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the crippling medical oxygen shortage, the circulation of new variants of concern – I have been wondering about why we assemble giant institutions like governments: among other things, they are to weather uncertainty as best as our resources and constitutional moralities will allow. Does this mean bigger the institution, the farther into the future it will be able to see? (I’m assuming here a heuristic that we normally are able to see, say, a day into the future with 51% uncertainty – slightly better than chance – for each event in this period.)
Imagine behemoth structures like the revamped Central Vista in New Delhi and other stonier buildings in other cities and towns, the tentacles of state control dictating terms in every conceivable niche of daily life, and a prodigious bureaucracy manifested as tens of thousands of civil servants most of whom do nothing more than play musical chairs with The Paperwork.
Can such a super-institution see farther into the future? It should be able to, I’d expect, considering the future – in one telling – is mostly history filtered through our knowledge, imagination, priorities and memories in the present. A larger government should be able to achieve this feat by amassing the talents of more people in its employ, labouring in more and more fields of study and experiment, effectively shining millions of tiny torchlights into the great dark of what’s to come.
Imagine one day that the Super Government’s structures grow so big, so vast that all the ministers determine to float it off into space, to give it as much room as it needs to expand, so that it may perform its mysterious duties better – something like the City of a Thousand Planets.
The people of Earth watch as the extraterrestrial body grows bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier. It attracts the attention of aliens, who are bemused and write in their notebooks: “One could, in principle, imagine ‘creatures’ that are far larger. If we draw on Landauer’s principle describing the minimum energy for computation, and if we assume that the energy resources of an ultra-massive, ultra-slothful, multi-cellular organism are devoted only to slowly reproducing its cells, we find that problems of mechanical support outstrip heat transport as the ultimate limiting factor to growth. At these scales, though, it becomes unclear what such a creature would do, or how it might have evolved.”
One day, after many years of attaching thousands of additional rooms, corridors, cabinets and canteens to its corse, the government emits a gigantic creaking sound, and collapses into a black hole. On the outside, black holes are dull: they just pull things towards them. That the pulled things undergo mind-boggling distortions and eventual disintegration is a triviality. The fun part is what happens on the inside – where spacetime, instead of being an infinite fabric, is curved in on itself. Here, time moves sideways, perpendicular to the direction in which it flows on the outside, in a state of “perpetual freefall”. The torch-wielding scientists, managers, IAS officers, teachers, thinkers are all trapped on the inner surface of a relentless sphere, running round and round, shining their lights to look not into the actual future but to find their way within the government itself.
None of them can turn around to see who it is that’s chasing them, or whom they’re chasing. The future is lost to them. Their knowledge of history is only marginally better: they have books to tell them what happened, according to a few historians at one point of time; they can’t know what the future can teach us about history. And what they already know they constantly mix and remix until, someday, like the progeny of generations of incest, what emerges is a disgusting object of fascination.
The government project is complete: it is so big that it can no longer see past itself.
Here’s wishing you a Happy Lord of the Rings Day! (Previous editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.) On this day in the book, Frodo, Sam and Smeagol (with help from Gandalf, Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, Faramir, Eowyn, Theoden, Eomer, Treebeard and the Ents, Meriadoc, Peregrin, Galadriel, Arwen and many, many others) destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Orodruin, throwing down Barad-dûr, bringing about the end of Sauron the Deceiver and forestalling the Age of Orcs, and making way for peace on Middle Earth.
Even though my – rather our – awareness of the different ways in which Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature more broadly are flawed increases every year, in the last year in particular I’ve come back to the trilogy more than before, finding both that it’s entwined in messy ways with various events in my life, having been the sole piece of fantasy I read between 1998 and 2005, and more importantly, because Lord of the Rings was more expansive than most similar work of its time, I often can’t help but see that much of what came after is responding to it in some way. (I know I’ve made this point before but, as in journalism, what stories we have available to tell doesn’t change just because we’re repeating ourselves. :D)
This said, I don’t know what Lord of the Rings means today, in 2021, simply because the last 15 months or so have been a lousy time for replenishing my creative energy. I haven’t been very able to think about stories, leave alone write them – but on the flip side, I’ve been very grateful for the work and energy of story writers and tellers, irrespective of how much of it they’ve been able to summon, whether one sentence or one book, or the forms in which they’ve been able to summon it, whether as a Wikipedia page, a blog post, a D&D quest or a user’s manual. I’m thankful for all the stories that keep us going just as I’m mindful that everything, even the alt text of images, is fiction. More power to anyone thinking of something and putting it down in words – and also to your readers.
