systemic

The submerged summit of the Detroit Seamount ranks among the planet’s gloomiest spots. East of Kamchatka, a mile beneath the waves at 51 51′ N, 167 45′ E, it is second-to-last in the long line of Emperors. Inch by inch, it creeps toward destruction in the Aleutian Trench.

Detroit’s glory days were the late Cretaceous. Back then, it was an active Hawaiian volcano.

Live it fast, you’re gonna there soon. Kauai is five million years old, but underground, the lights have gone out. Over half of the original height and the original land area have disappeared. Rivers gush sediment into the sea. Waimea Canyon juxtaposes verdure and an erosive wasteland. Four wheel drive claws and rends the red dirt.

Beyond Kauai, the next islands in the chain are Nihoa,

Necker,

and the La Perouse Pinnacle,

whose resemblance to a sinking ship is not just metaphoric.

Before humans arrived, the Hawaiian islands had strange flightless birds. Indeed, each island in the chain developed its own odd avian inhabitants, sculpted by natural selection, and then driven conveyor-like to extinction. Not once, in forty, fifty, sixty tries, did the birds respond by evolving intelligence and doing something about their situation. Probably, there was never enough time.

Or perhaps, that’s something that rarely, if ever, happens.

Aon Tower, as seen from Lurie Garden in Millennium Park

Millennium Park in Chicago is a remarkable place. Skyscrapers shoulder together and soar up steeply to the north and to the west. The vertiginous effect of their cliff faces is reminiscent of Yosemite Valley.

Lurie Garden is at the center of the park, and is given over largely to native plants that carpeted the Illinois landscape in the interval between the retreat of the glaciers and the advance of the corn fields. In the silence of a photograph with a narrow field of view, it is as if the city never existed.

Lurie Garden

Restore the sound, and the the buzz and hum of insects are superimposed on the wash of urban noise. A swarm of bees, algorithmic in their efficiency, and attuned to the flowers’ black light glow, collect the nectar. 55% sucrose, 24% glucose and 21% fructose.

When viewed in microwaves and millimeter waves, say from 1 to 100 GHz, the Millennium Park scene displays a similarly jarring juxtaposition. The sky glows with the ancient three degree background radiation — the cosmic static of the Big Bang explosion — subtly brightest in the direction of the Virgo Supercluster. All around, the buildings, the roads and the sidewalks are lit up with manically pulsating wireless transmitters: routers, cell phones, myriad sensors. In highly focused 6 GHz and 11 GHz beams, billions of dollars in coded securities orders streak above the urban canyons on line-of-sight paths linking the data centers of Chicago, Aurora, and suburban New Jersey. The fastest path of all runs through the top of the monolithic Aon Tower, where the signal is amplified and launched onward across the Lake and far into Michigan.

The microwave beams are a new development. In mid-2010, price movements at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange generated reactions in New Jersey nine milliseconds later. The signals traveled on fiber optic cables that meandered along railroad rights-of-way.

Now, the messages arrive within a few microseconds of the time it would take light to travel in vacuum, galvanizing the swarm of algorithms that are continually jostling and buzzing in the vicinity of the match.