Our planet is our spaceship. As we hurtle through space at incomprehensible speeds it provides us the most incredible life support system there is. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the food we eat, or the weather we enjoy on our tropical vacations - they are all thanks to the system keeping us alive and healthy - our biosphere.
When you begin thinking about it, it’s astounding just how many different kinds of value our biosphere brings us. Mangrove forests protect our coastlines from storms while grasslands protect us from runaway erosion. Microbes tend to our soils and enable the digestion of our food. That feeling you get when you complete a hike and get to see that incredible view, the beauty of a New England fall, or getting lost in the metropolis that is a reef - all thanks to our biosphere. We were inspired to fly by birds, took note from whales in designing the fins of our windmills, and have crafted many life saving medicines by learning from the chemicals produced in the everyday lives of rare and exotic species. Beyond being our life support system, the biosphere supports our culture, our creativity, our happiness, and our very sense of wonder. I think it’s far from a stretch to say that our biosphere is currently the most valuable resource we have.
Today we find ourselves in the Anthropocene - an age marked by our incredible power. Thanks to the technologies that we have birthed over the past couple of centuries we, as a species, now have the ability to enact world altering change that used to take millions of years or meteoric intervention. Our most run of the mill actions now regularly wipe out species, reshape ecosystems, empty seas, and, perhaps most famously, change the very composition of our climate. All of this means that we can no longer passively depend on our biosphere remaining that most valuable resource that it is today - given the impact even our most passive actions have, non action has simply become uniformed and unintentioned action. Therefore, if we hope to continue enjoying the benefits of the very thing keeping us alive, we must place active stewardship of the earth at the center of our priorities as a species.
But this challenge will be among the most difficult ever undertaken by our species for one very simple reason: our biosphere, the thing most of us take for granted, is the most complicated system in the known universe. This becomes readily apparent as one becomes cognizant of the vast scale and yet infinitesimal resolution our biosphere operates at. On the one hand the biosphere is mind numbingly broad in its scope. Changes to oceanic feeding grounds at the poles create sweeping changes to the trophic webs in every major fishing region throughout our oceans, our rainforests act as pumps that alter the global climate, and reefs and mangroves literally shape the coastlines of our continents. Yet, on the other hand, the biosphere operates at the minutest of scales. Losing a particular microbe from your microbiome can make foods you once enjoyed intolerable, the quality of our soils are dependent on the cycling performed by worms, protists, and bacteria, and a tiny virus now colloquially called Covid-19 caused the world economy to crash. The biosphere is a hyper nonlinear system that operates at infinitesimal resolution across a global scale; and thanks to our technological ascendancy we now must actively manage our relationship with it. This will be one of the most difficult tasks we ever take on.
In order to be successful stewards of our planet we too will need to be able to take on this incredible breadth of resolution and scale - earth stewardship itself must be able to operate at local resolution across global scale. Thankfully the very technology that has put us in this position makes this possible. This then is the mission of the Fjorgyn project - to apply the technological ascendancy that has placed us in the Anthropocene to enable local resolution across global scale within earth stewardship itself.
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