In Mundania, much of what we are connected to is somewhere else. Beyond. Elsewhereness has become a normal condition of everyday life with network technologies (Willim 2013b). Occurrences elsewhere have concrete repercussions in our immediate surroundings, and they also influence how we think about such phenomena as places, location and addresses. Systems and devices spread out across the planet influence at a distance and can also be influenced from a distance. Instantly. The assemblages of Mundania stretch out geographically and through imagination.

A manufactured firmament

August 2022. It is beyond midnight and I sit outside. Just outside my home. Looking up to the sky. Waiting for something to happen. This is the time when the comet Swift-Tuttle and the Earth come close to each other. It happens once a year. Like distant acquaintances briefly passing in the night. The comet is followed by a stream of debris. Small particles stretching out in a cloud behind it. The Perseids. That is the name of the cloud. Some of the particles reach the atmosphere of the Earth, creating a shower of meteorites. Dust and stones incinerated as they fall, creating a celestial spectacle. Several shooting stars appear across the night sky every hour during these mid-August nights.

During that night a stronger light appears. At least that was what I heard had happened. I could not see it myself. According to the stories, the light glows brighter than any of the meteorites. Newspapers and television channels start to receive reports from people wondering about the light. Is this really normal? Is it something extra-terrestrial? It looked like a ball, hovering in a cloud, as one person reported to the newspaper Sydsvenskan (13 August 2022).

After some hours, an astronomy researcher offered an explanation. It was the light from a SpaceX rocket, launched from California (Karlsson 2022). What looked like a bright cloud, was burnt rocket fuel. SpaceX, the company headed by eccentric and controversial magnate Elon Musk, had launched a Falcon 9 rocket to bring another cluster of satellites of their Starlink programme into orbit. The glowing cloud in the sky, with the ball in the middle, was related to the way the layers of Mundania grow.