In the Aerocene, problems exist not for the flying, but for the floating. Habitants of the Aerocene are not flying. Even if they seem to be flying, actually they are not. If they are not flying, what are they doing? The answer is simple: they are floating. Yes, they are floating. They are simply floating; floating by principle of the Aerocene itself. Why do they float? Because they must float. When the required condition is satisfied, they begin to float.

This is how Tomás Saraceno explained the principle of the Aerocene.11This may not be exactly what Saraceno said, but it was as it is in my memory. When I heard this, it struck me quite suddenly: it might be possible that I could float. In reality, or in general, it is not possible for me to fly: this is a truth of this world whether we are in the Holocene or in the Anthropocene. But when one thinks about the possibility of floating, surely, I thought, it might be possible for me to float. This idea came to me as if it were part of the natural order of the world. I know that it might be a curious thing to think, but for me, at the same time, it seemed quite natural to think thus, and I even thought that it must be a matter of fact. I was convinced of my ability to float, because it seems to be a truth of our reality. I did not doubt the possibility that I can float. But why have I thought this?

 

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When I close my eyes, what do I feel? I feel something. Closing my eyes, I am thinking about the problem of gravity. Is what I am feeling the feeling of gravity? What I feel in my inner self is the touch of my feet on the floor. When I am lying on the ground, I feel my back touching the Earth; even when I am standing on my head doing a yoga exercise, I feel my head touching the Earth. But is this the feeling of gravity? It could be said to be the feeling of gravity. But if gravity is a function, can I feel function with my inner feeling? Function is a concept and hence no one can feel it; if what I feel in myself when I am closing my eyes, standing on my head, or lying down on the floor is not the feeling of gravity, it means that in that moment I do not feel gravity, and hence I am in the world without gravity. If I am in the world without gravity, then what I am doing must be floating. So, is it possible to say, therefore, that when I close my eyes, concentrate on, and dive into my inner self I am floating?

 

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Actually, things can fly without any special equipment like wings or engines. When a strong wind blows, small things, like sand, can become airborne and travel huge distances.22I learnt this fact from Bronislaw Szerszynski during the seminar, and, in the communication that followed after he had read a draft of this essay, he offered many suggestions concerning the distinction between floating and flying. He also indicated another couple of concepts similar to floating/flying like gliding/soaring. I learnt many other things about the mechanisms of floating and flying from an article he introduced me to: Jasper F. Kok, Eric J. R. Parteli, Timothy I. Michaels, and Diana Bou Karam, “The Physics of Wind-blown Sand and Dust,” Reports on Progress in Physics, vol. 75, no. 10, 106901 (2012). The article is interesting; it deals not only with the phenomena of things that fly on Earth, but also things on Mars and the other planets that fly (or float). Imagine flying in Mars! I was reminded of Szerszynski’s marvelous essay about the possible religion (Mangalayana Buddhism) in Mars in the twenty-second century. See Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Liberation through Hearing in the Planetary Transition: Funerary practices in twenty-second-century Mangalayana Buddhism,” in: Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer (eds), Grain Vapor Ray: Textures of the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. I thank him for all of this. They splash when strong wind hits them and the aerodynamic lift exceeds the gravitational and inter-particle forces. Some small grains of sand move from the Sahara desert and reach the South American continent. Recent research points out that this kind of immigration of the sands enriches the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the sand particles fall back to the Earth before they can reach the continent. When sand drops into the Atlantic Ocean, it provides nutrition to the sea in that area. Sands of the deserts contain minerals, especially bio-available iron and phosphorus, and the fallen sand particles with minerals are the origins of the richness of the ocean. But such flying is only possible for small particles. I cannot take off in the wind (in normal conditions).

Floating in my memory. I was certainly floating in my old memory. I remember that I was floating in the womb. In the womb, there is amniotic fluid, and there, I, as an embryo or a fetus, was floating. Normally an embryo or a fetus remains static, meaning that in the womb the head is up and the feet are down. Sometimes, however, the orientation changes, and the feet are up and the head is down. Viviparous animals, animals with a womb, appeared in the Permian period of the Paleozoic era, 298.9‒252.2 million years ago, in which the Earth became gradually dry. In order to simulate conditions similar to hatching eggs in the ocean, mammals developed the womb, a safe sack filled with water inside the body. Our memory contains the memory of the Permian Ocean. When I was an embryo or a fetus, I might have been floating in the time of a million years of solitude.

 

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The world is floating. Everything is floating inside me. Inside me, or, to be exact, in the inside of my eyeball, everything is floating. I see things outside of me as an image, projected on the screen inside my eye bulb. The thing seen is via an image enabled by the reflection of light on the surface of things. When a ray enters my eye it is concentrated through the small hole of the pupil and screened onto my retina. The ray is dead straight. Because the hole of the pupil is very small, the ray from below will reach the top of the screen of my retina and the ray from above will reach the bottom of it. Because of this mechanism, the image reflected inside the wall of my eyeball is upside down. In the upside down condition, everything is floating. The mechanism of my eye is not influenced by gravity. My eyes are free from the yoke of weight. The image is floating. When I open my eyes, everything I can see with my eyes must be floating inside my eye bulb.

Anthropos and floating are closely connected, and that must mean anthropos has a need to float. Actually, I perceive that we are experiencing floating in various ways. What does this mean? I do not know. But doesn’t it indicate some possibility of our thinking that we have evolved from a floating creature, in that the principle of the ray requires the brain’s corrective function in order to interpret an upside down image the right way up? Normally we don’t notice how closely connected with floating we are; we un-know the fact. To know the unknown must necessarily inform the ethics in the new era of the planet, the Anthropocene. Floating is the principle of the Aerocene. To know the principle of the Aerocene might be one basis for the new ethics of the Anthropocene.