“Our minds all go to dinosaurs when we think about the Earth’s past. But my goal was to bring up the vast amount of important biological history that’s part of this system.”

Gail Wight: Ostracod Rising tackles a system of absurd scale. It’s the history of Earth from the Hadean into the far future, encompassing an absurdly large, complex system. I’m primarily interested in the evolution of plants and animals and then asking the questions, ‘Where do we go from here?’ And ‘how does the complexity of this elaborate system fix itself and heal going forward?’

When we think about the Earth’s past, we probably think of dinosaurs. But my goal was to raise awareness of the vast amount of important biological history that’s part of this system. What surprised me was the geophysical stuff that I was completely unaware of. For instance, the history of how the chemistry of the atmosphere has changed, or discovering that daytime was only four hours long in the Hadean Eon. The Earth was spinning much faster, and it’s still slowing down. So, moving into the future, the Earth will continue to slow down. 

The other surprise was that the Moon was so much closer—so close that it appeared vast on the horizon. This means the Moon’s pull on tides could have easily caused mile-long tides. There are still really extreme tides on the planet, but it used to be extreme everywhere every day. And if you consider the intertidal zones a nursery for evolution, then having those extreme, vast intertidal zones is important, right? When you throw that into this system and then consider the interaction between all of these things, it’s extraordinary. The Moon is still moving away. So what happens when the Moon is so far away that it no longer impacts the tides, and we don’t have that intertidal zone anymore? My book doesn’t go far enough into the future to have the moon too far away to impact us anymore, but hopefully it makes the point that that can happen.

David Familian: One of the ideas that gets repeated a lot about complex systems is that every system is indeterminate after a certain temporal threshold. The planets have a four million-year span of predictability, and the weather has seven days, but this just means every system is indeterminate.

Gail Wight: But even that four million is a crapshoot because there are other random things, such as numerous asteroid strikes and the tectonic plates still shuffling around. I’ve talked to many scientists during this project, asking them what their predictions are for the future, and they’ve all said, in this sort of casual way, “Same thing that’s happened in the past, and a continuation of whatever’s happening now; That’s what’s going to happen.”

We’re aware of the asteroid that hit and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but there are others—contended—that we’re still discovering. There have been five mass extinctions before this one, during which almost everything on the planet died. My understanding of that comes from Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction (2014), in which she walks through the five previous extinctions and their causes. There are also many minor extinctions, which we call minor because they didn’t wipe out almost everything. But if they wiped out a single species in a complex system, that could potentially impact everything else.

I’ve tried to emphasize in this piece the many, many large and small extinctions that have happened over time. When I have us become extinct in this book, it happens alongside ungulates and a swath of other species that we’re really tied up with. So cattle, pigs, and sheep, species with whom we share interdependence and various habitats—and viruses—we all go extinct together. The end of the book is 104 million years beyond where we are now. And our extinction happens around 30 to 40 million years out from today. The timeline isn’t super specific. It has epoch-sized brackets. So there’s a period that predicts 55 million to 104 million years in the future. But when you read it, it’s as if it’s the present to 49 million years in the past. So, the present is actually 104 million years in the future.

I have no great pain, no internal angst, thinking about the end of humans. I think it’s going to be a good thing for the planet. I have great pain thinking about all of the life that we’re killing on our way out. It’s horrific. I’m reading Greg King’s The Ghost Forest (2023), my latest miserable reading on this topic, about the total decimation of the redwood forest in California. People don’t understand how total that decimation has been. I didn’t. And that Save the Redwoods League was behind much of it. This forest had the world’s most massive trees, hundreds of thousands of acres stretching up the entire side of this continent. Their destruction has to have impacted global warming, yet that hasn’t come up in a single conversation I’ve encountered.

“I have no great pain, no internal angst, thinking about the end of humans. I think it’s going to be a good thing for the planet. I have great pain thinking about all of the life that we’re killing on our way out. It’s horrific.”

