1— ‘Time’s Bookends’, for Aeon Magazine

17 February 2025

Edited by the brilliant Richard Fisher, this one was a labor of love. The essay is, in many ways, a summary of the primary things I’ve been thinking about since X-Risk. It’s a summary of some ideas I’ve been thinking through for a while now.

As young children, we all come to terms with our own mortality somewhere between ages of six and ten. We might call this the First Death. But, as Jonathan Schell argued, the species itself now confronts its own extinction: which he called the Second Death. But, as we have progressively pinpointed our placement within cosmic time, we have discovered and grappled with the fact there are even greater deaths: that of the biosphere and, beyond, even of the universe itself. So, a Third and Fourth Death, too; there are ever greater mortalities, expanding concentrically outward.

But, in coming to terms with these mortalites, we have also had to expand the arena of space and time wherein we acknowledge that actions and decisions can be meaningful because their consequences cannot be taken back. Before acknowledging said mortalities it wasn’t clear that consequences can stick, and be irreversible, at scales beyond the tangible and familiar. Reckoning with these realities, we have had to acknowledge that we live in a thoroughly historical universe where contingency has bite.

If — from Copernicus onward — discovering where we are in space made us feel unremarkable, pinpointing where we find ourselves in time stands set to dramatically reverse this. One intellectual revolution, undone by another.

Read @ Aeon here.

2—‘Asteroid Anxiety’, for Big Think

7 March 2025

Early last year, asteroid #2024YR4 provoked fear of cosmic collision. But astronomy's quest to forecast such hazards goes back to the very origin of science. In fact, such efforts provided early vindication of the promise of the scientific method itself.

Over three centuries ago, during a time when many thought scientific research to be an ineffectual and trifling pursuit, early breakthroughs in predicting comet paths began turning the tide.

The story of one of modern science’s earliest triumphs, this article relates how fears of comet-induced extinction provoked early attempts to predict the cosmic hazards jeopardizing our planet.

Read @ Big Think here.

3—‘Aliens Everywhere’, for Big Think

30 April 2025

For centuries, scientists assumed the universe was not full — but brimful — of life. Many naturalists claimed even the surfaces of suns were inhabited, whilst others conducted cosmic censuses: guessing total population numbers for the universe, calculating this to be in the "quadrillions".

In this article, I inspect why people used to assume every last planet was occupied by reasoning beings, and w

In the article, I explore Thomas Dick’s mid-1800s attempts at conducting a ‘population census’ for the Solar System (by extrapolating from contemporary population density of England across all circumstellar surfaces… including Saturn’s Ring). Here are his results:

Read @ Big Think here.

4—‘The History of Now’, for Antikythera Journal

10 May 2025

This one was another labour of love: a unique opportunity to collaborate with information architect and data visualizer Lisa Strausfeld (of InformationArt) and Clinton Van Arnam to produce an interactive essay and accompanying timeline.

The timeline attempts to visualize how answers to the question ‘where is now?’ have changed over time: illustrating how humankind’s sense of the time behind and time ahead has changed over history, as we have learned and discovered more about chronology and the placement of the present within it. Over the years, every time I’ve come across a quantitative estimate on the size of the future or past, I’ve recorded it — this project was an attempt to visualize that dataset and make it interactive.

In the timeline on the left-side of the screen, the central and vertical line represents human history, with earlier years above and later years below. As you scroll down and peruse the accompanying essay on the right-side of the screen, you are moving forward from more ancient to less ancient, all the way up to the present day.

Whilst scrolling, contemporaneous estimates of the size of the past and future come into view and pass by on the timeline. These are the red horizontal lines. Every time a prominent historical figure or scientist made a numerical prediction concerning the length of the past and/or future, it is recorded here, with the predictor’s name, the year their prediction was published, and the numbers they proposed all appearing in red.

The red horizontal lines depict the comparative sizes of these historical estimates. The leftward length of the line represents the individual’s calculation of time passed; the rightward length visualizes their gauge for time left ahead. In this way, by the end of the essay, you will have gained a synoptic vantage on just how much our sense of time has changed over time.

