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Paper short abstract

How do data infrastructures enact the planet in microbiome research? Drawing on ethnography at a European life sciences institution, this paper traces co-enactments across data centres, genomic databases, and AI-driven microbiome prediction.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to know the planet through its microbes—and at what cost? As global environmental crises intensify, computational biology increasingly positions microbial communities as both indicators of and responses to planetary challenges. The drive to map and know these communities at scale—through metagenomic sequencing, large genomic databases, and satellite Earth Observation—has created opportunities to dream new ways of knowing and governing the planet. Yet the data infrastructures enabling this knowledge are themselves implicated in the planetary conditions they claim to monitor.

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at a major European life sciences institution, this paper traces the moments and spaces where planetarity is enacted through microbiome digital databases. I follow three such enactments: in the data centre, where a planetary-scale microbiome database physically runs, its hardware warming as distant users query it, drawing on energy infrastructures whose geography mirrors broader geopolitical inequalities; in the work of colour, where fluorescent dyes, satellite spectral filters, and biodiversity visualisation palettes form a chromatic chain connecting molecules to pixels to predictions, dependent on energy-intensive infrastructure at every step; and in the production of synthetic data, where machine learning models trained on sampled landscapes generate predicted microbiomes for unsampled regions, making epistemic ambition and material costs inseparable.

Following an interlocutor's analogy between AI prediction and dreaming, I suggest that the dream of a digital twin of Earth's microbiome is shaped by particular geographies of infrastructure and power, generative of new forms of environmentality—and dreamed at considerable planetary cost.