The Incas sought their cosmology in the space between space. With feet planted firmly on the ground in the southern hemisphere, they turned their eyes skyward to the blanket expanse of the cosmos and watched the blushing sky thicken into the deepest shade of night. The milky way cut across this star studded canvas, a luminescent seam, billions of stars silently shooting and falling, even more clustering to form rivers of purl, swirling swirling swirling in an ocean of gold, cosmic curtains of gauze and gossamer. Their eyes flocked to islands of night in the spiraling symphony of stardust to the emptiness of negative space, to the ink that paints by not being and named these their constellations.

The Incan constellations are dark constellations, representing the silhouettes of animals that came to drink from the waters of the celestial river.

The Incan constellations are dark constellations, representing the silhouettes of animals that came to drink from the waters of the celestial river, Mayu, thereby obscuring its heavenly glow. Yacana, the llama, still tethered to her child through her umbilical cord, Mach’acuay- the serpent, Hanp’atu the Toad, Atoq the fox and Yutu- the ground partridge. 

It's the thirteenth day and my eyes have acclimatized to the earthen tones of the Atacama, even my skin obliges the desert pantone, paints itself bronze with light and scattering dust as today I follow Pepe the archeologist into the heart of desert, where he will coax out her secrets from where they were written in stone. 

We drive through the holiness of silence, through muscles of taupe, and veins of ochre, across coral banks and fawn crests, past golden dunes and the iridescent salt flats of San Pedro Atacama, empty vistas so vast they suggest the curvature of the horizon, until we arrive at Taira. 

We park at the base of a nondescript hill and begin our ascent. It's an exacting hike, the air is thinner at this altitude and the sun weighs the shadows dragging at my feet. When we reach the summit, I see the desert cracked open by a shard of green, the glittering Loa river snakes its way through the rift, and the seam is lush with life where ground slakes its thirst. We descend into the valley, following Pepe who moves through the land as if his feet remember the old ways. 

We ford the river, dripping little showers onto blistering rocks when we emerge. There are many kinds of thirst in the desert. Eventually Pepe stops at a small pool, so tiny it is almost obscured by the giant reeds that flank it. Six such pools are scattered across the rift, nestled in the undulations of the sparking Loa river. 

The Atacameno people used Taira valley as an observatory.  As the night draws its dark tassels across the sky, the apertures of the pools become reflecting mirrors capturing their respective constellations in its gaze. 

‘This water is old’, he says, ‘fossil water that never entered the water cycle’. Every year, Yacana, the llama in the sky, comes here. 

‘She stands where you are standing’, he says to me, ‘to drink this ancient water. After drinking her fill, she lays down to rest the earth for a night and in the dawn before the blush has reclaimed the night, she turns into a bird and flies away’. Yacana’s return is essential for the Atacameño, her arrival rests on the earth and begins the annual cycle of birth and decay. If she doesn’t come, the elders say, it will bring about the great unraveling.

It is no empty threat since the Atacama desert sees frequent incursions for mining and extraction while the light from the increasing urban sprawl threatens to erode the inky blackness that characterizes the sky. The descendants of the Incas can no longer see their celestial river as clearly as they once did, and Yacana might not be able to find her way back to earth. The great unraveling is already here, I think. I’ve only ever known it by another name - climate change. 

The great unraveling is already here, I think. I’ve only ever known it by another name - climate change.

Pepe rests against a panel of rock paintings. Begun in 800 BC, the paintings are continuously engraved and re-engraved, painted and repainted with red ochre drawn from the earth’s veins. The panels are works in constant progress, the paintings periodically revisited and retouched by ritual. They are abundant with figures of camelids both wild and domestic, guanacos and llamas, a scattering of birds, the flamingo, the rhea, andean wild geese, a rare fox or two. These panels are almanacs, ecological calendars that mark fertility cycles of different species. He explains the Atacameño were scripters of shadow and light, written into stone which helped them plan agricultural and herding activities, a fact he only recently discovered when camping here in April 2002. He woke up to a shaft of light piercing the pregnant llama’s belly and realized that the artists must have choreographed the sun itself to tell stories about the earth’s fecundity. After 11 months of gestation, April is when the herd sees baby llamas emerge. 

‘The painting is technology', he says, ‘a symbolic technology, if you do not perform the ritual you will simply not get the herd you were expecting’. 

The Llama is central to the Atacameño, central to their survival in the desert. Wool scaffolds their skin, and its meat makes their muscle. They are their companion species. 

Night has claimed the sky. My feet are wet and I can see the celestial river. I am kneeling outside our hut, thinking of the artists, those whose imaginations feared no substrate. Painting their ecologies into stone and sky alike, where it would remain a barometer of their shared health. A compass of custody. 

I am just in time for the keynote lecture at the International Aeronautical Conference.

It's 8:29 and I am just in time for the keynote lecture at the International Aeronautical Conference. I sign up at the registration desk, grab my agenda and contemplate it. It promises to be a spectacular day. It's the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing, and there are NASA scientists, Astronauts, Corporations, Engineers, Artists and Designers milling around discussing humanity’s stake in space exploration. We are on the cusp of becoming an interplanetary civilization, my agenda tells me, and today is all about discovering the technologies, tools and stories that will lay the sky at our feet. 

The day is deepening, and as I wander in and out of talks, sampling snippets about space tourism, lunar settlements, probe missions, the democratization of open space, martian bio-manufacturing and space architecture, scientists tell stories of the impossible, of moonshots and star shots, of dreaming against all odds to take humanity into the great unknown, the artist’s tell stories of world building, imagining our space futures. 

Are the future space travelers human or cyborg? Are they universal beings or indigenous? 

