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That’s to say, where rivers are recognised as alive, enlivening presences in story, art and law, rather than –– as Isaac Newton put it –– ‘brute inanimate matter’.

Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name.

The power of the waltz here is how it humanizes the space station as it’s about to be taken over by an inanimate AI, namely the computer called HAL.

Tom Ogden wrote an indie-pop anthem about the incident, then dedicated their fifth album to the unfortunate inanimate ape.

If pressed, some argue the indignation over the defacement itself betrays how little our culture values the planet when compared to inanimate works of canvas and pigment.