| Description | It's nearly an apocalypse, the time of human-made climate catastrophes, the era of mass extinction. A kin group that has been accumulating an advanced level of biotechnology wanted to preserve the planet's biodiversity for the beings that will emerge after them like what Noah intended with "his" ark. They turned an island into a 10000-hectare glass dome. The island was biologically isolated and only had very controlled energy and material exchange with the surrounding environment. They envisaged this island to be an everlasting utopia isolated from the tragedies outside.
However, it was clearly a human arrogance to overestimate their own capacity. Their ambition to make a perfectly static, self-sustaining biosphere had failed. The atmospheric composition fluctuated, plastic debris from the outside surged in through the island's filter. The islanders had to acknowledge that they are not capable of being a divine controller of the island anymore. The island was in crisis. Fortunately, due to a biological reason which is still unknown, a number of species on the island evolved rapidly and dealt with environmental instability. The evolutions were highly cooperative because it took place alongside intimate interspecies interactions. As a result, the island became a sympoietic sphere, which operates like a creature that sustains itself in a world that is full of disasters. And humans were not an exception to this. Like any other animal species, the islanders, after giving up the authority they once dreamed of, joined this symbiosis. Their rituals, far from being one-directional and exploitative, had been formed by the interactions with the myriads of species. The full story of the island can be read here. |