175 petawatts of radiant energy from the sun, and we are about 150 million kilometers away). Science-fiction authors, Charles Stross in particular, have updated the Dyson sphere conjecture to include macrocomputational geoengineering. <sup>76</sup> Beyond collecting energy to run machines somewhere else, the solar megastructure would also be a vast star-sized computer, known as a Matrioshka brain, that is able to support unimaginably complex and powerful synthetic calculation and intelligence. <sup>77</sup> Perhaps some variation on this sort of megastructure will be, as Stross has suggested, composed not around a star but around a planet, such as Earth, where it will use the raw material of the stellar body itself as a computational substrate, and perhaps (like Galactus) also eventually consuming that planet by its operations. It is of course impossible to know what lifeforms will survive the Anthropocene, let alone if they will want to engineer carnivorous Turing machines at this scale, but such conjectures help coax a necessary shift in our thinking about the ground and figure of natural and synthetic computational landscapes. At stake for The Stack is not only a design and engineering program but a political-philosophical maneuver as well; though as should be clear, these are all but impossible to untangle from one another. As such it may be that the purpose of the Stack megastructure is less to archive and rationalize our bizarre digital cultures than to deliver the platform logics that will allow geodesign and geoengineering their full due as modes of governance. For this, the Earth layer is not only The Stack ’ s schematic foundation; it is also the driving force and form of its logic: the world remaking itself in waves, bit by bit, pebble by pebble.
Earth Layer
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