PHOTOGRAPH BY WIRED JP

*This article was originally written in Japanese. Article in Japanese is here.

The Anthropocene and Nausicaä

The last of the great naturalists Alexander von Humboldt once “discovered” that the earth is a living organism. He said that everything—including all the living things on the Earth, the atmosphere, the ocean, the biosphere, and both organic and inorganic substances—are connected together to create a “web of life”.

The idea that the Earth is a huge organism that maintains homeostasis is widely known these days. But we use this idea without understanding what its implications. To enjoy a thing’s usefulness without knowing its mechanism is sometimes referred to as having an “intellectual debt”. For example, people have been taking aspirin for almost a hundred years without knowing why it works. Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, who appeared in the previous issue of WIRED, presses adults to “pay our debt”, meaning that the time has come to repay our “intellectual debt” with respect to this planet.

In addition, sustainability and a circular economy are advocated along with the elimination of plastics and the practice of permaculture based on the idea of ethical consumption and a “One Planet Lifestyle”. It is good news that we are expanding our ethical stance to include all beings connected by the web of life, but on the other hand, human beings have had a major impact on the Earth’s ecosystem and climate. (In terms of geological time, the present era of human activity is now being called the Anthropocene.) If you look back in the history books on the activities of people at the time of the Industrial Revolution when Humboldt was active, I think you will agree that not only do we need to look to human ethics for solutions to repaying our intellectual debt; we also need a Plan B. That is what Deep Tech is about.

The idea that more technology can deal with or solve the problems caused by current technology is sometimes criticized as “technology supremacism”. Despite that, I think that the most humble and sincere attitude we can take now is to seek gradual solutions through technology while accepting that technology isn’t almighty and cannot solve all our problems. This is because (as Kevin Kelly described in What Technology Wants) technology is also part of the “web of life”.

This is what underlies our intention to feature Deep Tech in this month’s issue. We are not shouting “Back to nature!” (Because untouched nature no longer exists anywhere.) Nor are we attempting to engage in marketing or greenwashing. Instead we are sincerely asking our readers whether you are ready to take on “nature through technology”. I think this is a role WIRED should embrace. In our special feature entitled “Deep Tech for the Earth”, we are pursuing a positive approach in trying to solve the problems of this planet, which is a web of life, by combining “deep range technology” and “deep social issues”.

In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a manga series written and illustrated by Hayao Miyazaki, industrial civilization has been destroyed in the Seven Days of Fire, a global war perpetrated by the great God Warriors, and a poisonous forest called the Sea of Corruption covers much of the planet. However (spoiler alert), I can reveal that the Sea of Corruption was an Earth purification device created by the last scientists of the industrial age, while Nausicaä and the other people living at the time of the story are a kind of transhuman, and when the purification is complete and the “old world” of civilization is planned to be restored on the cleansed Earth, the transhumans are destined to no longer to be able to live. At the climax of the tale, Nausicaä refuses to “revive mankind” and chooses instead to live with the Sea of Corruption. In so doing, Nausicaä is questioning our resolution regarding how humanity will handle the Anthropocene era.

In today’s world, we are told that we have to make a shift in design away from mechanocentrism and technocentrism and towards anthropocentrism, but the real theme of this issue is the future that may lie beyond anthropocentricism, that is, the possibility of post-anthropocentricism. (And we must also take into consideration the contradictions and deceptions of human thinking about the Post-Anthropocene.)

In a recent book, James Lovelock, who advocated the Gaia hypothesis half a century ago, presents his concept of a new era, the “Novacene”. This will be a time when super-intelligences abound on the Earth, although humans will continue to be necessary for Gaia’s homeostasis, albeit playing a role comparable to that of plants today. This unexpected conclusion of Lovelock’s, who drew on Humboldt’s ideas to provide theoretical support for the environmental movement, also gives us a perspective removed from anthropocentrism that goes beyond the idea of ecology in a narrow sense.

Will the Post-Anthropocene be a time of beautiful nature without humans, or of a super-intelligence that thrives, or will the human ego attempting to maintain “human civilization” impede its progress? At least, the “deep tech for the Earth” that we should be considering now will be something that indicates a path toward attaining a new constancy as an “organism” that coexists with any new technology, whether super-intelligent, robotic, or whatever. At that time, I wonder what part will human beings play in the “web of life”?

*Japanese version is here.

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