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The Planet on the Throne: An Essay on Go and the Climate
Even if the game of Go doesn’t tell us what to do about climate change, can it tell us what our strategy should be?
One evening, a few stones…
A few weeks ago, while looking for something completely unrelated, I stumbled upon Atari Go. The rule was a single sentence: whoever captures one of the opponent’s stones first wins. I learned it in ten minutes and lost my first three games. Then I came across another game played with the same stones: Gomoku. Again, just one sentence: whoever lines up five stones in a row wins. The same board, the same black-and-white pieces, but two distinct mindsets. One kept asking, “Where am I getting blocked?” while the other asked, “Where am I opening up?”
The news was on that evening as well: yet another climate report, yet another mention of the word “threshold.” As I arranged the stones, a question popped into my head and wouldn’t go away: Even if a game like Go doesn’t tell us exactly what to do about climate change, can it tell us what our strategy should be?
This article is an attempt to explore that question. Let me say this up front: a game is not a book on ethics. But it is surprisingly candid about “how we should think.”
