A Nighttime Flight Over England

I’ve been keeping late hours recently—email, tasks, more tasks, often keeping me at work beyond reasonable o’clock. As a result, even the everyday evening chores—doing the washing up, taking out the rubbish—sometimes happen in the small hours.

One night, stepping outside with a bin bag in either hand, I was struck by the coolness of the air—the kind of spring night coolness that comes with the clear skies prized by astronomers. Walking to the bins, I tilted my head upwards. The heavens arched above: Leo, Ursa Major, Draco, Cygnus…

I was struck by a felt sense of scale: how small we stand beneath the tallest buildings, past the passenger jets, satellites, even our own Moon—into the vastness of space.   If the Earth was the size of a beach ball, the distance from the Earth to the Sun would still be far as the true distance from London to New York City.  That smallness lent itself in my mind to an image of unity in the world; that the Earth or the solar system, or the galaxy – whatever ‘the world’ means - existed like a single cell, self-contained, entirely inter-dependent. 

This idea of the cosmos having the structure of a single cell left an impression on me long after I deposited the rubbish into the bins, and I wonder in this blog if you would indulge me in a continuation of this same reverie – taking a nighttime flight over England. 

From Cabin Window to Open Air

The sun had long set over England – and disappeared over the Atlantic.  Shadow swept across and in our millions the people of England, like fading fireflies, turned to sleep.  Up here the curvature of the Earth is revealed, and for a moment we are conscious that we live on a planet that is in orbit around a star – a star just like all the others, except for its closeness. 

Staring out of a little window of our passenger jet, beyond the wing that lightly judders, we can just discern the coastline we are flying over.  Dark waves of sea water slosh against British ports, fortified gateways of the country.  Ships have been arriving at these ports every day now for hundreds of years, since the days when they were still sail-powered – an island nation forever trading with its neighbours in the Netherlands, in Ireland, in France, and indeed from all over the world.  Huge containers are lifted off ferries by crane.   And up here we can see them: people walking along wide grey pavements – it looks cold where they are. 

And then… there is no window, no seatbelt, no cabin, nor fuselage. Now just the open air, five miles above land.  It is a very long way to fall but there is no danger.  There is an icy wind – your breath would steam before your face and hastily rise; there is an icy taste in the air. 

The Land at Night: A Living System

With only space between us and the landscape below, it is the vastness of the country that makes the first impression.  What we see is mostly wild – there are brooding lakes and coarse moor-land and clay-coloured hills and valleys that go on forever.  We see grasses that stir in the windy darkness, a spontaneous swirling like the restless sea. 

But in this prehistoric landscape too there are pockets of warmth.   See the road that runs along the coastline and a solitary house on the side of the road, a light in the window.  A herd of cattle float like phantoms at the bottom of a hillside.  Power-lines criss-cross the land disappearing off into the invisible distance, and further north giant wind turbines.  See a solitary car, navigating its way silently on a winding road through the mountains, its headlights lighting up the way.  Who are the people in the car, and where are they going so late in the night?  Looking west beyond the mountains there is a much busier road, and this road is lit every hundred yards like a passage of light passing miraculously through the archaic darkness.  There are cars and lorries heading north and south, their headlights like white spurs; there are thousands of people on the road tonight.  These roads are like arteries and veins, connecting up all of England; the cities, like the central organs, need a larger supply and so the greatest roads, arriving from different parts of the country, terminate in them, but every town down to the smallest settlement has its own road-supply. 

Further inland there is agriculture, in vast patchworks of fields, pixelated according to their crop.  Considering just how little a proportion of England’s land is populated, it is impressive indeed to fly over mile after mile of agricultural land.  These fields are like a colossal vegetable patch, and all this land is set aside to feed human beings who reside in such relatively small pockets in the towns and the cities. 

Settlements from the Sky

Looking south, see the settlement built along the banks of the river. See the bridges they have built, so as to cross the river whenever they please.  The glow of streetlights has a halo effect in the sky above it, and as we approach this place of warmth it becomes clear just how big it is, almost too big to take in as we pass over.  I cannot name the city, for they look strangely alike from the air, but it is something to behold. Row after row of terraced houses, each with their own strip of garden, and playing fields bordered with trees, severely put in their place. Further inland we can see tower blocks, some of the windows lit up in a random pattern.  There is a diversity of human life in those tower blocks – to live vertically, on top of one another, would have seemed peculiar to our ancestors, and yet now it’s a way of life for millions.  The whole city is connected up with hundreds of tiny roads – capillaries in our earlier analogy.  There is a larger building that looks like a hospital, and then a reservoir, and then more houses, and perhaps a school set within the neighbourhood.  Fly down by the railway tracks, bordered by iron railings – amongst the weeds and the scrap metal. 

