Tracing thoughts on the inhuman found in ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts up through recent functionalist theories of mind, artist and theorist Anil Bawa-Cavia calls for a new, diagonalized notion of reason distinct from that of logos still employed by humans. Using logic and experiments in game-playing neural networks, he exposes a Copernican humiliation—or Turing trauma—that sees the human as only one situated embodiment of reason and not its apex.

The UN IPBES global assessment, for instance, confirms that the planet is currently experiencing 2,500 conflicts over fossil fuels, water, food and land — conflicts which are therefore directly related to the ongoing collapse of the earth’s biodiversity.

The new report shows how if everyone in the world consumed at the same level as EU residents, from the period of 1st January 1 to 10th May alone, humanity would have used as much as the planet’s ecosystems can renew over the entire year: which means that 2.8 planet earths would be needed to provide for this level of consumption.

“They have taken the field of synthetic genomics to a new level, not only successfully building the largest ever synthetic genome to date, but also making the most coding changes to a genome so far,”

The redesigned genetic code was then chemically synthesised and, piece by piece, added to E coli where it replaced the organism’s natural genome. The result, reported in Nature, is a microbe with a completely synthetic and radically altered DNA code. Known as Syn61, the bug is a little longer than normal, and grows more slowly, but survives nonetheless.

Nearly all life, from jellyfish to humans, uses 64 codons. But many of them do the same job. In total, 61 codons make 20 natural amino acids, which can be strung together like beads on a string to build any protein in nature. Three more codons are in effect stop signs: they tell the cell when the protein is done, like the full stop marking the end of this sentence.

The artificial genome holds 4m base pairs, the units of the genetic code spelled out by the letters G, A, T and C. Printed in full on A4 sheets, it runs to 970 pages, making the genome the largest by far that scientists have ever built.