David Familian: Well, you know the problem. I came up with the idea that scientists are ADD without peripheral vision. There are certain areas of science where, in order to encapsulate a phenomenon, they do have to widen their view. So, someone looking at gene expression must look at the gene’s building blocks. They discovered that the gene sequence is fixed. But stuff is happening underneath that’s either turning it on or off. They don’t know whether it’s turning on and off certain letters or whether it’s tweaking them like a piece of music. So those scientists have a wider view. We all bought into the idea that DNA was fixed. That was the whole genome project. We’ll figure out the DNA, and we’ll fix all our problems. But the problems aren’t all in the DNA.

So when you say no one else thinks about this, the question is, when are they forced to widen their viewpoint? What will it take for science to really look at complex systems, instead of discrete parts of the environment? In medicine, you get money only for doing certain things. The reason why universities keep everyone in their silos is that that’s how they can raise money. So it’s a whole feedback system of research, too.

If you’re familiar with the idea of the organic versus the mechanistic in modern science, we still think the world is a machine 300 years after Descartes. I enjoy that your work encourages people to extend their sense of time beyond the immediate future, particularly when it comes to the evolution of ideas.

Gail Wight: There is a really beautiful quote from Elizabeth Kolbert, which I’ll mangle. It has to do with the fact that our legacy will end up being the depth of a cigarette paper in the geological record of time, but every organism that we can save on our way out will create exponentially more life in the future.

David Familian:  Unless we leave robots behind. You know, the thing is, we could be leaving robots behind, and then we’ll leave a new species. This is the weird part. We’re actually preparing our replacements that can live in any environment.

Gail Wight: Yeah, if they’re biological. Anyhow. I don’t mean to suggest that nobody’s thinking about redwood loss contributing to climate change. It hasn’t entered the mainstream dialogue because everybody’s siloed. You know, some people are looking at the decimation of the redwood forest. You have other people who are looking at the complete extermination of beavers in the United States who used to create these water systems and others looking at local loss of native species… We need a public central hub of research.

David Familian: Even the guy who started the Santa Fe Institute complained that it was hard for him to raise money for transdisciplinary collaborations. He couldn’t even get the scientists to do it as much as he wanted. And this space is supposed to be dedicated to complex systems. What does that mean? If in the very place that was started to look at complex systems, scientists are resisting a certain aspect of what we’re talking about. I come back to the idea over and over that the knowledge people are studying is almost useless because it’s unconnected and abstract. I don’t know what it will take.

Gail Wight: Do you know this little book by Norbert Wiener—I think it’s called Invention. He walks through four brilliant inventions that failed for four different reasons. So, for instance, early computers failed because fine machining wasn’t available. He notes four instances where technology or society wasn’t prepared to build some invention. But the fault in fixing our climate crisis just seems like human belligerence. We’ve had the facts for a long time, but we can’t wrap our heads around climate collapse because of human belligerence.

David Familian: But the thing with climate change is that our brains have become so linear that we can’t see the world in its complexity. It takes a lot of effort. This is a challenging thing to do.

Gail Wight: Elizabeth Kolbert has another book called Under a White Sky (2021). Right at the very end, she discusses these scientists who plan to seed the clouds in the sky to rain more in areas that are drying up. However, one of the side effects is that the sky will turn completely white. It won’t be blue anymore. It’s a chemical reaction. And everything that they seed the clouds with will come down, and it will cause other problems, which is classic. It was in the paper last week, and I thought, this is so crazy; this will never happen. And now there’s somebody in LA talking about this. We might have to do this. But it’s a pretty straight line between cause and effect!

David Familian: And these are all these people that don’t look at the unintended consequences because they’re looking at solving a problem that can’t be solved. It’s not possible to do that. And this is the whole wicked problems problem. These issues are entangled, you know. I’m not teaching, so I’m not confined within an academic silo, and most artists aren’t siloed either, but you see it everywhere. And you wonder, what’s going to break this system?

So from talking to you, I can see that this temporality component is very important to the work—this extended timeframe. In your readings, what have you found that makes this distant future feel more immediate and relevant to audiences?

