Axiom 1: The Emergence of Aliveness. Matter in the universe is constituted of atomic alliances that formed molecular communities millennia ago. Energy, and therefore liveliness, is present in all molecular communities. Aliveness occurs through the desirous convergence of molecular communities. Thus, energy is the connective tissue of alivenesses. Molecules cross community domains and begin to move and perceive in synchronous alliances to form mobile convergent entities.
Urgent Message from ₻ to ₯: Did you perceive the full planetary communiqué that came in just now from Signalers in far orbit? In case you’re still receiving down there at ocean depth, they say it felt first like a ripple. The smallest of energetic disturbances that reverberated the millennia of stillness between our planet and the Blue planet. It’s so different from other signals. Unlike the chemical play of regular solar ejecta or the wash of heat that announces an interplanetary weather event, this whispery ripple, according to the communiqué, was almost unobservable.
Message from ₯ to ₻: Yes! It felt like a prickling all along our collective body. A sense of excitement that was obviously different from the hydrothermal currents that thermoenergize us up from below. It felt like it was falling down from above, like an avalanche of otherkind energy. Where are you now?
Message from ₻ to ₯: We were listening to fungi we found in this previously impossible-to-scale ridge. You’d really love what we’re doing over here. Of course, each of us retracted our perceptages wherever we were and came back to camp to commune properly because we were so overwhelmed by the news.
Remember when we were young, all those lessons each year about poor Blue? The so-called “orderly planet”? We can’t believe we’re witnesses to the arrival of real convergent boundary crossing, a disordering on that planet! We’re still reverberating. It’s a dream come true for anyone in the Seeking fields.
All the memories are flowing among us at the camp. Remember being so absolutely terrified by a planet stuck in a non-convergence phase? The horror of distinction, suspension, of a time without communing? We remember being so obsessed about non-ecogenesis on Blue, the paralyzing terror of it as the Elders described it in old stories.
Message from ₯ to ₻: Or as it was portrayed by our Signaler kin in orbit on asteroids. Back then, we thought their position in space removed them from all the liveliness here, but now, we are envious! From their position, they can relay Blue’s sensory changes to the energetic gradient before we can feel them on the surface.
Message from ₻ to ₯: So true! Ahh, a cluster-kin has just reminded us… here’s a poem we wrote during Seeker training. At this moment it seems funny now how emotional I got about that static planet. Trying to convey what I imagined fungi to feel like being stuck on a planet without convergent bacterial partners. We thought you’d laugh at this… but that you’d also understand:
Small sad still spores
Holed up alone in Blue’s surface
When will we begin?
Message from ₯ to ₻: That does make us laugh! If you could see all the bubbles around us, you’d be sure we’d turned into a geyser! Though more seriously, it too reminds us why we became a Seeker. As Seekers, we seek relations, a desire not to know completely, but rather, to resonate with the forces that make that connection and try to make it sense-able. When we attend to the connections of newly converged entities, the learning is more than just about the entity itself; we learn about ourselves and how we are resonantly made. Sharing that feeling-knowing, as we are now through our sensory messages, and along the gradient with our Clusters and beyond them, the Signalers… well, it transforms us all. To Seek is to choose to encounter and openly perceive… to receive entities that are entirely different. Forgive our vehemence, but the ripple also has our energy reeling! This signal we picked up feels like a warm unsettling and disequilibrium that makes alive our very being and reminds us that this work is bigger than us. Bigger than our planets and the asteroids that soar in the cosmos.