A unique opportunity to work with two incredibly talented designers, I am very proud of the result! We also included a ‘free roam’ option, accessible via the settings widget in the bottom left, so feel free to explore the data with that.

Read ‘History of Now’ @ Antikythera Journal here.

5—‘The Media & Morphospace of History’, for Farsight Magazine

13 May 2025

This essay traces, in broad outlines, how humanity’s sense of what’s possible has radically expanded throughout the past — largely thanks to the development of electronic computers. It borrows the idea of a ‘morphospace’ from evolutionary theory (a conceptual or graphical map representing all possible or existing organic structures) and applies this to human history itself.

I return again to the idea of ‘Deep Possibility’: the sense that there’s far more possible than can ever be actual, and how it is this that makes history matter, insofar as it means not every outcome will come to pass regardless.

Featuring characters ranging from Pascal to Leibniz to Edward Lorenz, I am rather fond of this particular essay.

Read @ Farsight here.

6—‘A Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere’, keynote @ ICI Berlin

15 May 2025

I was invited by the brilliant Magdalena Krysztoforska, Ben Woodard, and others to give a talk at the ICI Berlin. Other keynotes included Mike Levin and Deborah Coen. It was great fun. I talked about the idea of planetary intelligence, and whether such a notion makes any sense.

Here’s the blurb for my talk, which was titled ‘A Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere’:

For centuries, people — both misanthropes and humanists alike — have compared Earth’s life to a ‘sludge’ clinging to our planet’s crust. Stephen Hawking memorably called the human race ‘chemical scum’ clinging cravenly to a spinning rock. Is biology merely a mold or planetary fungal infection? Answering this question depends on the evaluation of the stature of sludge. After all, some slime has potentials. The Earth’s organic coating, after all, has — for aeons now — drastically transformed its planetary environment, bringing forth the unprecedented from the precedented. So far, however, this process would be best called planetary stupidity, rather than planetary sapience. However, how could it have been otherwise? No one is born wise: this is a status that can only ever be earned, and this takes time and tribulation. So, too, with any baby intelligence, no matter the scale. Folly is part of growing up. This talk, thus, asks the question: can our planet’s infant noosphere, spawned from upstart chemical slurry, ever leave its infancy?

Listen to a recording of the talk here @ ICI Berlin here.

7—‘The Strange History of De-Extinction’, for Big Think

20 May 2025

The concept of species extinction is only a couple of centuries old. But as soon as scientists began accepting that species could die out, they also began speculating on ways we could resurrect them. From dinosaurs to aurochs, early visions of de-extinction blurred science, myth, and mourning: and they did so long before Michael Crichton or Colossal Biosciences.

In this article, I attempt to tell the broad outlines of that story, leading up to present attempts to bring back the dead.

Read @ Big Think here.

8—‘Life as Slime’, for Asimov Press

9 June 2025

You’ll be familiar with the favorite clever quip of pessimistic philosophers and hard-nosed cosmologists alike. 'Life is just slime atop a spinning rock, circling a mundane star, in a cosmos unimaginably large.’

Something about the emotion going into such statements has never quite sat right with me. The ‘just’ is doing a lot of work. What else did you expect? In this essay, I trace the history and development of such statements, before arguing that they are clearly a hangover from elder, religious worldviews that did put us in the role of cosmic protagonist and did flatter us with cosmic nobility and dignity.

After all, you can only feel demoted if part of you still believes you deserved your old position. You can only feel cheated from an inheritance if part of you, deep down, still thinks you were owed it.

It’s time to retire the ‘just’ in such statements. Long live the slime!

I’ve always admired what Asimov Press does, so it was a joy to write something for them. I may post the original version of this essay here on Substack soon, as it was compressed a lot in editing.

Read @ Asimov Press here.

