A doting lover once gifted a word to his paramour, and may have unwittingly saved civilisation.
What could be more romantic than to invent a word for someone? A sound and its meaning would forever more associate with the love between that couple. Even if that love would one day end, like a dying star, the word would capture and communicate to all an idea that could last to the end of time. As long as there were mouths to speak, ears to hear and a mind to understand, the word could immortalise that couple’s love.
When christmas came, he told his lover what her gift would be! That she would receive a new word that no one had used before. He asked what her word should mean.
She enjoyed stories of other worlds. Of parallel worlds. Worlds with hidden meaning, and subtlety. Sometimes inspired by Shakespeare. Often gruesome and scary. But not always. Stranger Things. Pirates of the Caribbean. Peter Pan. Pan’s Labyrinth. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His Dark Materials. She said she wanted a word that described the genre of stories about parallel worlds. In music and movies, plays, or books.
He thought and hunted. He delved and he mined. He thought about octopuses and octopi, the etymology of the words and whether he should choose a Greek or a Latin root. He mused and pondered and eventually after much deliberation with himself, he hit on the idea that such worlds were shadows of each other. Like the shadow on the wall of the cave, stories about other worlds were born of desire for platonic perfection, or a realm where struggles between good and evil could play out without harming ourselves in this world.
From his lists of Greek and Latin candidates one word stood out like a super nova in the night sky.
Mirusumbra
From the latin “mirus” meaning strange or wonderful, and the more familiar “umbra”, meaning shadow. The word itself, given the genre it describes, would be inappropriate without a double meaning. It can mean strange shadow or wonderful shadow, entirely as the user pleases.
She loved it. And the genre of stories known as mirusumbra was named!
The years passed and the lovers moved on. Their lives complicated like all lives. There was no anger or malice. Just a growing distance that could not be closed. Like two galaxies drifting apart for eternity.
One day he found a curiosity tucked into his book shelf that he had forgotten about. A star naming gift. You could pay a company a silly amount of money and they would ask you to invent a name for a star. They would send you a gift certificate telling you the coordinates and constellation of that star, making it official. He knew it was a bit of a scam because astronomers had their own catalogues for stars.
“But who cares about them”, he thought. “I can name a star and if that’s what people call it then that’s what it’s called.”
He couldn’t remember how the package came to be on his bookshelf, but it was unopened. He thought that maybe it was a gift from his former lover. He decided to open and use the gift, and set about thinking what he could call this star.
“Stars create shadows!” he thought, and instantly her word sprang to mind. Using that as inspiration and with a little help from Google translate, he found a phrase that he liked the sound of:
Fons Mirusumbra
The fountain of strange shadows.
That is what he would call his star. And he did. Its coordinates are right ascension 8h 33m 00.0s, and declination +4o 49′ 34.0”. It is a magnitude 12.5 star in the constellation of Hydra and it’s AGASC_ID is 28579072.
He tried to make the name grammatically correct and he thought of his old latin master conjugating verbs and how he had won a prize for best unseen translation when he was 11 years old. And then thought. “Screw it. Rules were made to be broken”.
Literally translated Fons Mirusumbra means the source of the wonderful shadow. That’s close enough.
Years passed and he took it upon himself to save his own planet. He wrote his own book about a mirusumbra world called Brave Green World. This was a vision of Earth in the future and how the technology around today could help us make a better planet. He sold a few copies, but not enough to leave his day job as a research scientist.
He didn’t mind. He loved being a scientist. In fact one day, while waiting for some computer code to finish he started to play with ChatGPT, the new AI. It’s a wonderful tool and can write code and all kinds.
He thought to himself, “what if I asked it to write a poem about a star called Fons Mirusumbra?”
This is what happened:
He cringed a bit at the rhyme scheme. But he loved the last verse and it made him excited. Which is a pretty good result for an AI! What more could a poet ask for than to illicit an emotional reaction?
“That’s actually not a terrible poem”, he thought. “The last line makes me think about humans leaving the shadow of Earth to leap into the great void on starships. I wonder if ChatGPT can make a story about a civilisation that learns to become sustainable?”
Even though technically the path to salvation in the story was largely nonsensical, the story was brilliant and the lover loved it. He thought to write the story of how the story from ChatGPT came into existence on his blog, Rubiks Planet. He hoped that it would inspire others to be creative and to want to find ways to save the world, so that humans could one day travel to Fons Mirusumbra and tell the inhabitants of that star, how they had been an inspiration to save an entire world.
The End.
Epilogue
In this story, ChatGPT took the idea of a circular economy literally and made the ring system around a planet into an economy. That’s not what circular economics means, but it’s an interesting idea: what if all the toxic and terrible things that pollute our world, but give us the standard of living that we want, could be performed in space where the pollution would stay in orbit, and we could leave the natural Earth system untouched?
What if we made all the fancy things like iPhones in space and only moved finished products between Earth and space? and unwanted products back up to space, with interim stages of manufacturing and recycling left up in orbit or on the moon?
Would this work? Apart from the cost of moving objects to and from orbit, we would not be able to satisfy all of our demands on Earth from space. We need food on Earth and our human waste must leave our bodies.
Real circular economics is about converting waste back into useful products. Many of the largest problems in the world, such as biodiversity collapse, climate change and so on are caused, fundamentally, by people trying to get richer in terms of money. But our economic system doesn’t capture all things of value in the number that we use to describe a person’s wealth.
The amount of money a person has doesn’t include the cost of destroying natural systems to get that money.
Thus people who think they are rich aren’t really. They have a large bank balance and share holding but that is only a small part of the story! Work that people do like bringing up children, or cleaning their houses is not paid for but actually contributes far greater value than the entirety of the monetary economy.
The Earth’s systems clean the air and regenerate the oceans, but we do not pay them. And we do not take the cost of destroying them into account. Thus all billionaires are living a lie. They are not that wealthy at all. They reformat stolen natural resource into forms that others want, but they do not pay nature or replace that resource. If they do not start to pay that back in terms of money, they will pay for it in terms of death. For everyone.
All parts of our system should be quantified in wealth measurement, and we must learn how to avoid converting the natural resource of Earth into forms that destroy the original system that gave us life.
When we look in detail at circular economics it is split in two. The renewable and the finite. The left and right hand sides of this diagram (image credit: Ellen MacArthur Foundation). Incidentally this image is in my book co-written with Claire Asher, scientific journalist.
What if we could build a lush green biological natural system on Earth (left half), and ship the finite, technical polluting half to space (blue side of the diagram)?
We are part of the Earth! and no matter what we do if we want to live on Earth we can’t separate ourselves from it completely. All living systems and humans together on the Earth form a single system. We are trying to build a second system within the first one. Our economy! This ChatGPT story about separating our world into two parts helps us see that so clearly. We must either learn how to limit what we want to prevent destroying our system, or figure out how to take damaging parts of economics outside the Earth. Is it possible? The aim here is to spark a conversation, not to provide answers. I merely ask the question!
Could we live forever in the strange shadow of our own pollution and restore Earth to a pristine wilderness?
Two realms of existence. Linked for eternity. Or if such a mirusumbra economy is not feasible, then we must learn to limit our consumption within this one. If we do not, we will become but a shadow in the geological record. Let us hope that doesn’t come to pass and the inhabitants of Fons Mirusumbra will one day find our world, and it is we that will inspire them with our Never Ending Story!
Like all the great heroes in Mirusumbra stories it is your choice that makes the difference.
Rubik's Planet 