Once - and it was only a few thousands years ago - this island was entirely covered in dense forest.  It is said that a tree-dwelling creature such a squirrel could have passed from the southern coast of England to the Scottish highlands without touching the ground.  This would have seemed quite an alien landscape with trees so dense as to be tangled up in one another, many of these dead due to flooding, wild winds, and fires caused by lightning.  Just out of the last ice age, this would be a colder place than we know today, but this island-forest would be teeming with life and the songs of innumerable birds. 

At the dawn of agriculture, when this country was first colonised by human beings, Stone Age men would chop down small areas of forest for farmland, and later colonisers would clear forest to erect wooden encampments, the most ancient seats of British civilisation.  This land by the river would be surveyed by Celt and Saxon - traversed slowly by foot, they claimed it their own.  But land that was once claimed by bands of warriors is now settled by ten thousand nuclear families. Could they ever have imagined the housing estate it has become? What would they make of these clean, winding crescents of semi-detached houses and double-glazing, with cars parked up in the driveways and kids’ bikes in the garden, gathering the evening’s dew?  There are airports now where battles were once fought with swords and bows – evidence of a still-emerging wonder. 

Society as Organism

From above, society reveals itself not as a machine, but a living system.

At the root: the wild margins—forests, moors, rivers, coasts. Around them: farmland—cultivated skin sustaining life. Water treatment plants and sewage systems act as the circulatory base, processing what feeds and what’s spent. Power lines and pylons: nerves transmitting energy. Roads, railways, shipping lanes, airports: the limbs of motion.

Settlements cluster in dense nodes—cells of habitation. Emergency services are our immune response; hospitals tend the wounded tissue. Courts, councils, parliaments—our nervous system of governance. Military bases, outer muscle. Schools and universities: memory and learning. And crowning it all, the cultural cortex—where meaning is made and remade: theatres, places of worship, cinemas, galleries, sports grounds.

The Infosphere: A Collective Mind

Our planet, if a cell, is made up of layered spheres:

• Lithosphere – The rocky outer crust of the Earth.

• Biosphere – The sum of living organisms and ecosystems.

• Atmosphere – The gaseous envelope of weather and breath.

• Hydrosphere – All waters: seas, lakes, rivers, glaciers.

• Anthroposphere – The human-built environment: cities, infrastructure, machines.

• Infosphere – The sphere of knowledge, communication, and shared meaning.

This last layer—the infosphere—is where I want to pause. It’s a kind of extended or collective mind.

Below us, the land flickers with the machinery of knowing. Libraries and universities cloistered in stone. Mobile masts blinking in hedgerows. Art galleries glowing. Museums that cradle memory. Theatres and family kitchens. Pubs steeped in story. TV towers casting news. Fibre-optic cables pulsing under fields. Satellites catching and returning signals. The Earth, dreaming in signal.

But the infosphere is more than its infrastructure. It includes everything humans hold and pass on: stories and songs, methods and beliefs, rituals and ethics. It has existed as long as we have walked upright, building fires and telling tales.

And it’s not solely ours. Non-human creatures have transmitted information long before us—through DNA, neural patterns, immune memory, in structure and biofilm. The ecosystem itself is a nervous system, animated by a continuous feedback loop between stimulus and response. We stand and flow in this in-between space — we’re embedded in it.

Between the Earth and the Heavens

The infosphere is a nested system—suspended between the more fundamental metabolic processes that support us and the more complex symbolic systems we uphold.

A song requires a singer; a book needs a reader to reanimate its words. Without living beings to carry it forward, information lies dormant or is even lost.

And so we stand in between: nourished by the Earth below, contributing to the Heavens above. The Heavens, in this analogy, are not out of reach—they are within the infosphere, within our shared knowledge and aspirations, our stories and visions. We are in communion with them, always.

Each generation inherits this garden of consciousness and is tasked to tend to it, to enrich it, to pass it on.

There’s more I wanted to say but for now I’ll leave it here. The thread continues, and I’ll return to it in a future piece.