8—Interview with Benjamin Bratton for Berggruen Institute’s Futurology Podcast

29 July 2025

I had the pleasure of recording a podcast interview with Benjamin Bratton, in the Palazzo Diedo’s upper floors, looking out over the spires of Venice. It was for the Berggruen Institute’s new ‘Futurology’ podcast; it was a genuine honour to be featured.

Listen or watch here.

9—‘In Defense of Secular Religions’, for Combinations Magazine

30 July 2025

Something of an extension to an article I wrote for Noema a few years ago, on the question of residues of religion in contemporary AI discourse, this article explores the question of what it even is to be a ‘secular religion’.

Many things, these days, are accused of being secular religions: including, perhaps most notably, the entire edifice of modernity itself. Often, this is meant as an insult: an attempt to debunk and delegitimize. The gambit being: if you can reveal an unavowed inheritance of religiosity in avowedly atheist or secular discourses, you have shown that they are not being fully transparent or honest with themselves.

In this essay, I explore what that means and, whilst accepting that, yes, modernity is an offshoot of medieval theology, this doesn’t thereby delegitimize modernity or its precepts. Again, borrowing from evolutionary theory, I argue that modernity, science, and modern ethics (i.e. utilitarianism and deontology) are ‘exaptations’ of medieval theology, where an ‘exaptation’ describes a fortuitous shift where an organ evolved for one function (or none at all) is later co-opted for a new one. The essay opens with one of my favorite concepts: that of ‘cosmic emotion’, or, the feeling of ethical urgency we are sometimes struck with when considering the universe at large.

Read @ Combinations Magazine here.

10—‘The Philosophers Who Predicted “Ultimate” Forms of Consciousnesss’, for Big Think

20 August 2025

For Big Think’s special issue on consciousness, I wrote an essay on the history of suggestions that, as there minimal forms of consciousness, so too must there be ‘maximal’ ones. Or, ultimate states of mind, intelligence, and cogitation. People have being thinking, in more or less secular terms, about omnipotent and omniscient minds for a long time: long, long before current discussions of ‘superintelligence’ and so forth. In this essay, I trace the development of these types of ideas, whilst relating them to very early, embryonic fears that — through our machines — we may be creating more potent forms of intelligence that may outcompete us.

I open the essay with the humble oyster. Philosophers have often conscripted the oyster, in symbolic terms, as some supposed ‘minimal degree’ of consciousness or insight. From Plato onward, they have dismissed the oyster as living the most unreflective life an organism can live. But will there, one day, be types of minds that make us look like oysters in comparison?

Read @ Big Think here.

11—‘Yellow-Bellied Pages’, for Tank Magazine

Autumn 2025

For the Autumn edition of Tank Magazine, the editors asked writers, artists, and filmmakers which books terrified them the most. It is a really great prompt. My response was as follows:

I love working with Tank: I should have a conversation with the brilliant Pete Wolfendale coming out in a future issue. Watch this space!

11—‘Why Scientists Fear “Mirror Life”’, for Big Think

15 September 2025

When, in late 2024, Science published a paper on potential risks from ‘mirror life’, I was captivated. Mirror life refers to the possibility of engineering lifeforms whose molecules have reverse chirality: i.e. flipped in structure, as if in a mirror. The Science paper raised the alarm on the potentially disastrous consequences of creating mirror microorganisms. They might be able to ‘infect’ our cells and go mostly undetected by immune systems, potentially causing an unprecedentedly damaging pandemic.

Upon reading the paper, I immediately asked myself whether anyone had said anything similar before. It turned out none other than Louis Pasteur — the first scientist to realise that all living cells have chirality or handedness — was the first to speculate on the possibility of creating mirror life all the way back in 1860.

This inspired me to write this article: touching on very early fears surrounding synthetic biology and thereafter opening up into the wider history of worries that science is on the brink of discovering or producing new, exotic forms of matter or life which, spreading rapidly, might end our world.

Read @ Big Think here.

12—‘The Limitless Future’, podcast for Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

Rounding out the year, I spoke to Casper and August for the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies’s Farsight podcast. It was a fantastic conversation: we spoke about everything from doomsday to dolphins…

Spotify here. Apple Podcasts here.

