Lineage of Endurace

Lineages of Endurance is a machine learning project investigating patterns of biological survival across deep time, through ten species whose persistence extends far beyond the scale of human experience.

Global life expectancy stands at 73 years today, yet bristlecone pines have lived in a single location for over 5,000 years, certain glass sponges for up to 15,000, and species like the horseshoe crab and nautilus have survived multiple mass extinctions with little evolutionary change. Tardigrades can endure the vacuum of space; cyanobacteria oxygenated the Earth's atmosphere and remain active today.

The project encodes scientific image archives of these species into a shared latent space, asking whether a machine can learn what it means to endure and speculatively reimagine it. In doing so, it proposes a departure from the hierarchical logic of the Tree of Life, positioning non-human endurance not as curiosity but as a possible mode of understanding survival in the context of ecological crisis.