By contrast, computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin do have an important part to play in building and thinking alternatives for the Earth layer of The Stack, and we shouldn ’ t dismiss their potential based on the na ï vet é of their initial goals and marketing. As a rule of thumb, I recommend more megastructures, not fewer, and yet Planetary Skin cannot really “ manage what it measures ” because ultimately it cannot measure what it thinks it can measure. Instead the Earth layer should be designed by thinking at the spatial and temporal scales of the ecological emergency itself, which means to build with the self-amplifying irruptions, not by policing them. Is the reliance on the identification of ecological noise — a standing enemy of excess and waste to be disciplined and normalized — also to foreclose possibilities and to guarantee that Anthropocenic global society, as it exists now, can only be the antecedent enemy of another Stack-to-come? If we fashion the Earth layer of The Stack in these terms, we have set ourselves up as the enemy of the enemy of the enemy of the friend we hope to conjure up. The math is against us.
Finally, as for the scale and program of the lines and frames we inscribe and the worlds we present by them, I would rather that design draw too big than draw too small. As we know, Anthropocenic energy platforms largely rely on sucking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them in the sky, but planetary-scale computation cannot really grow if it powered by the oozy corpses of Mesozoic vegetation. Can we power the planet other than by eating the planet, or at least find a better way to do so? Splitting atoms (or, better, merging them) still holds some promise, as does the direct capture and storage of the energy shining down every day from our sun. While all of Earth ’ s civilizations are by definition solar powered, if sometimes indirectly (consider the ancient photosynthesis that made possible what goes into your gas tank), the amount of solar energy we use is nowhere near the total amount theoretically available to us. Thinking big, we recall that in his 1960 paper, “ Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation, ” Freeman Dyson surmised that a sufficiently advanced civilization would come to require not just more energy from its sun, but eventually all the energy from its sun. <sup>75</sup> He supposed that one way to do this would be to build a sphere around the sun that would capture its energy (minus a bit of infrared radiation) and use it to support engineering projects elsewhere. The sphere could be a solid ball or a latticework of satellite collectors arranged in longitudinal or latitudinal rings, or perhaps arranged in triangular networks like a geodesic dome. As noted above, currently the global economy uses about 15 terawatts of energy, but consider what it could do if it had several orders of magnitude more than that (Earth now gets about
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Earth Layer