Gail Wight: I’m considering putting the Elizabeth Kolbert quote about saving things—of every small thing being exponentially important in the future—in the colophon for this book. There are 28 pages in total. Twenty of them are about specific time periods, which vary. For instance, the first two pages are about eons, but after that, it breaks down into periods of time, epochs, and a couple of sub-epochs. I have us in the Holocene, and then four more pages follow. To ensure that it’s not overwhelming reading, there are only nine or ten small snippets of text on each page. There are so many factors that can be rolled into what’s happening on any particular page, or period of time, whether it’s the chemistry of the atmosphere, the chemistry of the seas, the creation of dirt, the movement of plates, or asteroid strikes, or instances of volcanism or inland seas, or the erasure of shoreline, or the shifting of mountains and creation of glaciers—I try to touch on all of those things briefly in each page. So, hopefully, you will become aware of this cumulative yet repetitive process. Species are constantly being eliminated, and as they’re being eliminated, new species are emerging. While dinosaurs are evolving, for example, other more ancient species are on their way out. I’ve chosen 104 as a number in the future because it’s the number in Fahrenheit, which is the medical emergency fever zone for humans, as in when your brain stops functioning.

“Eventually, every concrete dam in the world disintegrates, and residual salmon reinhabit the freed rivers. Arboreal forests will pollinate the thin soils of depopulated cities.”

Everything in this book is very succinct, and I’ve made each comment count. After humans go extinct, there is this sort of fallout of the mess we leave behind. Eventually, every concrete dam in the world disintegrates, and residual salmon still can reinhabit the freed rivers. In depopulated cities where the soil is very thin, arboreal forests will pollinate those spaces rather than lush tropical growth.

I’ve tried to follow logical cycles of what could exist after humans as well as temperature cycles. So it’s going to be really hot for a while, but temperature tends to be cyclic, so there is a freezing that happens after the hot temperatures that we’ve caused begin to cool off, and then following the freeze, it becomes more temperate. Brand new species and familiar species are evolving, and things that make it through the gauntlet don’t become apparent until the end of the book. As we did—we made it through a gauntlet numerous times.

David Familian: So you point out the stress points in our time on Earth, too?

Gail Wight: Minimally. I don’t give a huge amount of space to people or dinosaurs. We’re only referred to as bipeds, and dinosaurs are only referred to as lizards. There are small species that exist here with us that we’re largely oblivious to. So those things take center stage. And even if we’re not oblivious, I think we’re not quite cognizant of how long they were here before us and how likely they are to be here in the future. This thing called a coccolithophore, for example, is this small single-celled creature that makes these beautiful calcareous structures around it. Or ostracods or copepods, viruses, and bacteria. They’ve been here for ages and will likely survive our chaos.

Different types of plants like cycads and angiosperms don’t make it–flowers are a weird and delicate thing that may not make it, but gymnosperms do, since they’re rugged. There’s a call-and-response relationship between many insects and angiosperms, or flower-making plants, so if there’s no insect, that call-and-response falls apart. But other dynamic systems between other types of plants and animals might take their place. 

Have you ever seen a map of sound space in the biological world, where every animal inhabits a specific tone in the sound space, a specific pitch, and if there’s a gap in a space, an animal will evolve with that pitch as its signal? It’s kind of like that. As things become extinct, I have other things filling those niches.

David Familian: You say that flowers will disappear, but as the Earth becomes more temperate, would they reappear somehow?

Gail Wight: There might be a flower that persists, but there will be a general collapse. It’s really rare for every variation of a species to go extinct. Some dinosaurs made it through the gauntlet and are here with us now. They’re mostly flying.

David Familian: I heard that lizards, being cold-blooded, had difficulty surviving during that period.

Gail Wight: Right. So many small dinosaurs survived. Many little permutations of things are preserved, but we humans are a pretty specialized species, so I don’t have us showing up again. Small things do make it through. And that’s why this book focuses on the small things. Big lumbering lizards didn’t make it, but the small ones that were agile and could fly and go to different places survived. Similarly, small monkeys might make it through, but these big specialized apes are probably not going make it through.