You know, your mention of memories sparked mine. There was that first time we went out Seeking. It’s one thing to be young, surrounded by kin in your Cluster, there is a feeling that is as elastic as the skin that stretches across our outsides and as strong as the bonds that give definition to our form. Both skin and bonds keep us together. But it is a choice, to merge, interact, relate, engage beyond that Cluster. Our Cluster is a choice made with and across the porous forms of skin and bonds that make us up. That first time Seeking, we couldn’t imagine the feeling, the high energy jolt that connecting with entities unconnected to our Cluster networks would be like. Our oldest memory is of brushing by the coral that wend across the sands by the eastern shallows in the South Ocean. It was vibrant with the energy of its own distinct nascent and past aliveness. Of the beings who have passed through the caverns it embodies, the fissures in its forms. We remember feeling a wash of coraline energy. It was scary on some level. That connection couldn’t be undone. That memory—of the uncontrollable expansion through experience, and the simultaneous understanding of the catalytic potential of difference-convergence for making and sustaining life—stays with us to the core.
Message from ₻ to ₯: Scared? No way! We were thrilled. And even more so now. We remember the feeling of anticipation during advanced training. The day we learned, without a doubt, that molecular communities on Blue may have been connecting, but the axioms of aliveness, as we perceive it, weren’t yet in concert. The need to ally wasn’t there yet, although teachers always got a little vague about why that was… We remember the explanations, do you? Like: “Encounters among molecules never seemed to spark the commitment to sharing difference.” The whole thing about how, for ecogenesis to happen, molecules on Blue weren’t yet_[message interference]_enough to tend toward cooperating outside their fields. Then protobacterial clumps could form, and then they could merge into sharing-based communities… the teachers would go on and on. There were so many contingencies! Even today we find the process beguiling—the genesis of ecology, when singular molecular linearities converge into diversities that continue? It’s hard to imagine that reeling, animated dis-coordinations! But perhaps we will be witnessing it now.
Message from ₯ to ₻: Yes, perhaps it is. We feel a bit nervous about it at the same time we feel this thrill, as you say. There is this old Elder song, somehow this stanza feels like the right thing to send back to you:
Moving,
Desire makes convergence
Pulling-forces spark change.
Converging,
Choice unmakes order
Choosing catalyzes life.
Alive we begin.
Message from ₻ to ₯: That passage, we can’t help but feel this resonates just as much now, with the ripple, as it did when we first heard it. Perhaps with Blue, we’ll change once again, with a new kind of recognition of what convergence means across planetary assemblages. Something we have only understood in our connection to asteroids! Maybe, just maybe, this means, we’ll become more aware of the desirous forces of convergence, when the mysterious energetic shift to convergence begins.
Message from ₯ to ₻: We hope so! But now that we think about it, isn’t there more…
Axiom 2: The Presence of Nurturance: Nutrient molecules are present in nearly every non-stellar astronomical body. Aliveness occurs when molecular convergences convert nutrients to the processes of convergent nurturance. Nurturance is the ingestion and shared processing of external molecular matter by molecularly convergent entities.
Message from ₻ to ₯: Another pulse! We have an idea! Shall we go to a Communing Place where we can send/receive across spaces? The rock formations there have a higher resonance due to their co-presence in the ocean edge, maybe we can learn more by attuning there to what the Signalers are sending. Would you want to meet to commune at the Severed Rock? It’s midway between our Seeker groups now, we believe.
Message from ₯ to ₻: That place has always put ourselves on edge. It feels off somehow and it’s a bit shallower than we like. Couldn’t we just wait until the Signalers are back in range?
Message from ₻ to ₯: But can we risk waiting… What if what is being sensed is a fluke—a passing liveliness on an asteroid passing between our planets?
Message from ₯ to ₻: That is a risk, but we don’t even know for sure that this is convergence. We have hypotheses of what another life event may feel like, and what kinds of indicators would be evidence of this. But in the end, we don’t know, do we? What if we are swimming forward too quickly before we check the current? Every day we feel the ecological fluctuations on our own planet. Shouldn’t we be putting out efforts towards learning more about our home?
Message from ₻ to ₯: Home, you say. Is it a place? A time? A planet? Or is it something we feel so much more poignantly—our connection, to ourselves and the shared experience we all have—you, us, our cluster—of living? That is the core of being a Seeker. We attune to the sensorial gradient more intentionally and seek ways to commune with other entities. We know that it is scary, all this, happening all at once. But if there is any place that can heighten our connection to the Signalers enough to feel the messages more deeply, it would be there. And then, perhaps, we can see if Blue fits into our home too.
