On November 21, 2012, planet Earth acquired a new moon. It wasn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary. In fact, hardly anyone noticed. Since the former Soviet Union placed the first “artificial moon” in space on October 4, 1957, the world’s nations and corporations have added thousands of satellites to Earth’s orbit. Some of them monitor the weather, others take pictures or relay telephone calls. One of them, the International Space Station, even serves as temporary home for humans. In 2012, there’s nothing remarkable about adding new moons to Earth’s vicinity.
Some of these satellites, however, are a great deal stranger than we realize.
The vast majority of satellites (and space debris) are in relatively low orbits, any-where from a few hundred to a thousand kilometers above Earth. Because of their close proximity to our planet, they experience small amounts of drag as they dart through the highest wisps of the upper atmosphere. In time, drag accumulates, the satellites slow down, and they eventually fall back to Earth. A small number of other satellites, however, have an entirely different destiny. The majority of communications satellites—providing Internet bandwidth, broadcasting television signals, routing credit card transactions, and streaming music toward the Earth below—are in an orbit designed to keep the satellite stationary over a fixed point on Earth. The television dishes seen on so many houses and apartment buildings are pointed toward satellites based at a fixed location in the sky. To “hover” in one spot, a satellite must orbit around the Earth at the exact same rate that the Earth itself rotates. This is called a “geosynchronous” or “geostationary” orbit. There’s only a very small band in space where this particular orbit works. The magic number is 35,786 km above the equator. Several hundred communications satellites hover at that distance from Earth, forming a ring of machines sometimes referred to as the “Clarke Belt.”1
But the Clarke Belt is not only unusual for its orbital characteristics.
Communications satellites are so far from Earth that they experience no atmospheric drag whatsoever. Hence, they’re never pulled back toward Earth. Every spacecraft
Information about Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures project is available at www.creativetime.org /projects/the-last-pictures/.
1 The name honors science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who in 1945 proposed using geosynchronous spacecraft to create global “communications relays.” Nonetheless, the name
“Clarke Belt” is somewhat unfair. The orbit was first theorized by the Russian aerospace visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the late nineteenth century and the Slovenian engineer Herman Potocˇnik first calculated its distance in 1928.
placed in the Clarke orbit over the last half century remains there (or in a slightly higher “graveyard” orbit) to this day. What’s more, they will remain in Earth’s orbit indefinitely. The implications are profound: 35,786 km from Earth, some of human civilization’s greatest engineering achievements are effectively frozen in time. More than the cave paintings at Lascaux, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, or the ancient city of Çatalhöyük, the ring of abandoned satellites far above the Earth’s equator will be human civilizations’ longest lasting artifacts. In fact, there’s really no comparison with any other human invention.
The ultimate fate of geosynchronous satellites lies with the sun. About four billion years from now, the sun will have burned through most of its hydrogen and will start burning helium. When that happens, our star will swell to become a red giant and will probably swallow the Earth (and the lingering geosynchronous satel-lites). But four billion years is a long time from now. For a bit of perspective, four billion years is about sixteen times further into the future than the advent of the dinosaurs was in the past; it is four times further into the future than the entire history of complex multicellular organisms on Earth. A billion years from now, a species as unrelated to humans as we are to ancient trilobites may look up at the sky and see the ring of machines leftover from a civilization in the impossibly distant past. Placing a satellite into geosynchronous orbit means placing it into the deep and alien time of the cosmos itself.
One of these satellites is different from others in the Clarke Belt. Like most spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, EchoStar XVI is a communications satellite. It doesn’t do anything appreciably different from what EchoStars I through XV have done. Like its predecessors, EchoStar XVI is designed to broadcast pictures on hundreds of television channels. But there is nevertheless something unique about EchoStar XVI: it carries other pictures. Attached to its anti-earth deck, a gold-plated aluminum housing contains a small silicon disc designed to last for billions of years.
Embedded into this disc is a collection of one hundred pictures.
EchoStar XVI and the image disc onboard have a profound and counter intuitive set of relationships to time. On the one hand, the satellite is an instrument of speed, transmitting hundreds of thousands of images per minute, all at the speed of light.
On the other hand, EchoStar XVI’s materiality inhabits time (billions of years) in a way that is utterly alien to human experience and understandings of history. As such, EchoStar XVI, like other communications satellites, embodies a deep contra-diction in time itself.
