[an Island Studies work-in-progress]
What to expect of a volatine planet, a cosmic island in the Kantian sense, confronting techno-climatic entropy?
The entropy wave, for instance, has reached an exponential rate in terms of commercial and intergovernmental cooperation laying down the initial template for a space colony, beginning with Mars. In the age of space exploration, islands have become consistent astrobiological models of alien planets’ signature of habitability (Fitzpatrick and Erlandson, 2018, p. 3), involving ‘classical anthropic fine-tuning’ mechanism that provides primary optics for interplanetary exploration based on island variability, liquid materiality, or soil composition, coupled with volcanic activities (ibid.). Astrobiological modeling is ultimately based on ‘archipelagic seashores’ where Schrodinger’s famous question, What is life?, establishes the all-in register of inhabiting an alien ecology (Circovic, 2012, p. 302). But classical fine-tuning is not immune to pathological conditions that bear upon utopian and dystopian fantasy generation peculiar to the Earth’s terra firma. A kind of liquid utopia on a second Earth, a dead planet, underwrites the search for past life on Mars, characterized by the ambition to reverse entropy, a way to avert the planet Earth’s future, albeit in a new spatiotemporal colony hostile to organic life. This kind of necro-fantasy by island variability has proven to be pathologically conducive for earthly tourism, which in past histories incited romantic fascination for remote places and eventually the military instinct for conquest. Its augmented interplanetary template for Mars, the potential tourist colony, at least for an indefinite period until it becomes a permanent human settlement, is well underway.
This points us to the retro-dystopia of liquid imaginaries on an alien environment, highlighted by space exploration in the era of techno-climatic entropy, indicating a planetary shift that is capable of existence ‘beyond substance’ (Stiegler, 2017, p. 32 ), technically beyond life in the Kantian ethico-teleological sense of immortality based on ‘anthropic fine-tuning’ that goes hand in hand with the Copernican revolution, which is island-based, the ‘land of truth.’ The truth of which the Earth is an island is based on the idea of the cosmic archipelago, a ‘wholly completed creation,’ such that ‘if we could step outside this evolved sphere, we would see chaos and a ‘random scattering of elements’ (quoted by Cirkovic, 2012, p. 44). This cosmic archipelago provides the overall mantra of territorialization that started on the Earth’s terra firma.
To this extent, however, island-inspired imaginaries, fantasies, and utopias, despite their appeal to transversality, deterritorialization, and ambiguity, as Edouard Glissant argues (in Wiedorn, 2018), pointing to their protential autonomy from systems or ‘evolved spheres,’ are themselves at risk of hyper-technical inversions in the era of techno-climatic emergency where systems are about to implode that drives the pursuit of a second Earth.
The crux of the matter is one cannot in principle perform utopian imaginings on Mars, which is the future of a planet straining itself in utopian dreaming. Mars is our anterior future where the possibility of new realism, more precisely, new island realism, is inconceivable.
'Being is the scandal of Nature waiting for a new host' 