· Flocks of Light ·
The two images represent an original science fiction scenario where upon facing multiple existential crises such as global warming and energy shortage, human beings in the future launched the Dyson Swarm Project to harvest energy from the sun. On each Dyson Swarm mothership, millions of cubic-foot-sized satellite solar batteries are attached. These batteries are named Birds for two reasons: the seasonal sailing schedule of the Dyson Swarms in space is not unlike the seasonal migration of birds, and that the behavior of each bird follows simple rules that collectively manifest complex flocking behaviors. Stations built on Earth would receive charged Birds from the space and launch them back towards the mothership to be recharged every three months. The arriving Birds were shiny, fully loaded, couriers of warmth and light, and those departing were dim and faded. As a result, the lives of humans become dependent upon these simple robots, and the coming and going of flocks of light brought by Birds becomes the new indicator of the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, while their radiance has become a cosmic memorial for what life used to be on Earth.
Collaborators: Junran Yang & Lucas Frozza Secco
“First came the Moon, and they were all happy with it. Then came Mars, and they thrived on it. We stayed here. This is our land, after all. This is where we buried our dead, and where our dead buried theirs”. Winston’s disconnected thoughts kept swirling at the back of his mind as he commuted in the dark to the vitamin factory. For an old man like him, the daily lack of sunlight was a constant, lurking agony.
It started slowly, too long ago, way before his time. Small satellites were the baby steps, thousands of them. They formed machine constellations, silently observing with their machine eyes, carefully listening with their machine ears. Before anyone could notice, they swarmed the skies. “Spores and parasites on low Earth orbit”, Winston would have said if he had been there, even though his survival now depended on the parasites he would have been so eager to curse.
The real leaps came shortly after. For decades they had delivered inflamed speeches about colonizing the Moon, about how the pristine footprints of Armstrong and Aldrin would be trampled by the masses. It had been a prophecy, and it was indeed fulfilled: the first human colonies were established on the Moon. Winston had no idea how they made it that far, he couldn’t care less, but it had been the dawn of a new era, and that much he had to agree with. The successful lunar colonization inevitably led men to Mars, and slowly but steadily more and more groups of earthlings embarked on the journey to become the first Martians.
However, this cosmic endeavor had a cost. The laws of thermodynamics never fail to hold true: since energy doesn’t come out of nothingness, progress needs fuel. They burned all the coal and gas they could find and fissioned every atom they could mine. They cut, wrecked and incinerated, and it still wasn’t enough. Earth was sterilized and devastated, but they needed more energy, and like Icarus they soared into the Sun armed with wax wings.
When the first Bee was built, Winston was in his early 20’s. It was a worldwide effort to initiate the ultimate structure for humanely achievable energy production: the Dyson Swarm Project. The youth around the globe were hired to mass produce Bees, and Winston promptly joined the seemingly noble effort. Thousands of Bees were launched during the first few years, and countless more after that.
After years of menial work in many stages of the assembly line, Winston came to understand the design of the Bees. They were the unit cells of the Swarm, which aimed to surround the Sun and harness all its energy. Each Bee carried a photovoltaic panel of colossal dimensions, but made of such light and flexible material that it was folded during launch and only expanded to full stretching at the final destination. Connected to the panel, a large cylinder housed those who were sent along to maintain and navigate the Bees. With the panel in a fixed position, the cylinder rotated at high speed about the axis along its height, providing a fake source of gravity for those inside it through the centrifugal effect.
Over the years, before quitting his job, Winston built the Bees’ living quarters, their agricultural sections for a modest food production, their external layers of lead to protect navigators from solar radiation, the labyrinth of entry and launch channels for the countless Birds and virtually every other part of the system. He used to believe he was doing the right thing for humanity, that the Swarm was the future and that the future was bright. “But it was not”, he realized later.
Darkness started descending upon Earth. At first, each passing year was a bit colder than the previous one. Daylight slowly got dimmer and dimmer, and a growing number of people would swear they could see Sunspots at naked eye. The Bees were sent to hive at the Earth-Sun Lagrangian L1 point. Over there, far beyond the lunar orbit, they diligently collected the light rays that would otherwise reach Earth. There is no nighttime at the L1 point, and there was no rest for the Swarm. Slowly but surely, the hive grew to block more and more of the precious sunlight, casting upon many patches of land on Earth a cold, wintry night.
“Perhaps they knew all along that it would turn out this way”, Winston bitterly thought as his train arrived at the vitamin factory. The large shadows created by the Swarm hindered agriculture almost everywhere on Earth, and factories like the one he now worked in became what kept many people alive. The terrestrial environment was doomed from the start, but back then, in his days of youth, Winston believed the Swarm to be Earth’s redemption, not its epitaph.
On the other side of town, Carl woke up and stretched his arms. His skin was pale, much like the other kids who were born in those dark times. The indoor air was cold and the outlets had no power. “You’re a big boy now,” grandpa Winston told him the previous day, while hopelessly trying to turn on the bedroom lamp, “and big kids have important duties”. Carl’s was to pick up a Bird from the distribution station and bring it home.
He had learned in school that very, very long ago, the Birds were small satellites launched into low orbit to take pictures from high above and to perform other unimportant tasks, but got repurposed once the Dyson Swarm Project was initiated. Now, all of them contained high-capacity batteries and served as the main energy transfer between the Bees and Earth.
Carl took his morning vitamins, anxiously put on the heavy winter coat he wore all year round and got outside. He could see the distribution station from far away: a tall tower, lit up and bright. The stations would receive charged Birds from space and launch back towards the hive those which needed to be recharged by the solar panels. The arriving Birds were shiny, fully loaded, couriers of warmth and light, and those departing were dim and faded.
At the distribution station, people gathered to receive their batteries. Children and the elderly, women and men, all talkative and excited as the glowing flock landed. They were handed one Bird per household. Both regulars and first-timers like Carl shared a certain sense of joyful awe while holding their glowing, charged creatures. “You’re back and forth with light, aren’t you?” asked Carl with a smirk to the shiny Bird on his hands. He observed the other people walk away with their batteries, each of them lighting up a small patch of the surrounding darkness. It is true that life on Earth was not very easy these days, but in fact it had never been. And that never kept humans from being stubbornly cheerful even in the gloomy moments.
Back home, he pulled a faded Bird from the energy plug and attached the new one. The heating system started running and lamps went bright. Electricity was guaranteed for another couple of months or so. Waiting for grandpa Winston to come back home from work, he looked out the window. He could see one or two areas of a faraway city less affected by the Swarm’s shadow, bathed by a couple faint rays of sunlight. He also saw more birds arriving at another distant station and decided he wanted to explore all of these new places. “Earth is outer space”, he said to himself.
Carl heard in school that more than two hundred years ago an old mischievous Bird called Voyager was sent to outer space to never come back. But Voyager grew homesick and took a last picture of Earth before it got too far. A wise man then looked at the picture and saw that Earth was but a lonely, pale blue dot. That man was infused with compassion for the humble dot, and asked everyone he could find to help him care for it. Carl looked through the window again and saw the distant, faint glimmer of human technology on Mars and the Moon. “Our pale blue dot is not alone anymore”, he thought, and was filled with hope.