The ethicists and the lawyers suggest caution, we don’t have the policy architecture for exploration yet. What of babies born in space? Who will own the rights to land on mars? Big business is eager, one could say salivating, at the thought of the commercialization of space, a new frontier, a new market. Asteroids are ripe for mining, space is a tourist’s backyard, the race is on to capitalize space itself. 

It's admittedly also exciting. The air is charged, it's heady. I take refuge at the bar and sip on my drink and taste the undertones of what if  in the air all around me. Extraction, Inspiration, Exploitation, Aspiration, Industrialization, Motivation, Colonization. I cannot look away. A stranger hands me a business card and I look up to see who it announces. He looks barely 16 years old in a suit much too large for him. He must have borrowed it from his father, or an older brother. Fresh faced and eager, he appears intoxicated. 

‘Space is the place to be,’ he says, ’colonization is the future. We must seize our piece of the pie.’

His eyes are black and glittering, star studded. My heart breaks a little.

Time passes and now I’m at another conference. This one on synthetic biology. My neck strains a little looking from the cosmic to the quantum. Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that applies engineering principles to biology. It aims at the redesign and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not exist in the natural world. The summit is teeming with a gathering of bio-hackers, DIY biologists and bio-makers from across the globe. A community of dreamers trying to rebuild wooly mammoths from scratch using the fossil record, to synthesize scents from extinct flowers, using big data in drug design, engineering jellyfish genes to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits. 

She is fluent in earth, she tells stories of the land.

One person draws my gaze. The water protector, this is the title she chose. LaDonna Brave Bull is a leader and founder of the resistance camps of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Adorned in ceremonial jewelry, she takes to the stage in what is the final talk of the evening. She is fluent in earth, she tells stories of the land, of entering into communion with the more than human earth, of  companion species; coyotes and corn. She tells us that indigenous people have always been scientists, that they have always known how to listen to what the ecology wants to be, and that it is a shame that science doesn’t know how to listen to indigenous people. What do you think about Space Exploration?’ someone in the audience asks and her gentle bearing dissolves. The question erodes her composure, anger tinges her tone. 

‘We have broken our mother, the earth and you talk about leaving to go find someone else’s home to break too?’ 

Her face is red and her body is shaking. 

‘Even if everyone on earth leaves, I am not leaving, our people will not leave, we will stay to heal the earth.’  

The audience is clapping wildly, but all I can hear is silence. 

Brick and mortar, ink and stone, pigment and paper. These are old friends, tools I know how to wield. I came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where today I work as research assistant for the Space Enabled research group at MIT, to expand my repertoire as a designer to include mycelium and microbes, silk and spiders, elephants and ecosystems, the quark and the jaguar. To learn how nature designs with life and how to co-design with her help. To wake up wearing nature’s face demands the lightest, most graceful touch, to intervene in evolutionary time necessitates a reverent nudge. It takes me three years to enroll in this class. How to grow almost anything, a crash course in synthetic biology. I am going to learn how to regard cells as factories, do biology on breadboards, consider cyborg botany, 3D print tissues and stem cells, extract and edit DNA and ‘hack’ life. 

My first day in the wet lab, I'm outfitted in my sterilized white lab coat and disposable lavender gloves. Any skin that once touched the earth is now concealed. I am listening to the supervisor give advice on lab etiquette. 

I came to Cambridge to learn how to be a companion species.

‘You want to be strategic about how you use your time today, once you are done with the experiment, remember to dispose of all your samples. It takes 20 minutes or so for your cell cultures to die. So be sure to kill them before the lab is done, so you have time to clean up your stations, otherwise you’ll be stuck here, staring at the petri dish waiting for your cells to die.’ 

I came to Cambridge to learn how to be a companion species.

The first time I saw The Powers of Ten, I had a sensation akin to remembering. A truth at once so profound and simple, it could be carved onto an emerald tablet and hold the alchemist’s gaze for all of eternity. Ray and Charles Eames’ magnum opus is a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe. It zooms out and in simultaneously on two unsuspecting picnickers in commensurate scales of 10, bypassing planets and atoms, until there is only seemingly empty space from the cosmic to the quantum realms. Space between Space. The pattern that unites all patterns.

As the myth goes, when the great flood threatened to engulf the world, Noah built an ark to survive the deluge and rebirth the fabric of life anew. With the great unraveling upon us now, our arks should be metal covenants, navigating the great unknown with compasses of custody.

Unlike the genesis flood, climate change is a manufactured reaction from the combustion chambers of capitalism, industrialization and extraction, a descendant of colonization. Ever since the first ships sailed to seek fortune in future colonies, we have not been able to stop telling ourselves the same old stories, the techno-optimist justifications that brought us here.

Colonization is not history, it will be our future. The same forces that catalyze climate change are shrinking our horizon, the same desire for profit will propel us to space. The very same forces breach cells walls and yank out its DNA for a vigorous edit, enlisting life’s miraculous self replication as if a cost effective employee in a production line. No frontier is too vast or too small to escape the clout of the capitalist. Where do we find new stories that will serve as a compass of care?

Indigenous people have long had their eyes turned skyward, coaxing the skies to reveal their secrets.

Indigenous people have long had their eyes turned skyward, coaxing the skies to reveal their secrets, weaving the earthly creatures into sky faring metaphors long before corporations or nations existed. In the mythology that makes them, will we find the stories that will help us traverse this terrain? What might an indigenous ethics for space exploration look like? We are charged with the custody of the species that make us. What kind of ancestors will we be? 

We arrive at two great unknowns: cosmology and biology. The Powers of Ten show us that the horizon stretches both ways, that perhaps it's not a straight line at all, but rather a Möbius strip, stretching along into infinity until it twists upon itself.  It is no exaggeration to say that we are born from stardust and one day we might return home.