EchoStar XVI comes from a lineage of communication and transportation technologies that have, in a relatively short historical period, fundamentally altered our relationship to time and space. In the nineteenth century, the advent of steam engines, trains, and telegraphs made the world dramatically smaller. Railroads meant journeys that had once taken days or weeks were reduced to mere hours. Telegraph cables meant messages that were once hand-carried by men riding horses could now travel at the speed of light. Transportation and communication technologies
integrated global commodities markets and led to the creation of international finan-cial markets. Over the course of a single generation, time sped up so quickly and so dramatically that humans found it nearly impossible to keep up. Communications technologies had outstripped time-keeping. Time, it seemed, had been broken.
Nineteenth-century artists and philosophers tried to make sense of a new world of speed, commerce, and distorted geographies. In 1844, J. M. W. Turner showed the unmooring of time from human perception with a blurry painting called Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway. Four years later, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, declared that the “constant revolutionizing of production, unin-terrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. […] All that is solid melts into air.”2 He later expounded on this point, arguing that the continual speeding up of time was one of capitalism’s fundamental dynamics, which he famously described as the “annihilation of space by time.”3
So complete was the nineteenth century’s annihilation of space and time that time itself had to be reinvented. Before the railroads, each place kept its own time.
When the sun was overhead, the time was noon. In England, Oxford time was five minutes behind Greenwich, and Leeds was a minute behind Oxford. Dover, in the east, was separated from Penzance by half an hour.4 But in order to coordinate their schedules and prevent accidents, the railways had to create their own system of time, railway time, to bring the discipline of a shared clock to the towns and stations along their routes. Railway time was the first step in a grand reinvention of time, an international effort to engineer a centralized, common time. “Time coordination,”
explains historian of science Peter Galison, “was an affair for the individual school buildings, wiring their classroom clocks to the principal’s office, but also an issue for cities, train lines, and nations as they soldered alignment into their public clocks and often fought tooth-and-nail over how it should be done.”5
The creation of absolute time meant subjugating localities, regions, and nations to the centralized tick of a clock at the Royal Observatory in south London:
Greenwich mean time. Not everyone wanted to go along: in 1894, the French anar-chist Martial Bourdin tried to blow up the Royal Observatory (his bomb exploded prematurely, killing him). But by the end of the century, the transformation was nearly complete. “Time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the cosmos,” explains Rebecca Solnit, “and became one administered by technicians
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476.
3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 539.
4 Dan Falk, In Search of Time: The History, Physics and Philosophy of Time (New York: Thomas Dunn Books, 2008), 70–71; see also
www.greenwichmeantime.com/info/railway.htm.
5 Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2003), 40.
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to link industrial activities to each other.”6 Time became something that was both absolute and malleable. The second hands at the Royal Observatory ticked uni-formly, but time-bending technologies from railroads to telegraphs could be used to manage, leverage, destroy, and create time anew, particularly in the service of warfare or profit.7
The industrialization of time had a curious historical partner in the dis-covery—and subsequent invasion—of geologic time. In 1788, James Hutton pub-lished his Theory of the Earth. By carefully cataloguing geologic strata, Hutton began to realize that the Earth was far older than the six thousand years biblical scholars had calculated. “The world which we inhabit is composed of materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which […]
had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of ocean.” From the deep histories inscribed in rocks, he said, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”8 Hutton is credited with the discovery of deep time: the timescale of tectonic plates and gradual ero-sion, the forces that slowly sculpt the earth’s surface over millions of years, creating mountains, canyons, continents, and seas. Just as the industrial age discovered deep time, it began actively to shape it.
The “Anthropocene” is an informal term for the period in which humans began to shape the earth’s surface on a planetary scale, and when political and economic forces began to have geologic consequences. In his 1994 article “On the Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” earth scientist Roger Hooke set out to assess the impact of human activities such as agriculture and mining on the earth’s surface. He found something remarkable: over the last hundred years or so, humans have moved more sediment than has been moved by classical geomorphic processes.
Agricultural erosion, he estimated, moves about seventy gigatons of sediment annually, almost twice as much as meandering rivers (at forty Gt/y). Mining and highway construction move more earth than plate tectonics, glaciers, wave action, and aeolian (wind) processes combined.9 The implication was profound. Shortly after the Industrial Revolution, human activity eclipsed natural earth processes as a geomorphic agent.
Other earth scientists have expanded Hooke’s work, suggesting the idea of an
“anthropic force” and proposing new fields of “neogeomorphology” or “anthro-pogeomorphology.” Geologist Peter Haff explains: “Anthropic modification
6 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York:
Penguin, 2004), 61.