One of the interesting things about working on this has been that almost every supposition I’ve come across, somebody is arguing against it. So I have a biologist who’s fact-checking everything for me, and she’ll look up a prediction and say, “I found ten ‘yeahs,’ but I found one really angry ‘No,’” and I’ll say, “It’s a work of art, we’re going to include it.”

David Familian: I think we’re going through an intellectual and scientific revolution that may be equivalent to the beginning of science. This is huge, so it’s no surprise that emerging scientific ideas are highly disputed. This is what happens in the period we’re in now. The uncertainty we feel is more than the normal in uncertainty. It is the uncertainty of culture that is experiencing an incredibly accelerated transition.

Gail Wight: In a nutshell, I have deliberately chosen a non-traditional narrative. Even though there are traditional parameters, so for instance, I haven’t changed the timeframe of the Hadean or the Archean or the Cambrian. I’ve chosen to tell a story about how this system has operated in the past, where we are now, and where it might go in the future, reliant on both how it’s operated in the past and what’s happening right now. The emergence of new patterns and behaviors becomes very obvious in this book, as do the feedback loops seen in these call-and-response dynamics between species. Experiencing this artwork is a very internalized experience. It does what reading always does to us: It causes us to engage internally—it posits ideas in our heads.

“Experiencing this artwork is a very internalized experience. It does what reading always does to us: It causes us to engage internally—it posits ideas in our heads.”

David Familian: I think what that allows for is that there are works that you immediately have a visceral reaction to, and there are other works that plant seeds. Some works do both, and some do one or the other, but each approach is distinct.

Gail Wight: Right. I’ve also tried to keep the language very poetic. So again, every page has nine or ten snippets of text. The book can be briefly visually understood without reading more than a few numbers, but the more you read, the richer it is, and the more seeds it plants in one’s mind. The book ends 104 million years in the future, but I don’t use the term’ future.’ So, the end of the book is the concept of now.

Gabriel Tolson: On a closing note, I’d love to hear more about the incorporation of the ostracod specifically as a motif throughout the project. It gave rise to the work’s name, and I’m wondering how it threads through the book.

Gail Wight: Yeah, so it came about through an odd happenstance on a visit to the Hadley Lab. They showed me their core samples and how they could see when the atomic blast happened and when forests were cut down in California, all by looking at the composition of this core sample. They said one of the constants in the core sample was ostracods. And that’s because they are these tiny, hard-shelled crustaceans that live in every body of water on the planet, fresh or salty, and have been around for millions and millions of years.

I realized there’s this critter that has persisted. It’s been here forever, and if the future will belong to anything, it will probably belong to it, no matter what else happens. When I talked to some scientists and I asked, “what could happen to ostracods in the future?” again, their response was, “Well, you’ve got to look at what’s happened so far.” And so far the ostracod is a survivor.

Recently, someone found ostracods that have started to use their legs to walk. Previously, their legs were just thought of as swimming appendages. But they’ll walk on lily pads to chase food! They’re developing land legs. And then they have this carapace. It’s like a beetle carapace, so there is no reason (in my mind) why they couldn’t develop wings, which is what I have them do at the end. This means that ostracods will live 104 million years in the future in all three ecospheres: the land, the sea and the sky.

The final image is of this flying ostracod, a humorous take-off into the future. It’s this tiny, most minuscule thing that’s actually extremely relevant in our complex system. So many tiny plants and animals are creating potable water, breathable atmosphere, the basis of our food chain, and life forms that sustain us, and we generally have no clue. We being me, of course.

David Familian: What’s weird about all this is that we could be the only humans in the universe. We could have been a freak thing of nature. But most worlds do not have organisms that are building and altering their environment like we do.

Gail Wight: We could be. I mean, we are a fluke. I would argue that many animals are tool users, as with us, but they don’t create exorbitant waste. We don’t cope with our waste stream. Nothing has time to adapt to our staggering output. It’s at the root of all of our problems. The waste stream shows up quite a bit in this book—concrete detritus, radioactive detritus, and cesspools. We’ve created an enormous number of weird waste pits all over the planet. As we die, that waste, all kinds of cesspools, become thriving places for new species. Hope!

→ Gail Wight, Ostracod Rising, 2024