Information is instant. I remember the moment when this fact of the digital age was made unequivocally clear to me. It was the summer of 2014 in Montreal and I felt my room shake. A truck? Thunder? An earthquake? An earthquake. The news was up on Twitter faster than it seemed possible to type. Yet, as the internet breathes immediacy into almost all forms of communication, the dissemination of biological findings has remained embarrassingly slow. Research routinely takes years to be shared, hindering the speed at which science progresses.

“Would you rather live forever or die in the next five seconds?” This question was posed to me recently and I was flummoxed. Most people, according to the asker, say they would die in the next five seconds. It took me much longer than five seconds to answer, so I guess I was already doomed to an eternal life and to the painful demands of being a thinking, sentient lifeform forever.

When I lie on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and focus my vision softly on the undulating water, I imagine the life that swarms underneath the ocean’s surface. The fish, the sharks, even the tiny happy phytoplankton, all bumping and grinding amongst one another like puckish tipsy high-schoolers. I imagine this happens all over the ocean, a teeming sea of water and fish and water again.