Around the same Sun, 2022

Edition of 3 + 2AP.

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In the short story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” Ursula Le Guin describes an academic journal dedicated to the study of “Therolinguistics”, namely of non-human languages such as Ant, Penguin and others. In the last section the editor writes about the possible future developments on the field, where linguists will presumably be able to recognize the language of the plants, and even that of the rocks, the stones, the volcanoes.

Stones are maybe the oldest material formations. They hold the memory of the world. Around the same Sun (listen to the stones) gathers fragments of these memories of two stones NWA7034 and a Pilbara rock. NWA (Northwest Africa) 7034 is a space rock, recovered from the Western Sahara of Africa in 2011. It’s the oldest Martian igneous rock ever identified. It formed 4.5 billion years ago and slammed into Earth after an asteroid impact sent it flying across space five to ten million years ago. Only in 2022 scientists managed with the help of artificial intelligence to pinpoint the exact origin site of the oldest Martian meteorite.

Pilbara rock comes from the homonymous region in north Western Australia and it is the oldest rock formation on Earth, 3.45-billion-year-old fossil stromatolites. Pilbara is a place that has been and still is heavily extracted, but it is also home to Aboriginal indigenous people who are strongly connected to the ancient land. What are these two rocks remember? Recent complex events of terrestrial history, colonization, technology advancements and new space exploration. What does language used in new space exploration today reveal? Will humanity repeat the mistakes of the past? Is listening to other than human or even speaking to other than human going to help decenter human POV from the future worlds?