THE PLURALITY OF ANTHROPOCENES / CHAD WAPLES Artist’s Statement: The Plurality of Anthropocenes appropriates the optimism behind Bernard De Fontenelle’s frontispiece in his 1686 book, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which offered a heliocentric model of the cosmos while theorizing a galaxy teeming with life. Yet even today, the great silence of the stars haunts us. We can detect the collision of two black holes that happened over a billion years ago, but we haven’t intercepted any intelligent signals of communication – forcing us to ask ourselves, are we alone - in the sense of developing a technologically advanced civilization? Astronomers today have mapped out over 4,000 exoplanets with the help of satellite instruments, and as astrophysicist Adam Frank asserts in his book, The Light of the Stars, “one out of every five stars hosts a world where life as we know it could form.” The answer to why we may not have heard from anyone may be because life itself breaches the safety net of its environmental
limitations through the dissemination of energy waste. For example, our Earth, at 4.54 billion years-old, took less than 800 million years to host the earliest forms of life. These early microorganisms evolved with molecular light receptors absorbing energy from the sun and converting that energy into sugar molecules. Around 2.5 billion years ago, these bacteria began using water as well as sunlight and CO2 to drive its chemistry, disseminating molecules of oxygen as a waste product in their activity. Over time, these cyanobacteria dumped so much oxygen in the atmosphere that just over a few hundred million years (the Great Oxidation Event) – the atmospheric oxygen increased by a factor of a million. This fundamentally changed the atmosphere and as result killed off the bulk of life at the time while opening the door for more complex organisms to evolve.
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