Message from ₯ to ₻: [silence] Yes. You speak well and remind us that we are not alone…perhaps those on Blue are also feeling a shock. If there is convergence, entities on Blue may be experiencing a shift in their existence, their sense of being. But we have always been, even without sensing it, an ecological interplanetary community. Let us go and learn more about each other.
Message from ₻ to ₯: We come! This is such a validation of what we’re trying to figure out about Aliveness in the universe. A movement in the slow, still, static. One among us wrote this:
Static no more
A promise of potential
Matter become energy become mattering
Sharing pluripotencies
Message from ₯ to ₻: Wait! Sharing…we just had a thought about nurturance beginnings. But it is still forming, what do you think? Just now, we were sweeping over a spot on the ocean floor, intense heat from below warming our insides. As usual, we greeted the deep silent Shifter communities, who converted the heat so that we may be warmed and moved by it. Then we saw small flares at the very bottom that light up the depths, Lighters working below in masses. We realized they don’t feel the messages as we do, their lives so tightly coupled with the chemical exchanges of their rock partners. But when we swim closer, we can feel bursts of energy, energy we needed to replenish the heat output of our swim. There is something important to learn in these moments of mutual constitution and dispersal. Remember the old song?
A piece of the whole
Meeting
Never the same
Our whole, their whole
Transforming
Into different configurations
Never the same.
Message from ₻ to ₯: That passage sends a prickling sensation across us. What if, from the Communing Place, we feel Blue? What an expanding, becoming bigger sensation it would be, and yet, also in becoming more, we are becoming a smaller, more complex part of the pluriverse. With Blue, there would be a whole new whole. A different one. Even our fieldwork experience from earlier feels now less unique to us here on this planet. The possibility that we are more than us here on this planet… It really makes us pause and wonder, how much wider will our sense of lifes become?
Axiom 3: The Presence of Molecular Interchange: Sustained aliveness requires the capacity for a molecular entity to engage with other molecular entities, to mutually deconstruct and reorganize, then to loosen boundaries and allow parts of themselves to drift free. This process of interchange can happen within liquid space but also within free space. Liquid-based and solid-based molecular communities meet, collide, break, release, and molecularly disaggregate to drift across space, enabling new potential connections and the possibility of convergent Aliveness.
Message from ₯ to ₻: Could you catch that last message? The Signalers must be beyond the curve of our planet. We won’t be able to hear them for some time. We will allow the current to move us onwards, we are getting fatigued. The bright above has dimmed. In the depths, the darkness leisurely begins to transform the brilliant blue of the waves into black. But you must see stars!
When was the last time you really felt into the dark? Not from fear, but genuine curiosity. We could almost imagine it as another kind of eco-becoming. The darkness only makes us more aware of the water’s sensation with us and what it loosens, the energies it transmutates within our bodies. The messages from the Signalers prove that these chemical agreements can happen anywhere. Is this what we sense now, the presence of interchange complexity at home and on Blue? Convergencies are growing!
It’s interesting to feel the need to drift with the current but also to move together to reach our destination and meet up with you. Perhaps we’re being too speculative, but it’s like we are drifting as did the newly Alive molecular convergent entities long ago. As light peels back the dimness, the colors of the water shift in hue, we feel the small beings that make the water glow letting off chemical sparks. We profoundly feel the exchanges of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur as something miraculous. We know this is Seeker nerdiness at work, but really, we feel it.
How is the water so shallow already? We are a ways off, but we are unsure how close we can come. Is that you on the shore?
Message from ₻ to ₯: We see you! Swim as close to the shore as you can. The Severed Rock is farther from the water than we remember. It was once entirely surrounded! From our vantage, we see that it is still deep on that far side. It’s been a while since we last swam, but we’ll jump in the water with you there.