Talking of dolphins, I submitted the manuscript for my next book as 2025 shaded into 2026. I’m quite excited about it… It’s under contract with MIT Press. More on what it’s actually about soon (hint: the subtitle is likely going to be ‘Nonhuman Intelligence & Human Extinction’), but here’s a sample of some of the myriad piles of books I used as source material:

More soon and thanks so much for reading if you made it this far!

Below is a selection of some of the essays and pieces I published this year, in chronological order.

1 — ‘What the “future histories” of the 1920s can teach us about hope’ — for BBC Future

12 Jan 2024

An exploration of visions of the future from a collection of books published a century ago: the ‘To-Day & To-Morrow’ series. Each entry in the series would task an intellectual or expert to detail their forecast for a specific domain of life. Topics ranged from the future of swearing, to those of poetry, nonsense, and monogamy. In this essay, I explore how these books somehow managed to avoid the restrictively dyadic future-thinking of our own time, which too often is forced into a binary straitjacket of ‘utopia’ versus ‘dystopia’. In the decades since, and following the various disillusionments they provoked, we’ve lost some of the nuance these old prophesies managed to muster: hence, these tomorrows of yesterday can still teach us a lot today.

Read @ BBC Future here.

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2 — ‘A US engineer had a shocking plan to improve the climate – burn all coal on Earth’ — for BBC Future

1st Feb 2024

I was shocked when I first tracked this down in the archive. That’s saying something, as I see my job as digging up the outlandish things people used to think. The short article tells the long-forgotten story of William Lamont Abbott, a US engineer who, upon learning about the Greenhouse Effect, thought it would be a great idea for humanity to set alight to all the coal seams on planet Earth simultaneously. He thought that this would provoke a return to Edenic weather: creating tropical conditions all the way to the poles, allowing greater crop yields for a rapidly reproducing humankind. He toured the US in the 1920s, proselytising his pyromaniac creed. What’s more, he wasn’t alone. This is yet another lesson in caution from history: when humans gain new knowledge about the external world (e.g. that coal-burning warms the atmosphere), they don’t always immediately arrive at the correct practical conclusions when it comes to global priorities… In fact, it seems they are often not only wrong, but catastrophically wrong.

Read @ BBC Future here.

3 — ‘Untangling religion from our AI debates’ — for Noema Magazine

27th Feb 2024

The question of ‘AI & religion’ — as with AI combined with almost any other domain of life — is probably only going to spill more ink and produce more scribbling as time passes. To me, the question seems vexatious. You’ll often hear people claiming that this or that ideology or group in the vicinity of AI research is practising something like ‘a secularised religion’. It’s not only here, you increasingly hear such claims made in politics too. Notably, it’s almost always used as an insult. This strikes me as peculiar. So, I wanted to shed some irenical light on the matter: trying to soberly respond to the question of theological residue in AI discourses productively, rather than merely with the attitude of a debunker or adversary. Yes, ideas like ‘superintelligence’ clearly resemble theological ideas — ones, tellingly, from the Abrahamic tradition — but what do we do with this beyond sling more mud and sharpen more barbs?

Read @ Noema Magazine here.

4 — ‘If a Victorian historian had his way, there'd be a giant time capsule under Stonehenge’ — for BBC Future

9th Jul 2024

This was a fun one — I also did the lead illustration! The article tells the story of the eccentric and endlessly fascinating Victorian historian Frederic Harrison. Being a historian, he had a good sense of time: not only in the retrospect, but also the prospect. Highly sensitive to how the past is a foreign country, he presciently looked forward to an unfamiliar future, too. He described his time as one occupied by “historical consciousness” to a degree more than any before: that is, to the anxieties of how they would be recieved by posterity. Knowing his era couldn’t control the opinions of future generations, he endeavoured to at least retain the fidelity of the picture of Victorian life that would be passed on. To that end, he decided to put a giant time capsule underneath Stonehenge (a place unlikely to be tampered with too much), and fill it with a snapshot of his epoch… one complete with the skeletons of animals which Harrison predicted wouldn’t survive the onslaught of Victorian acquisitiveness.

