Dust, everywhere dust: the stuff sloughed-off skin, the tiny particles pushed by the wind. The project of modern architecture has been one of interiority—clean boundaries and clean spaces. But we’ve learned this is a mistake. There is no seal so tight as to be unbreakable. Climate change has taught us the fact of our entanglement with the environment, that we are of our environment as much as it is of us. Like a child learning the bounds of its own bodies and hopefully respecting those of others, we too will have to grow up or face the repercussions of our eco-chauvinist egoism.

This episode of Early Stage, created in collaboration with architect and researcher Nerea Calvillo, imagines a dystopian near future where we never let go of our human-centric supremacy and it’s done us in. We’ve rendered our earth uninhabitable, and so we’ve had to leave it—further proof that there never was any inside or outside, just boundaries we conceived to make us feel in control. “Outer” space is just space we’ve always been part of. We’ve had to leave behind our precious AI friends run on computers whirring away in data centers, collecting dust, as the saying goes. Without human help to keep their circuit boards clean they’ll only last so long.