Google says the average depth of the Pacific Ocean is about 4000m. With a surface area of 165 million square kilometres, that gives it a total volume of roughly six hundred and sixty million cubic kilometres.
The Burj Khalifa is the world's tallest building, at around 830m tall, but as best I can tell the top 230m of that aren't really spaces for human use (this is based on it having 163 floors with a listed purpose on Wikipedia and the highest sky deck being on the 148th floor at 555m for an average of 3.75m per floor, putting floor 163 around 610m up).
I'm taking that as a marker for how high we could possibly build living space above local ground level.
The total land surface area of the earth is around 153 million square kilometres (30% of total surface area at 510 million square kilometres). If we approximate the habitable volume of the earth as a 600m layer over all of that, it gives around 92 million cubic kilometres.
(This is actually a pretty significant overestimate. The highest-above-sea-level permanent settlements on earth are a little over 5000m above sea level, so we can't build Burj Khalifas anywhere above 4400m and expect to get the full use out of them. I can't think of a quick way to estimate how much of the earth's land surface area is above 4400m, but it's not a trivial fraction).
The upshot of this is that the 'approximate habitable volume of the earth' would fit into the Pacific ocean about 7 times.
This is an example of a thing I call 'pseudo-mathematical argument'. Basically, you pull a bunch of vaguely-representative approximate values from Google and Wikipedia, crunch them quickly, spectacularly and publicly, so that people are intrigued but don't look too closely at what you're doing because you seem so confident, and pull out a grandiose conclusion.
Futurists, in particular, love this. If you see someone arguing that we're all living in a computer simulation, that's based on this kind of reasoning. It's a very bad way to formulate policy arguments.
Fortunately I'm not making a policy argument here. I'm a fantasist and I wanna talk about my relationship to fantasy, particular genre tropes, and Arknights. I'll come back to pseudo-mathematical arguments and their kin later.
It's also about fish, the fish are important.
At the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator tells:
"The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon."
Innsmouth is the only Lovecraft I've ever actually read myself. I am not good with genre horror. It tends to activate my fear of the dark, leaving me pathologically unable to sleep. When I read Innsmouth, one evening in my late teens after a friend linked it to me over MSN messenger, it fucked me up for a week.
But the ending, far from being the final expression of horror that Lovecraft clearly on some level intended it to be, came as something of a relief. For Lovecraft, the horror of Innsmouth is racial – of discovering one's blood isn't 'pure'. For me, being hunted through a dilapidated port town at night by sinister cultists was a frightening prospect, but the thought of wondrous cities and transformations of the flesh was enticing.
The vision of Y'ha-nthlei, the city of the deep ones, salved the mundane horror of the story itself. Since then, it's not so much that I have become obsessed with the idea of deep ocean creatures as some people are, but I have tended to be favourably disposed towards supposed horrors of the deep. I struggle to see them as menacing in the way that their authors imagine them to be.
The seas of Arknights' world of Terra are teeming with such horror. The Church of the Deep worship the Seaborn, slimy, gross, fish-like monsters whose forms shift and blur and who aspire to subsume the land and those who live on it into an all-consuming biological quasi-hive-mind. Aegir, the great nation of the sea, is lost, cut off from the land-dwelling peoples by the Seaborn, any of its children who were ashore at the advent of The Long Silence orphaned and alienated. Iberia, once a great oceangoing global power, is devastated by catastrophe, its fleet and shore defenses smashed and their ruins choked with the goopy vanguard of the Seaborn advance.
Good.
Purity is a fascist idea (at least, outside of a chem lab). Living matter, however dangerous, is not 'corruption'. Iberia plays host to an inquisition that clearly draws from the folkloric image of the Spanish Inquisition, which serves to terrorise the population of coastal towns where people may come into contact with the Seaborn. Aegir, in parallel, has the Abyssal Hunters, an elite military force who fight the Seaborn in their home deeps – but the Hunters themselves rely on a power that shares a source with the Seaborn, and have long since begun a synthesis with their enemy. Their contempt for their foe is hypocrisy. Nature knows nothing of the line they try to draw.
The various speakers for the Seaborn don't entirely agree on what, if anything, the Seaborn stand for. Necessarily, a lifeform defined by flux is a shifting signifier. At times, priests in the Church of the Deep, the landbound cult that worships the Seaborn, assert a kind of eugenicist, social-darwinist project that sees 'evolution' as teleological, directed towards some final, perfect or higher state.
One of the few Seaborn to actually speak has a simpler view:
To consume, is without fault. Food, is plenty.
And off-handed as this line may seem, these two short sentences go a long way. It is true, fairly straightforwardly, that sustenance is blameless. When a fox hunts a rabbit, we don't consider the fox to be evil for doing so. In a sense, nature, or even life, is eating. Defining 'life' is notoriously difficult, but one thing that life is is the biochemical conversion of organic molecules from one form to another. Digestion is everything.
