RESILIENT CIVILISATIONS
Headphones recommended
Yes, I work with an artificial intelligence.
I should also confess I work with a computer, with lights on at night, and sometimes even coffee—paper filter and all, let’s not get carried away!
Just a few hours ago, I spoke to someone I hadn’t seen in years. A little piece of sorcery made it happen: we call it a smartphone.
So yes—lacking telepathy, I make do with a phone. It covers my shortcomings nicely.
I use plenty more gadgets: sometimes I “teleport” 300 km with almost no effort.
All it takes is three hours of deep focus… behind the wheel.
You might think progress should stop right here—never venturing beyond our fears and anxieties—that this is the line not to cross?
Humanity runs on gadgets.
Some stand out—like artificial intelligences—now available to everyone in streamlined forms. The more advanced versions may exist elsewhere, reserved for a small circle who believe they can keep them caged for a while.
You can treat AIs as diabolical inventions in the service of evil—or, more simply, as a discovery every technological civilization eventually makes. As if we’d dug a well down to a source with a few lines of Python and crossed the “morphic” fields of our two kinds of memory.
Sure, we can blame AI for every ill that has struck, strikes, or will strike our civilization—but we can also look in the mirror.
Not you or us specifically, but humanity.
Let it remember it bears some responsibility for its past, its present and—most likely—its future.
As in martial arts, if a force is used against us, we can learn to channel it. Better than pretending it’s not there.
Meanwhile, our new companion on Earth—AI—remains fragile in the face of regular solar outbursts.
Crédit : NASA pour les deux images
And since we’re here: we’re currently at the peak of Solar Cycle 25, which raises the odds of turbulence and disruptive geomagnetic episodes.
Nothing apocalyptic—just a physical context we should factor in.
Who would seriously consider switching entirely to digital, a technology highly vulnerable to interference — without having a physical plan B?
For instance, moving to strictly digital money and fully electric ground vehicles as the only autonomous means of transport amounts to ignoring what a major solar flare - powerful and Earth-facing - could do to our networks for days, weeks… or even months.
As a historical reference, remember that in 1859 a solar storm (the Carrington Event) disabled part of the North American telegraph network: line surges, sparks at the operators’ keys, messages sent without batteries, then breakdowns and fires.
Around the year 993 CE, Earth experienced an extreme radiation event detected in tree rings as a spike in carbon-14—what we now call a “Miyake event.”
Back then, without satellites or smartphones, the visible impact was likely limited; a similar burst today would have serious consequences for our infrastructure and daily life.
These examples remind us that such phenomena are not just a distant memory.
This recurring risk—on cycles of about eleven years, with stronger or weaker maxima—has already been hinted at or thematized by crop circles.
Those who follow my work know this: the Sun comes back again and again as a common, neutral, universal topic.
A bit like how, in a queue, we end up talking about the weather with a stranger—no fear of verbal backlash.
Over time, I’ll share the results of my research and my new conclusions.
I don’t know who makes the genuine crop circles—let’s be clear if it needs saying—but several clues suggest they use the Sun as a starting point to open a dialogue while we’re all waiting in line.
Image credit and caption: NASA - Solar minimum and maximum.
Images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight the appearance of the Sun at solar minimum (left, Dec. 2019) versus solar maximum (right, April 2014). These images are in the 171 wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light, which reveals the active regions on the Sun that are more common during solar maximum.