We emerged from the cool darkness of the cave into the dry heat and the bright fierce sunshine of Texas, south central USA. I was there to research the character of empty places in my attempts to build a complete picture of the everything wilderness. The cities are full of everything, easy to see; but how do you see everything where there is nothing? My colleague Saski and I had been on a tour of the Longhorn Caverns in the company of a sadistic tour guide who suddenly snapped off the lantern and plunged us into blackness. He made us count to a hundred before switching it on again.
“Pretty dark down here, huh?” he said. It was – it was total. The caverns snake underground for miles and were once home to a million bats, before the tourist operation arrived. It’s so lightless down there it’s like being blind, and without the bats’ early warning radar, hope turns into fear. The tour guide could have been pulling a Bowie knife from his belt and getting ready to gut us for all we would have known. After all, it was Texas.
Saski and I were taking a break from work and had come out to the middle of nowhere up on the edge of the plateau. We were two hundred miles out of Austin, and it was so quiet and remote there weren’t even any planes in the sky. The land for miles around was flat, red sand, dotted with scrubby trees and littered with little rocks like the ones on the surface of Mars. After the caverns we cruised on up to the Buchanan Dam state park. In this part of the world the run off from the sudden storms that whip up in the heat are trapped by dams into turbid reservoir lakes. All the land around is privately owned, except for these water margins, which do double duty as state parks. And it is here, standing on the concrete wall of the dam, that you can look out for miles across the flat landscape and see no one at all.
“This looks just like India,” she said. “Where I come from the land is also this flat and the same colour of red. It even has those little black trees.”
“Homesick?”
“God, no. If my father found out I’d eaten barbecue, he’d lock me up!” She smiled with a flash of white. Her hair and eyes are black, her skin’s the colour of a chestnut. Face like an arrow. She would look like a native of this place if her expression held less history in it. “You know what’s different, though? Here there’s no one. Maybe” – she squinted into the distance –“is that a cow? I don’t know. In India we would be looking across the land like this and we would see little groups of people, not crowds, just five or six together, maybe with an oxcart, maybe working the land. But we’d look out like this and see little spots of human movement, all over.”
The population density varies – India is eleven times more densely populated than the USA – but the landscape is full of people grafting and trading, across the whole surface of the earth. Across the ocean, too. Let us jump space and time together to the Arctic Ocean and the year twenty thirty five: a merchant ship bound from Rotterdam to Yokohama beats North at nought degrees between Kong Frederick the Eighth’s land, North Greenland, and Spitzbergen. It is making for the Bering Strait on the other side of the Arctic Ocean, straight over the North Pole. Kong is Norwegian for king; this is an area that has belonged to Norway since the Vikings, but until recently was so seized with pack ice for the whole year round that no one else was interested. Now that the polar pack ice has melted, it is the new short route from Europe to South East Asia, and Norwegian interest has been engulfed by commerce. Trade route opportunities like this have not existed since the discovery of the new world.
This upbeat fantasy in which the catastrophe of the melting pack ice is spun in the other direction, is delivered by an urbane party in a twenty-minute presentation called ‘Flat Earth’. He is never more than arm’s length from his laptop, on whose screen elaborate parametric diagrams trace possible futures for the human artifice, on this occasion projected across the wall behind him like a psychedelic light show. Perhaps he is practicing for the next TED convention, where alternative mainstreamers, rational optimists the whole bunch of them, gather to discuss Technology, Entertainment and Design. And yet for all his TED-like no problem if we all pull together manner he is spellbinding. He talks about his polymath hero Buckminster Fuller, who invented the idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Back in the days of the moon exploration Fuller used to point at the picture of earthrise taken from the surface of the moon, a thing never before seen in the entire being-in-the-world of Homo sapiens, and describe how this simple icon, this image of the fabulously blue and luminous planet all alone in the black vacuum of intergalaxity, ushered in a new understanding of everything. From now on, he said, we shall live in the awareness that what we do to the world we do to each other. We live in a global community of interdependence, on this planet that is a space station, whose safe passage through the future is our responsibility. Spaceship Earth.
Fuller discovered that if he transferred an image of the spherical globe onto a twenty-sided solid and then unfolded the plates onto a flat surface, he could produce a map of the world that did not distort the proportions of the continents. More than that, depending on the way he cut the joins and laid out the plates, the entire landmass of the world from Antarctica to Australia could be represented as one contiguous entity – so making a one-world platform from which to promote the theories of world management that would be needed in piloting Spaceship Earth.
“Look at this,” says the urbane party reaching over to his computer, and shows us the dymaxion map, as it was called. “It’s like the original single continent, Pangea. The globalized world. Futures traders call it the flat earth, because it has no barriers to trade. I call it the flat earth because inside my computer,” patting the machine like a little dog, “there is an algorithm tracing the entire surface, oceans and all, in a single, very long, and need I say flat, set of symbols.”
So he has a digital dymaxion map in there! But what does he mean, oceans and all? It is the ocean that negates all flat earth theories, because the ocean has nowhere to go in them: You can see it on the flat earth maps, including Fuller’s dymaxion: the ambiguous edge of things where a ship on the perimeter ocean is in danger of sailing straight over the edge and getting lost in space. If the ocean is to be on the earth it must cling to the surface, which implies gravity, which in turn implies a spherical body. In fact the spherical earth was the standard ancient model, a stationary sphere around which the heavens turned and towards the centre of which everything fell. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that Copernicus added spin to the picture: he described the rotation of the earth, which gives us day and night, its tilted axis, that gives us the seasons, and its progress round the sun, that brings the annual solstice festivals. These cosmic dynamics are what give movement to the ocean, and the dispersal of the continents, and the swirling storms and the releasing of the planet’s interior energy, the factors that promulgated life itself. Just think of the moon, with the complication of its fertility signature, its twenty eight day cycle, which brings it to the same point above the Earth a little later each twenty four hour day and which drags the ocean tides back and forth a little later each day giving host to a plethora of little sea creatures opening and closing in sync – without the spinning, spherical earth there would be no life and no survival. How could we possibly pilot such a phenomenon?
Meanwhile on a cliff face high above the pounding waves, sea birds nest on tiny ledges safe from predators but with no room to build a nest. Their eggs have evolved towards the conical so when they roll they roll in a circle, and not over the edge and into the sea: the cliff face habitat has bent their lives. And here comes a rock climber, foolhardy, brave, agile, sinew snapping, not on a mission to steal the eggs, but to prove to himself he can climb all the way to the top. He measures his action in spacetime, in space and time simultaneously; exactly where his fingertips and toes have purchase on the minute fissures of rock, exactly how long his twanging muscles can hold the position. Space and time are inseparable in the dynamic world, and just being here, just being alive, is a strenuous activity. He comes face to face with a razorbill on its ledge, which stares at him with its little black eye. The birds on the cliff have no fear of humans. “Spaceship earth?” He yells at it, the sweat of hard work pouring off him: “This is no space ship! We should call it cliff face earth!”