Does the Severed rock seem even more mysterious than before, almost separate-other? Let’s connect with the Clusters at camp; they can learn as we do.
Open message from ₯ and ₻ to Clusters: Completely surrendering to the movement of the waves, we are floating, listening with a new attention, almost a reverence. To ourselves, here, and the tenuous cords of the beyond, to the sensory gradient that connects us all, humming.
From our spot, where sea meets cliff edge, we perceive the rest of the mountainous formation in the distance, rust red in the setting sun, where the Severed Rock is black. Around it is a series of cliffs, that wind like coral, around it. They seem even more lively than before. Tall cliffs, carved beyond memory before the waters came. Whatever had caused their formation left traces; we see fissures that hold traces of metallic residues, hued in black and gray. They sparkle with the rising sun.
We are getting closer, and feel the pasts of previous intractions layered like silt in its depths. Were those places where nutrients were more available, freer to exchange? Was that what happened, finally, on Blue? We are before the Severed Rock and feel…
Message from ₻ to ₯: Blue is Alive.
The crunch of gravel resounded in the small cleft. The sky is a narrow strip above, light pink, crowded by rust red cliff faces.
Rocks that had not been disturbed in millennia vibrate as the wheels of Perseverance rover wends its way forward, turning a sharp corner around a jagged rock face, maneuvering around a pile of larger boulders. Silver glints under a fine layer of dust, though the images it sends are still clear. It was 8:19 p.m. for the scientists in Pasadena, California, Earth. The eyes of the rover alongside data signals from an orbiting imager had been the predominant resource the scientists were using to model Perseverance’s path. All part of the mission from the Blue Planet to seek signs of life or its conditions on the Red Planet.
Despite the close confines of the rocks, the journey to the next sampling spot is relatively straightforward. Perseverance continues forward. This part of the Martian topography, located in the northern hemisphere of the red planet was well imaged by Mariner V. Ahead, the onboard camera “recognized” the mineral beveled rock formation from satellite images. A shallow dip, easily navigable with the wide treads of the rover’s wheels, brings it directly to the formation’s side. It rises over six meters high, a scoured surface of obsidian. Perseverance’s camera is already snapping photos, rolling around the formation, reconnecting with its tracks after a few hours of careful documentation. Unlike the cliffs it had spent the better part of a month traversing, this formation has rounded edges. But not from wind, for the sheen of the formation betrayed a metallic component that was not present in the mineral composition of Mars. Perseverance’s camera swivels to capture the base, of where formation meets surface. Ripples from where they had melted into each other pockmarks the ground for almost a meter. (Several scientists, upon receiving the images 29 minutes later, exclaim about this feature.) There is a gradient of sediment as if a portion of it had been underwater.
The scientist closest to the central monitor explains, “The meteor at the base of the formation is from Earth, evidence of the long material exchange between the two planets, stretching back into eons. But let’s not get distracted. Perseverance is programmed to seek evidence of individual organisms or the three prerequisites for a biological milieu: energy, nutrients, and a solvent (like water). These are the axiomatic substrate for biology and for life itself.”
The rover’s scoop scrapes against the rock formation’s surface, and the fall of rock on rock sounds like rain. Into a small cylindrical cartridge goes the geologic sample, Earth and Mars, and the sampling is done.
Rumble, rumble, rumble. Sand grinds under rubber wheels and wind whistles faintly by, creating the semblance of waves hitting a beach. Unperturbed, Perseverance does not pause, rolling onward with an internal compass and set of algorithmic instructions to the next site. The next sample. Waiting for signals of life.
What is life from the perspective of multiplicity? Of lifes rather than life? This piece is a speculative, playful rendering of scientific concepts about biological life, survival, growth through the lens of pluribiological entities who recognize that life is not something that takes place on a site, but is an assemblage across space and time. This piece proceeds by simply bypassing the idea of a singular biology and the basic underpinnings of astrobiological ontology.