Read @ BBC Future here.

5 — ‘The Mortality of Immortality’ — for Nicolas Party’s ‘Dust’ Exhibition at South Korea’s Ho-Am Museum

31st Aug 2024

I am a big admirer of Nicolas Party’s paintings and pastel murals: I find both the subject matter and style very evocative. After speaking together on a podcast for the Atlantic magazine, Nicolas kindly invited me to write an essay for his most recent exhibition, ‘Dust’, at South Korea’s Ho-Am Museum. It was a serious pleasure to be translated into Korean for the first time! The itself exhibit looks stunning: I was proud to scribe an essay for the accompanying catalogue, musing on Nicolas’s chosen themes of transience, longevity, and mortality. My essay reflects on the old psychoanalytical theory that civilisation begins with the individual’s “denial of death”, before exploring how such psychological repression connects to historic acceptance of not only individual mortality, but also the mortality of our species and all biological life itself. I will be posting a on my website soon!

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6 — ‘How the search for dinosaurs on Venus exposed a climate warning for Earth’ — for Big Think

4th Oct 2024

Over the years, I’ve been shocked to increasingly learn just how many people, in the earlier 1900s, took seriously the idea that Venus might be a swampy planet covered in jungles and, potentially, inhabited by dinosaurs. This, to the contemporary eye, seems patently absurd: surely everyone would know, a priori, this couldn’t be true? But, prior to contrary evidence, such conjectures were very much on the cards. In the first half of the previous century, it was assumed Venus was essentially a ‘younger’ version of Earth, and was thus undergoing something similar to our Paleozoic Period. Hence, the Venusian dinosaurs. The contrary evidence came, crushingly, when the first human probes flew close to Venus: revealing it to be a lifeless hellscape with a scorched, pressurised atmosphere. This article tells the story of how this woke us up to the potential for similar climate catastrophes to unfold on Earth. Searching for dinosaurs on Venus thus provided a warning for our own environmental future on Earth.

Read @ Big Think.

7 — ‘Are we accidentally building a planetary brain?’ — for Noema Magazine

19th Nov 2024

I immensely enjoyed writing this one. Put short, it is about how we can blame crabs for all this contemporary talk of the ‘Anthropocene’… In more detail, it tells the story of the American geologist J.D. Dana who from studying crabs in the mid-1800s became convinced that all evolution is tending “headward”. Various lineages of crustacea, he argued, have all converged upon a crab-like form; and what typifies crabs, over and above their more shrimp-like ancestors, is the shrinking of the abdomen, which tucks away underneath an increasingly engorged braincase. Of course, something similar typified our evolution too. From this, Dana thought he had discovered a universal law of evolution: that all nature, all living matter, is trying to reorganise itself into a brain. When people noticed that the recently planted transatlantic telegraph cables — connecting continents like hemispheres of a brain — curiously resembled nerve fibres, many concluded: ‘yes, we are buildling a planetary brain’. The article traces this peculiar thought throughout the 1900s, from Vernadsky to Maynard Smith, recovering some otherwise forgotten figures along the way, before demonstrating how none other than Albert Einstein himself was keen on such ‘world-brain’ ideas.

Read @ Noema Magazine.

8 — ‘How humanity discovered we’re all made of “star stuff”’ — for Big Think

18th Dec 2024

In 1973, Carl Sagan memorably said that we are “are made of star stuff”. But he was far from the first. In this article, I tell the story of how we realised the suns are our parents and our bodies are made from their ash. It stretches all the way back to the 1500s, when the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus confidently declared that the stars have “nothing to do” with our bodies. They, he insisted, “are neither party of us nor we of them”. Back then, of course, there was no way of determining the truth of this conclusively. No one had any clue what the stars were made out of. Many believed they were simply made of different stuff entirely: composed of materials not found on Earth, goverened by different laws. Three centuries later, in the 1880s, the French philosopher Auguste Comte declared we would never be able to ascertain the chemical constitution of stars. This didn’t stand the test of time. Only decades later, the field of spectroscopy was founded, implying we are the stars’ corporeal siblings, as we are made from identical elements. But then, throughout the 1900s, scientists realised that the suns are actually our parents: all living things are made from elements forged in ancient stars. Read the piece to find out the full story!