And, of course, food is plentiful. We could feed everyone. That we don't is a contrived state, a matter of social conventions backed up by stacked-high centuries of force and power. It is a state brought about by particular people, for particular reasons, and defended with particular arguments.
On the subject of those arguments, Amaia, the named, still-mostly-human character who speaks most clearly for the Seaborn in Arknights, offers:
Aegir. I have never seen that country myself. A vast, vast country, larger than Iberia, Victoria or Ursus. Or perhaps all three combined. I've heard that the Aegir are rationalists. But how rational can they be, compared to the rationality of our kin?
'Rationality' is a word that our prevailing, authoritative cultures conjure with. As a grad student I sometimes got frustrated almost to screaming when academics in my department would describe a position as 'rational' or 'irrational'. I would ask what the difference was, and never received an answer I could understand. In hindsight it is clear to me that for these people 'rational' and 'irrational' served as contentless value-judgements, meaning no more than is expressed by the words 'good' and 'bad'.
Why say 'irrational', then? To express loyalty to a regime of knowing, a conviction that there is, out there somewhere, a set of rational propositions which suffice to explain everything. This serves at least two purposes: first, it allays the fear of the unknown and unknowable, and second, it tacitly asserts the value and importance of 'men of reason', those lofty specialists whose job is to explain to us why we 'can't' feed, house and heal everyone.
This, really, is what pseudo-mathematical arguments do. Mathematical representations are tools, useful for certain kinds of problem and not for others. But maths also enjoys a cultural status that elevates it above other tools – Mathematics is A STEM Subject, one of the special ones that supposedly we don't have enough experts in, that's hard and inaccessible and if we could just get kids to take more interest in it instead of Staring At Their Phones All Day, it'd solve all our problems.
The maths comparing the volume of the Pacific Ocean to my absurdly cobbled together 'approximate habitable volume of the earth' isn't useful for anything. It's like trying to cook with a hammer. It doesn't tell us anything intellectually tractable about the size of the Ocean or how much life there is or could be. It just pretends that the knowledge-regime of mathematics can be projected onto the deep.
(Which is not, of course, to say that oceanographers never use mathematics, nor that oceanography is useless. To strain a metaphor a little, if the ocean is cooking and maths a hammer, oceanography is a cooking pot, and a blacksmith might well use a hammer to make the pot).
So it is, too, with the futurist's pseudo-mathematical argument. The future, and the vastness of space, are among the very few unknowns greater than the Earth's oceans. Undoubtedly they scare many people, in many different ways. Projecting mathematical knowledge onto them – and not the intricate, beautiful and headcrushingly difficult mathematics of astrophysics but the flashy, everymannish stunt of a pseudo-mathematical argument ('look, if you don't believe me, here are the numbers, just put them into a calculator and you can check my work yourself!') – reassures the expert that the limits to his power of knowing are, at the longest timescale, temporary, and the layman that someone knows the answer even if he never will.
We (as ever, ask who – which 'we's I, a white, middle-class trans woman and academic – might presume to speak for) have a culture that values knowledge highly, and is uncomfortable with unknowns. We operate on something like the assumption that everything will ultimately become knowable. Knowability is the border to controllability, and what is controllable, notionally, is safe.
What, then, of safety for the unknowable? Identity and its categorisations are a regime of knowledge too. It should be no surprise that academia – and philosophy in particular – has been so hostile to trans people, and especially to nonbinary and combinatorial gender positions. When a student asks their professor to address them by a chosen name and neopronouns, they assert a position independent of and not sanctioned by the academic's authority.
We speak, sometimes, of the experiences of oppressed people, or of street-level organising and communities, as 'knowledge from below'; we speak of an academic 'hierarchy'. The actual etymology of 'hierarchy' is from ancient Greek words for 'sacred' and 'ruler', indicating priestly rank, but it sure does sound, to the contemporary English ear, like 'higher' and 'arc' or 'arch', and it conjures exactly those kinds of images.
The reality of human identity is as teeming and shifting and murky as the seaborn. As a plural system, mine (ours) certainly is. I have more genders and sexualities than most of my academic colleagues could imagine. Many of my colleagues could not even be brought to imagine that the academic who denies a student's request to be addressed according to a change of name and pronouns might be even so much as technically in the wrong, let alone doing something that harms.
But the harm is intrinsic to the classification. The cookie cutter is another cliché here, but truly the regimes of gender and sexuality, and of many other identity categories besides, are cutters pressed into the flesh of our selves, reshaping us for convenience of consumption, packaging, distribution. Even those of us who are more or less cookie-shaped lose something by the application of the cutter.