7 For the space-time dialectics of capitalism, see David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2010), 37; and David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006).
8 John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 79.
9 Roger LeB. Hooke, “On the Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” GSA Today, vol. 4, no. 9 (September, 1994): 217, 224–25.
of landscape is a new and unique phenomenon,” whose effect on the earth’s surface may be as significant as the emergence of vascular plants four hundred million years ago. Contemporary scientists wanting to understand earth processes, he argued, might do well to study economics, sociology, demographics, and other fields usu-ally associated with the “soft” social sciences.10 In the Anthropocene, the price of gold futures determines whether mountains will rise or fall, and farm subsidies and commodity prices influence the rate of erosion.
The Anthropocene is a period of temporal contradictions, a period in which Marx’s space-time annihilation chafes against the deep time of the earth. The coal-fired plants and mass-produced automobiles of the industrial age have remade the air, concentrating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and eating holes in the ozone. It is an age in which ever-faster economic and political forces have ever more enduring consequences. The timescale of climate change, which unfolds over thousands of years, contradicts the timescale of human experience, which we measure in years or lifetimes, and the timescales of capital accumulation, measured in quarterly profits.
With nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the timescale of geopolitics and strategic military planning intersects the deep time of nuclear waste, which poisons its sur-roundings for countless thousands of years. A cup of fast-food coffee is meant to be sipped for a few minutes, but its Styrofoam takes more than a million years to biode-grade. A carbon-saturated atmosphere, nuclear waste, and Styrofoam cups inhabit space at the expense of time. As such, they become historic agents, producing their own futures. In the Anthropocene, communications and transportation technolo-gies are ruthlessly deployed to annihilate space by accelerating time, but in human activities—from coal burning to fast-food coffee cup manufacturing—we find an equally pitiless annihilation of the future: something we might call the annihilation of time by space. The fractures and folds in spacetime that form where the times-cales of economics and politics collide with the deep time of geomorphology are emblematic of the contemporary moment.
The various ways in which humans have remade time, both speeding it up and slowing it down, show that time is not something that just happens, like a ticking clock as backdrop to other activities; quite the opposite. Time is produced through human activities, and through the things we make, and through our interactions with the world around us. To quote physicist and theorist Karen Barad, “Time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices […] time itself only makes sense in the context of particular phenomena.”11 The implication, then, is that the production of time is a political phenomenon. How, and in accordance
10 Peter K. Haff, “Neogeomorphology, Prediction, and the Anthropic Landscape,” draft paper, Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, 2001), www.duke.edu/~haff/geomorph_abs/neogeomorph%20paper/
neogeomorphology.pdf.
11 Quoted in Rich Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism: Interview and Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 66.
GEOGRAPHIES OF TIME (THE LAST PICTURES)
with whose interests, is time produced? Producing time carries a set of ethical obli-gations that we have paid scant attention to: How to produce time in a manner that is just, not only for the present, but for that which has yet to come?
Too often, we imagine the future to be an unknowable void—something that does not exist because it has not happened yet. But much of the future has, in fact, already taken place. Through the annihilation of time by space, the things we’ve made have guaranteed certain futures at the expense of others. The prison at Guantanamo Bay, for example, is still open and operating. The brute fact of its sedimented concrete walls provides much of the inertia needed to carry it into the future: it continues to exist, in large part, because it exists. In the longer run, the climate will continue to change as the result of anthropogenic transforma-tions to the atmosphere. Nuclear waste will poison great swaths of earth for tens of thousands of years. And a ring of dead machines, far above the equator, will silently watch it all unfold over millions of years. All of this has already happened, in the future.
Earth’s new moon, EchoStar XVI, is an instrument of time, frozen in time.
While it whirls and hums with energy over its fifteen-year operational life, EchoStar XVI will broadcast more than ten trillion pictures and video frames to earth-based televisions and computer screens.12 All these pictures will be as fleeting as the radio signals that carry them, appearing and disappearing with the speed of light. But EchoStar XVI holds other pictures. A modest collection, to be sure, but one designed to last far longer than the oldest cave paintings. A collection designed to transcend the Anthropocene and to transcend deep time itself. A collection of pictures meant, in part, to acknowledge the future.
12 This estimate assumes that EchoStar XVI broadcasts thirty frames per second on one thousand channels over fifteen years.