Deliberately, we seek to create a world where singularity was never assumed or refuted, where ecological ethos is the enveloping framework, and ecology itself becomes blurred between life/other-than-life. As artists, researchers of science, and anthropologists, we are seeking to bridge the social scientific, creative, and scientific by opening up the possibility of what biology/s could be.
Throughout our conversations over the years, we have played with the many ideas of what the consequences could be of living in a world where it is recognized that multiple biologies exist. Through this collaborative writing, we are troubling the very singularity of life. How would we think of ourselves, on Earth? In many ways, it is not an altogether strange concept. Although we may identify ourselves as “human” we are made up of millions of microorganisms that live in our guts, on our skin. Every breath we take is a symphony of lives persisting, coordinating in a weird and unwieldy way. Our story aligns with efforts made by many multispecies and science and technology scholars who draw our attention to our entangled realities, and the ways our interactions with living and nonliving entities allow “our-selves” to come into being.
To create a pluribiological sensibility that is fundamentally otherwise, we played with three astrobiological assumptions about what life needs to be and survive: energy, a solvent, and nutrients. The Axioms we include in the story are reimaginings of these three aspects from a pluribiological perspective. We’ve come up with the below charting so that the relationship between current scientific parameters and what we are speculating becomes clear.
Axiom 1 Rethinks energy: We play with the emergence of life. Instead of thinking of it as bounded, and the individual thing needing energy, we offer a concept of aliveness. Aliveness is similar to Giles Deleuze’s idea of pure capacity. It is the capacity for emergence and development, and this energetic force of capacity is present in anything—crystal, dust, etc.
In the story, the creatures aren’t looking for the beginning of life, but aliveness, which to them is not “energy” but the convergence of molecular communities. Aliveness is the capacity for nonlife to become an enmeshed, moving, colliding, dynamic multiplicity.
Axiom 2 Rethinks nutrients: We move away from distinct categories of “this is a nutrient” and “this is not.” Rather, we focus on nurturance as a mutual process of sustenance and transformation. In the piece, the creatures are looking at nurturance, as a relational dynamic where the “nutrients” are becoming with the entity, a transformation of and with, similar to what Karen Barad conceptualizes as intra-action. It thinks with an assemblage—or interconnected, affective network—as well as an ecological framework.
Axiom 3 Rethinks solvent: This speaks against the inertness of water. It asks us to think of it as a co-molecular lively entity that engages with molecules. Together they mutually deconstruct and construct, reorganizing form. It is a mutually lively process that never reaches completion or full coherence. Like all ecologies, there are things produced, there is waste… there are parts of us that become “not us” and so there is a more co-constitutive, dynamic logic to solvent exchange. Everything has integrity and is also interchanging. This can occur in liquid space and also free space, such as asteroids. It is a process, a kind of becoming (as Donna Haraway or Anna Tsing perhaps would say), as bodies become (with) assemblages.
Beyond rethinking the axioms, we are also contributing to a longstanding conversation across disciplines about ecology. A very simple definition of an ecology is a system of living organisms and the environments that support them. What becomes of ecology on an interplanetary scale? How can we scale the transformative quality, power, and force of ecology if we lean into its contingent, dynamic, and becoming aspects–as we see them on Earth, and as scientists describe them as occurring on other planets, such as Mars or exoplanets of the Trappist system? We deliberately set this story on an ancient Mars to do this work. By moving the story away from Earth, where many science fiction imaginaries are set or directly imposed onto other planetary-scapes (think Star Wars), then what does that do to our definition of ecology? How does decentering Earth and Earthly-ness provide a different set of relations to become possible, especially in a pluribiological reality? Thus, we take inspiration from Mars’ geographies, scientific papers about its atmosphere, and images taken by satellites to craft the world the creatures of this story move through and live in. We follow them and their frameworks in an effort, we hope, to realize and re-meet a young Earth.
And ourselves.