And we can never know what our real shapes are, nor how common it is for people to be more-or-less cookie-shaped. Just as Arknights' Iberia and Aegir can only look at the Seaborn and see a failure to be properly individual, just as Lovecraft's land-dwellers lose their minds as they begin to grasp the lives of the deep, the regime of knowing that towers over us cannot be reconciled to us, cannot expand to make room for us. We are raised to see ourselves only through its perspectives, so that even attaining 'authentic selfhood' – itself a concept of the hierarchy – is a constant fight, inwardly as well as outwardly.
What would it be like to have experiences unmediated by the effects of the identity regime? That's not something I can imagine from my cultural position and background, despite some effort to that effect. I can't even say 'experience one's selfhood' – look at how, in English, the expression imports not only atomicity, the separateness of one self from another, but also possession, as if one's self were an object or commodity one owns (think, too, on how that idea reemerges in the occasional or not-so-occasional 'you're so lucky you're [X], I wish I was special like you' that oppressors sometimes express to targets they feel they look favourably on).
The Drake equation is a pseudo-mathematical argument which proposes to offer a way to estimate the number of alien civilisations in the galaxy that we might have an opportunity to communicate with. While it was proposed by one of the pioneers of SETI, its typical function in contexts where I've encountered it has been to argue that we are likely alone, or at least inescapably isolated, on our planet.
To actually calculate a result of the Drake equation, you need to know the following:
- the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
- the fraction of stars that have planets
- the average number of planets with the potential to support life per star
- the fraction of planets with the potential to support life that actually do develop life
- the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilisations)*
- the fraction of civilisations that develop a technology detectable from other worlds (or our world specifically)
- the length of time for which such civilisations operate detectable technology
*before any analysis, it bears mentioning that both 'intelligence' and 'civilisation' are highly loaded concepts and the equation would be better off without these terms altogether – what matters is the fraction of life-supporting planets on which living beings develop a technology detectable from our world, whether our concepts of 'intelligence' and 'civilisation' have any application to those lives or not.
Of these terms, the first two are at least in principle estimable from astronomic observations. It is plausible, too, that we might develop robust ways of estimating the frequency of livable planets for the third term, for some narrow definition of 'livable' and if planet-formation is a relatively stable, predictable process. For the rest, any estimate we could form from current circumstances is a hopeless generalisation from a single case, that is, ours. We know of one livable planet, and it is a planet on which life has arisen, and developed a technology (various forms of controlled electromagnetic radiation, starting with the radio) notionally detectable at interstellar distances.
Actually, for the final term, we don't even have a single datapoint. We know that our one extant example, us, has been generating controlled radio signals for a little over a century. We don't know how long we'll keep doing so. The question of how long we might is so absurdly complex that even to gesture at an answer is a fool's errand – we might have only five years of technological civilisation left on this planet; we might last another thousand years or another million; we might be two years from discovering some physics beyond electromagnetism that offers vastly superior communicative potential.
Estimating any of the terms in the back half of the Drake equation is a fun convention-afterparty discussion for a particular kind of nerd, but it is nothing more than that and absolutely futile as a projection of mathematics into the unknown. The equation has joined my least-favourite category of pseudo-mathematical argument: those used to deny the possibility of something exciting, intriguing or inspiring. The academics I deal with seem especially enamoured of those (and here I resist the temptation to crack that this is the entire discipline of economics).
The more I explore this perspective on my own life – spent, for my entire childhood, in presumptive preparation for academia and, for my entire adult life, discharging that presumption to my parents' and teachers' great satisfaction – the more I can only, ultimately, take the side of the Seaborn and Y'ha-nthlei. The horror of the unknown deep is horror only from the perspective of the land. The horror of being absorbed into shifting biological fusion is horror only from the perspective of individuality.
I find myself rooting for these horrors however much their stories stigmatise them. Turning against the perspectives of the characters and authors who resist. I stall myself on my own writing projects reaching for ways of crafting fiction that do not implicitly impose the framework of 'unknowable=horrible' (difficult, since the fiction conventions I was trained to assume that fiction is communicative and communication is the transmission of something intelligible).
I yearn to see the regimes of knowledge crumble, to vent my anger and my hurt on them. Material circumstance holds me – not least in that I make my livelihood as an agent of that knowability – and I understand that there can be no regime of knowledge without underlying, simpler, material regimes of power and oppression, but what if, what if…
I was taught all my life that knowledge would save the world, that if people who did harm would just become less ignorant, they would no longer do harm. Ironically this was an intellectual blind spot of the knowledge-hierarchs; the people they framed as ignorant in fact generally understood exactly what they were doing. It was the knowers who were oblivious to the harm they did me – and continue to do me to this day, whose regimes of knowledge could not imagine their own dangers.
If I hate myself, I hate the knowledge in me, the academic rank and title and position. If I love myself, I love the slimy, formless life that makes up my every surge. I am possessed of an anger and fear as deep and vast as the Pacific, that I wish could swallow the kingdom of reason whole. I wish I could see what would be left of me in its wake.
