Geoarcanity

Every season comes to an end. In geology, eons are separated by physical markers. In our planet’s story there was the Hadean, then the Archean, then the Proterozoic, and we now live in the Phanerozoic – the era of visible life. The marker of what’s visible is anthropocentric since we’re the species doing the naming. In history, eras are marked and demarcated by events deemed important to humankind. Pre-history was the time before humans showed up. Anthropocentric, of course.

But once humankind gained the power to terraform its own planet, geology and history coincide. The former operates on long time scales, hard to imagine by humans, and seemingly independent of our needs and wants. The latter is the quick blink of an eye in what has been a long saga, although we often portray it as the story’s apex. In The Stone Sky, a fitting conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy that began with The Fifth Season, the cosmic and the present sliver of time are juxtaposed. The more some things change, the more they remain the same. Can the cycle be broken?

The dynamics of life – biochemical life from my point of view as a chemist – is about energy transduction. Collecting energy. Moving energy. Dissipating energy. These seem like separate activities, but their boundaries blur as you delve deep, much like the artificial demarcations of geology and history. Seemingly blind chemical forces do this. Seemingly not-so-blind human history does the same; the digital ecosystem today is a growing beast, hungry in its energy consumption. A not-so-ecological ecosystem perhaps. The seemingly technological ‘progress’ of humanity runs on better ways to extract and use energy. Most of our energy is utilized from the sun; but the active geochemistry of our planet provides an alternate source.

We’ve been manipulating energy throughout history, but we don’t understand its fundamental essence. Try to define energy, and it dynamically slips out of our static strictures. We don’t know what it is. But we can count it. At least, that’s what I tell my students on the first day of second-semester general chemistry. N. K. Jemisin does a masterful job tackling these themes in The Stone Sky in three illuminating, yet cryptic, paragraphs (in italics below).

All energy is the same, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.

This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. The great machine called the Plutonic Engine is the instrument. We are its tuners.

And this is the goal: Geoarcanity. Geoarcanity seeks to establish an energetic cycle of infinite efficiency. If we are successful, the world will never know want or strife again… or so we are told. The conductors explain little beyond what we must know to fulfil our roles. It is enough to know that we… will set humanity on a new path toward an unimaginably bright future.

In Jemisin’s telling of the tale, the quest for energy is Geoarcanity. I like her use of the prefix Geo because it encompasses more than rocks or solid earth. The geosphere comprises the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. All teeming with energy! But mysterious. Arcane. Geoarcanity is modern technological humankind’s Tower of Babel dream, perpetual motion machines to cold fusion notwithstanding. We’re building better energy extractors, better energy storage units, more efficient devices. Our technogizmos are becoming more compact and it’s amazing what they can do!

This is magic, after all, not science. There will always be parts of it that no one can fathom… Put enough magic into something nonliving and it becomes alive. Put enough lives into a storage matrix, and they retain a collective will, of sorts.

Jemisin intricately weaves energy and magic, and presents an intriguing hypothesis. If magic is the dynamic of life, a sufficient compaction of the ‘stuff’ will turn non-living matter into something we would characterize as life. Magic is ill-defined, as is energy. Geoarcanity attempts to concentrate this ingredient into a matrix – giving the planet its seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. There are echoes of The Matrix in the dystopian tale. History repeats itself. Revolutions. A new season begins.