Read @ Big Think.

9 — ‘Five books proving history isn’t driven by destiny, but by chance and (sometimes) choice’ — for Shepherd

30th Dec 2024

Shepherd seem to be embarking on an admirable mission: creating a new way to find books and share reading lists. I’m all for that! They approached me to write a list of five books I admire, unified by any theme I choose. So, I went ahead and cooked up a list of books that, as the title suggests, argue that history — broadly concieved — isn’t dictated by destiny, but instead is driven by chance and sometimes choice. I decided to combine my interest in intellectual history (Hacking, Blumenberg) with my admiration for biological history (Gould, Powell). Because, if the greatest story ever told on Earth is that of evolution, then the second greatest might be the saga of our coming to understand and uncover it. What’s more, I also got to nod to Thomas Browne: probably my favourite prose writer, and the Jorge Louis Borges of the 1600s!

Read @ Shepherd.

Onwards to 2025!

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Last week, there were headlines claiming new evidence had been found that our planet, like Saturn, once had rings surrounding it. This week, it is being reported that the Earth has, transiently, caught a ‘second moon’.

Second moons and Saturn-like rings. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, this is not the first time such announcements have been made. Eighty-four years ago, in 1940, one scientist proposed them both in combination. He claimed that, long ago, Earth had a second moon. But this later broke up, causing our planet to temporarily gain a ring of debris, some 200 million years ago.

This Sunday (September 29^th, 2024), NASA scientists announced our planet has captured a “mini-moon” in the form of the small asteroid called ‘2024 PT5’. It will stay with us until around November 25^th, after which it depart us and will head on its way.

In an unrelated turn of events, several days beforehand, new research was published—by Andy Tomkins and colleagues at Monash University—theorising that Earth was once circumscribed by a ring of swirling debris.

Tomkins’s publication attempts to explain what is known as the Ordovician impact spike. This was a period, around 466 million years ago, when our planet suffered a period of peculiarly intense bombardment by meteorites. It was a time when Earth was populated mainly by squids, trilobites, very primitive fish, and ‘sea scorpions’.

Noting that most of the craters from this bombardment cluster around the equator, Tomkins proposes this clustering can be explained by the existence, long ago, of a Saturn-like ring surrounding our planet. This was formed after Earth captured a large asteroid, which was then torn apart by tidal forces, forming a planetary circlet of debris. The infalling of these debris—dragged down by gravity—would explain the equatorial clumping of the impact sites, around our planet’s belly.

Moreover, Tomkins and his team speculate that this “ring system” could have influenced planetary climate. The ring’s proposed existence, that is, coincides with a period of dramatic global cooling known as the Hirnantian glaciation or Early Palaeozoic Icehouse. This chilly period could be elegantly explained by the ring casting its shadow on Earth: obscuring incoming sunlight.

Almost immediately, paleoartists began visualising the scene: when, 450 million years ago, Ordovician arthropods looked wistfully at sunsets bisected by a planet-girdling halo.

It is an elegant and exciting theory. Strangely enough, something very similar has been proposed before. This time, however, it was put forward as an explanation for a slightly later glaciation event, known today as the Late Palaeozoic Icehouse.

In 1940, the geologist Ronald L. Ives published a paper titled ‘An Astronomical Hypothesis to Explain Permian Glaciation’. In it, Ives sought for an explanation for geologic evidence of very ancient glaciers found throughout the tropics, namely central and South America, Australia, and India. At the time, it was thought that this meant that, near the end of the Permian period, multiple hundreds of millions of years ago, icy glaciers somehow flowed away from the equator rather than towards it.

We now know that we find evidence of Permian glaciers in places like Brazil because of continental drift. These landmasses were once much nearer the South Pole. But, in the early 1940s, the theory of plate tectonics was still not accepted widely.

So, Ives sought another explanation for the bemusing fact that available evidence seemed to imply that ice had crept outward from the tropics, rather than downward from the poles. Ives does mention the theory of “continental rearrangements” in his 1940 paper, but puts it neatly aside as a highly speculative explanation—far from settled science.

Ives, instead, put forward what he called the “Ring Hypothesis”. This supposed that our Earth, since its birth, had owned two moons. One is the one we still know and love today. The other, occupying a shallower orbit, he called “Ephemeron”. This ephemeral moon, Ives explained, entered Earth’s Roche limit during the Permian period, and was quickly torn up by tidal forces.

The resulting, very thick ring of debris—in low orbit, at a height of 7,000 miles—would have almost completely blocked sunlight to the tropics. Hence, why, as Ives thought, the creeping glaciers counterintuitively spilt outwards, across the globe, from the Earth’s equatorial belt.

Finally, Ives explained that these remains of Ephemeron—roiling in their orbital swirl—would have ground themselves up, smaller and smaller, before falling to Earth in the greatest meteor shower our planet has ever seen. Hence, the Equatorial Icehouse ended: the tropics became tropical again.

Looking to the “very distant future”, Ives imagined that the Earth may once more “capture some wandering mass of cosmic junk and again acquire a ring like that postulated to explain the Permian glaciations”.

Though forgotten now, Ives’s theory caused enough of a stir to be featured in newspapers, complete with lavish illustrations. In January 1941, The American Weekly ran a story on his speculations.

Elegiacally, it described the late Permian scene at the tropics:

“Daytime would be merely twilight time. There would be no sun in the sky and only a dismal, dull haze as in a desolate, grey day of Winter. The bands would have been like a thick umbrella.”

The article closed with speculation on what would happen if, in some distant future, our current moon should get dragged back toward Earth. At the time, scientists believed this might happen in billions of years. The article pictured our lunar companion breaking up, creating not just a ring of dust, but a world-engulfing “umbrella”. The whole globe, the article continued, will become “a giant ice-box unfit for human and animal life as we know it”.

Perhaps humans will be extinct by then, the American Weekly concluded, or “if Homo sapiens persists” then “advance in learning may be sufficient to combat this hazard”. Otherwise, we learn, “the way out will be to burrow deep within the Earth and create underground cities in the remnants of the Earth’s interior warmth”.

Ives’s theory has not stood the test of time. In the 1960s, plate tectonics became consensus, explaining why evidence of ancient glaciers can be found in the tropics. No longer did we need to postulate secondary moons and Saturn-like rings.

Even if it is just an echo in the history of scientific theories, it is at least intriguing that we are, in 2024, again postulating the prehistoric existence of planet-girdling rings. And, what’s more, rings are once again being conscripted to explain changes in Earth’s climate throughout the deeper past.

What’s for sure, from looking at how much theories have developed in just the recent past, is that we still know far from everything when it comes to the Earth system and its history. For Ives, only 84 years ago, the notion of continental drift was like a “jigsaw puzzle of which some of the pieces are lost”.

It is fascinating supposing what pieces of the jigsaw that is our theory of this world currently lie just beyond our purview. Pieces which, upon discovery, would also dramatically reorganise our sense of things, just like continental drift did a few generations ago.

For my part, I hope Tomkins’s Ordovician-ring theory is true. It is peculiarly salutary to imagine ancient sea scorpions pondering a haloed horizon…

If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing! I am going to be posting gems I find on my travels through the history of ideas here. Subscribe for weird theories from the past & beautiful illustrations of retro-science. Thanks!

PS — Beautiful bonus drawing of our moon, done by the same illustrator who provided the artwork for the American Weekly article quoted above, from 1929: