“Today is not your first arrival here.” — Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091-1157 CE
Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed life, or is the drama of our Earth a singular cosmic accident? And what about other minds and civilizations? Have others in the universe, through their success as tool-builders and world-makers, also brought themselves to the brink of collapse?
Remarkably, the first answers to these questions are beginning to arrive. Just as Copernicus reimagined the architecture of our solar system five centuries ago, we are once again in a revolution that pivots on planets. A new science called astrobiology has changed the night sky.
It already shows us that nearly every star in the galaxy hosts a family of worlds. Using powerful new instruments and theoretical methods, we’re also learning how to search these distant worlds for alien biospheres. In this way, across the next few decades, we might finally gain answers to the ancient question of our place among life, planets and the cosmos.
Equally remarkable, this timescale will also be pivotal to answering a different set of questions about life and our planet. After so many generations as mere passengers on Earth, humanity has now fundamentally altered the world and its function. Our project of civilization has pushed the planet into the Anthropocene — a human-dominated epoch of dangerous unintended consequences and vast inequalities. As the planet’s evolutionary trajectory has changed, our collective project of living together on it is changing as well. The future of our project is up for grabs.
The simultaneous rise of the Anthropocene and astrobiology is, however, no accident. Both are manifestations of humanity’s first encounter with the true connection between planets and life. The urgency of the Anthropocene and the promise of astrobiology reveal that planets and life — the Earth and its biosphere — are always co-evolving. Anywhere it occurs, life and its host planet must be seen as a dynamic, inseparable whole.
From that perspective, something fundamentally new is rising, offering an alternative to our current stumbling toward disaster. A different kind of human future is now possible, driven by a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. It’s called “the planetary.”
The planetary is a new “cosmology” — emerging as an alternative to the social, cultural and political-economic orders of global modernity. The planetary is a radically new worldview and paradigm grounded in revolutionary scientific advances about biospheres and the planets that support them. It also yields insights into the fate of world-spanning “technospheres” like the one we’ve already assembled that’s driving the Anthropocene. Using this science as a frame, the planetary promises a new design for our future in a climate-changing world.
Given its potential, the planetary deserves our attention and understanding so that we might also understand how to nurture the long path to its fruition. But the broad reach of that potential also requires a journey across wide and wild landscapes, including the discovery of exoplanets, the recognition of Gaia theory and the intricacies of Complexity Science as a new theory of life. Together, these give us the purchase to see the most important of all possibilities: a renewed form of “planetary intelligence,” where human cultures and the biosphere thrive together long into the future.
The planetary’s view is thrilling. The journey is worth the effort. Even more importantly, it also offers something only planets can provide: a new horizon. There is a vast space of opportunities lying within the planetary’s horizon that serve as a path toward a different kind of future, if we have the courage and vision to take them.
“Just as Copernicus reimagined the architecture of our solar system five centuries ago, we are once again in a revolution that pivots on planets. A new science called astrobiology has changed the night sky.”
What Gets Overturned In A Copernican Revolution
In 1500 CE, most literate Europeans (few as there were) woke each morning and knew the sun was rising over the horizon. This was because everyone also knew that the sun moved around the Earth. Our planet was the fixed center of the cosmos.
Fast forward a few centuries, and most literate Europeans woke each morning knowing it wasn’t the sun that rose upward. Instead, it was the Earth’s horizon rolling down. Everyone now knew the sun was the center of the solar system. The Earth was just another planet moving under its influence.
For most scholars, Copernicus’s reordering of the solar system marks a milestone in the birth of the scientific revolution. What we’ll call the “Copernican turn” affected more than just science, however. Its influence was felt in all the substantive changes sweeping Europe (and eventually the wider world), including the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial economies.
In his book “Scientific Cosmology and International Orders,” political scientist Bentley Allan explored the last five centuries of major scientific revolutions and their interplay with culture. Allan also demonstrated how these revolutions found their expression in the dynamics of politics and economies. Science’s profound success in driving material change is what allowed it to reshape the European cultural imagination. From this perspective, scientific revolutions also change what Allan calls “cosmologies” — meaning both the background epistemology and the ontology of a culture.
Summarizing Allan’s results, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan cleanly expresses the link between scientific and political change at these largest scales. Likavčan writes in an upcoming paper that “emerging scientific cosmologies constrained and determined default perspectives on the institutional organization of international order, the dynamics of geopolitical change and the nature of the international economic systems.” Thus, cosmological shifts exceed the narrow definition of scientific paradigms. They become the moments when new cosmological assumptions “are introduced into political discourses,” as Allan wrote. What begins as a science grows to become the universe of culture, politics and power that societies imagine themselves to inhabit.
The first era of such scientific and political-cultural coupling began with the Copernican Revolution. What started as a purely astronomical re-conception of planetary architecture grew into something broader. When Galileo and then Newton added causal accounts of inertia and forces to Copernicus’s new solar system, a new kind of universe emerged. It was materialist, rational and mathematically expressible as unchanging laws of physics. This was the cosmology that displaced the long-lived synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Catholic theology.
What mattered most about the new science emerging in the 16th and 17th centuries was that it worked. When applied to domains as broad as ship navigation and military armaments, it generated extraordinary wealth and power. Given its efficacy, it’s unsurprising that the power of science was taken up by the powerful. It is estimated that a third of the founding members of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (what we now call the Royal Society) were crown officials. Francis Bacon, who was an arch-advocate for the new methods of science was, for example, also the Lord Chancellor.
There was a constant circulation of elites through the emerging institutions of science and the established institutions of politics. Via these currents of dialogue, both the natural and human worlds were increasingly seen through a materialistic, mechanistic lens. That was how scientific cosmology reshaped the universe of political economy.
The age of kings and princes ordering themselves and their states solely to God’s providence was ending. As Allan wrote, “Over the course of the Seventeenth century the dominance of dynastic state purposes gave way to the rise of ‘interests.’” Such “interests” could be expressed as rational and measurable. They were calculable in tables that represented a materialistic view of what mattered, and a mechanistic understanding of how matter could be set in motion in service of the state. Instead of the furthering of political dynasties, a new conception of politics as a quantitative balance of power emerged. It was this deeply mechanistic image that became explicitly codified into state relations.
As God faded into a deism that merely set the laws of mechanics into motion, ministers and diplomats created a new kind of mechanistic social order. Because Copernicus and Newton had reimagined the solar system as a clockwork, everything above and below became a machine. This included the new and wildly effective industrial economies being built directly from science.
It is indeed remarkable that an argument between astronomers over celestial motions would help reorder the political realities of a continent (and subsequently much of the world). That, however, is the power of planets in the human imagination. The Copernican Revolution’s historical impact was simultaneously deep and broad.
That is why we must now pay attention to what we will call the “astrobiological turn” — the ongoing revolution in understanding life in the universe. It is this transformation in worldviews that underpins the new planetary cosmology underway today.
“As the planet’s evolutionary trajectory has changed, our collective project of living together on it is changing as well. The future of our project is up for grabs.”
Earth Becomes A System, Climate Becomes The Problem
The first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system was found in 1995. It was an epoch-making moment. Astronomers had debated the “plurality of worlds” beyond the sun for 2,500 years. The discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting 51 Pegasi, a star 50 some light years from Earth, definitively ended that argument. But 1995 is not where the story of the planetary and its emerging cosmology begins. Instead, the potency of seeing life on Earth in its proper astronomical and planetary context was laid down many decades earlier.
Life did not impress geologists very much at the beginning of the 20th century. Considered the sole domain of biologists, life seemed to have had little consequence to the mostly physical and chemical mechanics of Earth’s history. It took the great Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky to recognize that life was a planetary force. Vernadsky, a geologist by training, was the visionary who first defined the biosphere in its full power.
As he wrote in 1926 in his book “The Biosphere”: “… the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth … The radiations that pour upon the Earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the Earth.”
Vernadsky recognized the biosphere as an active geophysical system and banished the vision of life as some green scruff clinging tenuously to the surface of an uncaring planet. His vision of the biosphere also initiated the critical idea of co-evolution. Earth’s life was a collective that was both driven and being driven by changes in the planet’s non-living systems.
The next step in articulating the capacities of the biosphere and co-evolution came about 50 years later, appropriately at the dawn of the space age. In the early-1960s, chemist and polymath James Lovelock was hired by NASA to help design life-detection experiments for lunar and Mars missions. Musing over the limitations of looking for Earth-like life on a not-very-Earth-like world, Lovelock suddenly saw that a planet’s atmosphere could itself help detect life. He was working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time, in an office shared by none other than a young Carl Sagan.
Musing over how biospheres can change their planets, Lovelock realized that life pushed atmospheres into chemical states that were impossible on a world without life. On planets without life, atmospheric molecules like carbon dioxide and methane react with other compounds until a quiet, dead equilibrium is achieved. On a planet with a biosphere, however, life continuously pumps new gases like oxygen into the atmosphere. The biosphere’s continual “respiration” is, therefore, a product of its planetary-scale metabolism. It keeps the atmosphere from reaching the exhausted equilibrium evident in the chemistries of lifeless worlds.
With this flash of insight, Lovelock saw the astrobiological future. By searching for signs of atmospheric chemical disequilibrium, astronomers could perhaps find life on distant worlds. What they would discover, however, was not simply evidence of individual alien species but of thriving planetary-scale biospheres.
Understanding that life had the power to change an entire planet’s atmosphere was Lovelock’s lasting contribution to astrobiological science. But more than just an experimental method, Lovelock’s insight into the power of biospheres was also the basis for his invention of “Gaia theory.”
Originally called “Self-regulating Earth System Theory,” Gaia theory argues that life on Earth co-opted the planet for its own ends. Specifically, and as we will see, throughout the planet’s history, the biosphere has exerted strong feedbacks on the non-living parts of the planet. These feedbacks maintain the world in a habitable state. Human bodies keep their temperatures at an average of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit regardless of outside conditions. Lovelock was arguing that planets with biospheres achieve a similar kind of homeostasis: They self-regulate.
Biologist Lynn Margulis soon joined Lovelock in developing the Gaia hypothesis. Her essential contribution came through a detailed knowledge of the planet’s rich microbial ecosystems. It was Margulis who saw the capacity of microbes to act as the agents driving Lovelock’s proposed planetary self-regulation.
Gaia was a stunning, expansive idea that demanded a fundamental re-evaluation of life and its evolution on planetary scales. Not surprisingly, Lovelock and Margulis met with considerable resistance. Their efforts, however, would quickly be put into a different context that changed how science viewed Gaia’s emphasis on the potency of biospheres.
The possibility that human activity was changing the planet’s climate had been recognized by the late 1950s with the work of oceanographer Roger Revelle. President Lyndon B. Johnson even spoke of climate change during a 1965 address to Congress. By the mid-1980s, the climate impact of anthropogenic fossil fuels was finally showing up in measurements. On a sweltering summer afternoon in 1988, climate scientist James Hansen famously testified before Congress that climate change was already happening.
The importance of Gaia theory to the study and recognition of climate change cannot be understated. Aspects of Gaia remained contentious, like how fully life could hijack a planet for its own ends. But by the end of the 1980s, there was universal agreement that the biosphere (and its human offspring) was a major force driving conditions on the planet.
From Gaia theory, a new scientific language was born that spoke of “coupled Earth systems.” First, there were non-living systems that made up the planet: its air (the atmosphere), water (the hydrosphere), ice (the cryosphere) and the upper regions of rock (the lithosphere). Collectively, these were known as the “geospheres.” They were “coupled” to each other and to the living matter that made up the biosphere. By “coupling,” scientists meant that changes in one system produced changes in another. If the atmosphere held more greenhouse gases, then ice melted, oceans rose, erosion on the land increased, and life changed where and how it lived.
Gaia theory slipped into its new branding as Earth Systems Science (ESS) as scientists studying climate began thinking about climate change in terms of these coupled systems. It was only through the advances in ESS that climate science made its progress. By placing the biosphere on equal footing with the other non-biotic geospheres, a full account of anthropogenic climate shifts was assembled.
Earth Systems Science was transdisciplinary, and so a new kind of science. This will be an important point for understanding how the planetary and its perspectives entail wider cultural cosmological changes. ESS was a field where old boundaries between previously siloed domains became porous. Gaining a scientific purchase on global warming required researchers to build new epistemologies for understanding Earth as a “complex system,” a term that itself was newly emerging in the scientific lexicon. The planet was not a dead ball of rock but nested networks of geology, biology, social systems and technology. Together, these networks moved vast quantities of energy, matter and information around the planet. While Gaia theory was the first to imagine that stunning, extensive vision of the planet and its life, Earth Systems Science brought that vision into detailed focus.
The international pressure to build Earth Systems Science created an imperative from which the planetary as paradigm and cosmology began to emerge. It was a new world system, grounded in a new scientific understanding of life and planets as a complex whole — a system of systems. These first steps toward a new planetary perspective occurred amid fierce political debates over global political orders and political economies. By the last decade of the 20th century, the core ideas of the planetary were already appearing at the center of foundational cultural debates over climate change and the human future. The planetary as a perspective recognizing a new kind of problem started to matter, and the planetary as a cosmology began to take shape.
“A different kind of human future is now possible, driven by a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. It’s called the planetary.”
How We’ll Find Life
The next step in the ongoing emergence of the planetary came with that earlier referenced 1995 first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. By the end of the 21st century’s first decade, however, the pace of discoveries grew so rapidly that astronomers had a validated census of alien worlds. We now know that Earth is just one of up to 10 billion trillion habitable worlds in the universe. With new exoplanets being discovered daily, we are ready for the next step, the search for life beyond Earth.
On a material level, that search will be carried out by new telescopes precise enough to collect light from distant exoplanets for detailed analysis. This kind of technological advance is remarkable but not fundamentally new. The whole history of the modern era is written in technological advances. These include the ones that drove the great acceleration of the Anthropocene with its anthropogenic global warming. Instead, it is at the imaginative, conceptual level that the search for life reveals ideas that can rewire the human future. To understand these ideas, we first must explore how astrobiological theory appears in the scientific search for exoplanetary life.
The search for alien life is a search for co-evolving biospheres. The basic idea is taken straight from Lovelock’s insight that day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Any sufficiently active biosphere on any planet in the galaxy will modify the behavior of its world and leave an imprint detectable across interstellar distances. These imprints are called “biosignatures.”
The simultaneous detection of atmospheric oxygen and methane is an exemplar of a biosignature. Because of their chemical affinities, these gases would react away quickly on their own. Finding evidence of their presence in a planet’s atmosphere would mean there must be a strong biosphere pumping those gases back into the world. An astronomer’s goal, then, is to detect the spectral signatures of, for example, atmospheric oxygen and methane in the light from a distant exoplanet.
What’s true for biospheres would be true for “technospheres” as well. The idea of the technosphere was first proposed by geologist Peter Haff. A technosphere is the planetary-scale activity of a technology-building species. It’s all the networks of energy-harvesting, transportation and production manifesting in all kinds of machines spread across the entire world.
And if that technospheric activity is powerful enough, it would also leave imprints in the light from an exoplanet: i.e. a “technosignature.” Industrial compounds like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are an example of a technosignature that my colleagues and I have extensively studied in a first-of-its-kind NASA program. We found that even current Earth levels of CFCs might be detected in exoplanets across interstellar distances.
It’s noteworthy that such gases might not be pollution but could be intentional releases to heat up a world and “terraform” it into habitability. This is possible because CFCs are potent greenhouse gases that could be injected into an atmosphere to raise the planet’s temperature enough to make that world habitable for life. Reflected light from large-scale use of solar collectors could also be a technosignature.
The search for biosignatures and technosignatures represents the cutting edge of astronomical science and will define much of our 21st-century work in astrobiology. The excitement among scientists is palpable. For the first time, there is a broad consensus on how we can search for life, including the tools to bring the search to fruition and the funding to build those tools.
For many non-scientists, the excitement is equally expansive. The millennia-old question “Are we alone” is lodged in the public’s imagination. They are paying attention as we get within grasp of answers. That universal excitement will be one factor in manifesting the new planetary perspective as a cultural cosmology.
“The planetary is a new ‘cosmology’ — emerging as an alternative to the social, cultural and political-economic orders of global modernity.”
Planets, Planetary Intelligence & Exogaia
So what are the critical features of astrobiology as it appears in the planetary? What new cosmological designs emerge from it that can be as transformative as the materialistic, mechanistic worldview was for the Copernican/Newtonian Revolution? Assembling these pieces of the planetary’s architecture of ideas is our next goal.
Lovelock’s recognition that biospheres fundamentally reshape worlds makes co-evolution crucial to understanding any inhabited planet’s history. With that come questions just as relevant to technospheres (like the one we have recently built) as they are to the billion-year history of Earth’s biosphere. How is co-evolution established? How does life build the networks of feedback that exert such powerful change on a world?
These questions also take us back to those posed when Lovelock and Margulis first proposed Gaia theory around half a century ago. One of the early critiques of Gaia theory was that it seemed to imply biospheres had a teleology or a goal. Was that possible? If biospheres can alter a planet’s evolution to keep it habitable, does that mean we should talk about them as having goals? Can a biosphere be said to “know” something about the state of its planet? A technosphere definitely has goals in the form of interests conceived by the sentient creatures who built it. So what happens when a technosphere, developed by a species with clear teleological concerns, is laid down on top of a biosphere?
It is from the standpoint of these questions that a central idea in the planetary’s cosmology can be introduced. “Planetary intelligence” is a view of biospheres and technospheres in which the vast, dense networks of feedback shared with the host planet can be described in terms of information and meaning. To understand what planetary intelligence can mean, we begin by seeing how Gaia theory found an explicit expression in astrobiology.
In 2016, astronomers Aditya Chopra and Charles Lineweaver introduced the concept of ExoGaia. They argued that inhabitation was required to maintain a planet’s habitability over billions of years. Once life emerged, a biosphere had to establish the kinds of feedback Lovelock and Margulis described. If not, the evolving astronomical environment would make conditions on the planet untenable for future biotic evolution. The steady increase in energy output from the host star is one example of dangerous changes in a planet’s astronomical environment. The brightening star will cause the planet’s temperature to increase. Left unchecked the temperature will eventually get so high that its oceans will boil away and all life will die.
Thus, according to ExoGaia, all long-lived biospheres must evolve the dense feedback networks that can alter the planet’s evolution. Planetary scientist Arwen Nicholson and colleagues further developed the idea. They showed how biospheres can evolve chemical reaction networks that can, for example, maintain a planet’s temperature in a habitable range, even as its star gets brighter.
Therefore, a planetary biosphere must move from what might be called an “immature” state, where its feedbacks have yet to exert strong planetary feedback, to a semi-Gaian state of maturity. In a mature biosphere, the networks of life have fully reshaped the possible trajectories of a planet’s evolution. The biosphere changes what the planet can do. That is where the possibility of planetary intelligence emerges.
“We must now pay attention to what we will call the ‘astrobiological turn’ — the ongoing revolution in understanding life in the universe.”
Autopoiesis, Distributed Cognition & What Complex Systems Know
Some might blanch at the idea of linking entire worlds with any notion of intelligence. When astrobiologists David Grinspoon, Sara Walker and I proposed the idea in a 2022 paper, we used the word in the broad sense of cognition, of “knowing” and response. This is the bridge allowing the idea of planetary intelligence to be linked with the planetary. In our work, the essential connection comes by situating the conceptual foundations for planetary intelligence within the rapidly advancing science of Complexity Science and Complex Adaptive Systems.
Complex systems differ from arrangements of matter that are merely complicated (like a tangled ball of string). Complex adaptive systems are built from nested hierarchies of smaller subsystems. Think of an animal built from organs that are built of cells that are built from proteins and so on down to the “fundamental” units of their atoms and constituents. Through these hierarchies of organization, complex systems manifest their most important feature: They self-organize. They create the processes and products necessary for their own ongoing existence.
But these processes and products are the very means by which they produce themselves. A concrete example is the cellular membrane. It is the membrane that allows the cell to endure. Needed chemicals are let in while harmful compounds are kept out. This is what allows the membrane itself to be assembled and maintained. Thus, it is the membrane that allows for the existence of a membrane.
This kind of self-organization was important enough to be given its own name by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: “autopoiesis.” To be autopoietic is to be self-creating and self-maintaining. It is the essential strange loop that makes life a complex adaptive system and makes complex systems so different from everything science has attempted to understand before.
Autopoiesis and self-organization are why it’s natural to describe complex adaptive systems in terms of teleology. They clearly have goals. The goals might be rudimentary, as in the process of microbial chemotaxis. This is where single-celled organisms recognize and move up gradients of nutrients. In this case, the goal is just to endure, to keep on living. But the teleologies of complex adaptive systems can also be highly structured as in a society that seeks to increase access to healthcare for its citizens. The key point is that life, through the lens of complex adaptive systems, is never blindly bumping into its environment. Instead, such systems can be usefully described as agents who embody some degree of knowing about their environments and their own internal states.
Most importantly for our concerns, Complexity Science has profoundly enlarged our understanding of where and how cognition and knowing occur. This is particularly true for the study of “liquid brains.” These are intelligences formed from collectives like termites, ants and bees. Such eusocial species have long been known to show attributes of distributed cognition, which was why E.O. Wilson called ant colonies and bee hives “superorganisms.” Recent work has also demonstrated aspects of distributed cognition even in microbial communities via bacterial “quorum sensing.” Chemical signals passed between individual microbes can allow communities to act collectively to, for example, fend off predators.
Additionally, there is ongoing research on how underground fungal networks linking tree roots can generate distributed cooperation. Initial studies have proposed that these networks allow trees to act collectively, moving nutrients from healthy regions in geographically extensive forests to distant unhealthy regions. While this work remains contentious, it demonstrates the range of debate on the subject.
Thus, how far can collective intelligence go? How large are the scales it can work across? Can a biosphere be a collective that exhibits some form of distributed cognition?
When we pull all these features of life as a complex system together with the planetary-scale function of biospheres, the possibility of planetary intelligence emerges. Life on Earth began at least 3.5 billion years ago in the Archean Eon. At first, it was an immature biosphere. That means life was too thin on the ground to exert strong feedbacks on the geospheres. Planetary characteristics like atmospheric chemistry could not be modified. Within a billion years or so, however, the biosphere had grown to the point where it was driving strong fluxes of oxygen into the oceans, atmosphere and land. In this way, it can be said that a mature biosphere was emerging.
Once life evolved into planetary networks of microbial communities collectively exerting pressure on the rest of the geospheres, it becomes possible to think of that collective as having a degree of knowing. There was, simply put, information being used by the collective which made up the biosphere. And it is information usage in the form of storage, copying, transmission and processing that are the hallmarks of agency in complex adaptive systems. This is how, across almost three billion years, we can speak of the emergence of planetary intelligence on Earth or on any planet where such a mature biosphere occurs.
A biosphere that achieves self-organization and autopoiesis has become mature. Through collective webs of life, mature biospheres actively maintain rather than degrade the conditions needed for their own existence. Information flowing through and being used by these living networks means we can think of a mature biosphere as a collective that holds knowledge of its own state and responds to changes in that state and the environment. Mature biospheres “know” something and use that knowing to maintain their own planetary-scale viability across geologic time.
Note that consciousness and conscious control is not part of the system’s self-design and does not need to be involved for the process to function. Once consciousness does appear, however, an entirely new level of complexity occurs. Planetary intelligence can also be applied to technospheres and that is exactly where the full potential of the new planetary cosmology appears.
“For the first time, there is a broad consensus on how we can search for life, including the tools to bring the search to fruition and the funding to build those tools.”
Maturing The Technosphere & The Re-emergence Of Planetary Intelligence
After completing his work on the biosphere, Vernadsky eventually took his ideas one step further. Once human beings arrived on the planet, Vernadsky argued, “cultural energy,” in the form of technological capacities, created yet another set of possibilities. This new layer was called the noosphere — “noos” in Greek for “thinking.”
Most people are familiar with the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s more spiritually inclined version of the noosphere as a “world-soul.” Vernadsky’s version was characteristically more grounded.
For Vernadsky, the noosphere was the sum of human agency expressed through networks of technological systems. This is what we now call the technosphere. Vernadsky correctly saw that one day the combined energy-harvesting capacities of the technosphere would exert as extensive a forcing on the planet as the biosphere exerts on the geospheres. What he could not see, however, was how the technosphere could wreak havoc on the Earth System it relied upon for its own viability. But while Vernadsky could not see it, we can.
Not only can we directly measure the technosphere’s effect on the planet as climate change, but we can also see it from the broader vantage point of planetary intelligence. The astrobiological perspective allows us to see how the technosphere we’ve built remains dangerously poised in its own immaturity. It has not yet achieved the collective, distributed cognition — i.e. the planetary intelligence — required to ensure its own survival.
The technosphere is essentially the collective project of civilization. That project now consumes a significant fraction of the energy captured by the biosphere via photosynthesis. The effects on the Earth systems of this energy capture have been disruptive. Climate change represents just one planetary consequence of our emerging technosphere. From transporting key nutrients like phosphorus to increasing ocean acidity, the activities of the technosphere are poised to cross multiple boundaries that endanger the ability of the supporting biosphere to maintain its own viable state.
We have known about climate change and our proximity to those planetary boundaries for decades. Despite that knowledge, our international systems of governance and control have been unable to alter the technosphere’s rush toward those boundaries. We continue a sprint towards collapse.
This failure to act globally is revelatory. Those international systems of control, governance, production and finance are themselves part of the technosphere. They constitute its “information architecture.” As we have seen, one of the principal results of Complexity Science is that information is as important as matter and energy for complex adaptive systems.
The biosphere is composed of both physical trees as well as the genetic, metabolic and ecosystem-scale informational flows that make forests possible. In the same way, the technosphere is composed of both physical technologies like container ships as well as informational organization — corporate policies, international treaties and NGO agreements — underlying its construction and use. The technosphere is as much about the informational organization of control as it is about what gets controlled.
With this realization, we can see what it means for our technosphere to be fundamentally immature. It is degrading the very conditions required to maintain its own viability. Drawing from the vision of mature biospheres, we can then see the exact shape of what must be created to avert climate change and the polycrisis it entails and exacerbates.
Here the long view of the astrobiological perspective becomes explicit. To exist on a planet for more than just a few centuries, any technosphere must become mature by manifesting a new form of self-organization. If it is to persist over even semi-geologic timescales of a few thousand years, it must become self-creating and self-maintaining. Thus, a mature technosphere would be autopoietic. In becoming so, it must manifest what the supporting biosphere established billions of years earlier: planetary intelligence. This is the only way technospheres can endure and thrive across timescales like those of biospheres.
What is essentially new and different with mature technosignatures (which is what makes them so exciting for astrobiological science) is that teleology is explicit in their emergence. A species becomes planetary when it first constructs a technosphere, even an immature one. But by recognizing the consequences of their own power in building such a planet-spanning technological system, any species that goes on to evolve their technosphere to maturity has built intention and goal into the new form their coupled planetary systems will take. By explicitly embodying teleology and meaning in this way, a mature technosignature represents the full completion of the Gaian potential, a planet awakened to itself.
“Can a biosphere be a collective that exhibits some form of distributed cognition?”
The Planetary As New Cosmology
The Copernican Revolution changed the perspective from which humanity viewed its place in the universe. It soon became clear that the Newtonian science supporting this celestial rearrangement could also be a driver for gaining material wealth and power. That was how new science became the imaginative foundation for a new world system.
This new world was, however, dead. It was a universe that was entirely materialist, mechanistic and reductionistic. Life was reduced to “nothing but” molecular machinery. The enduring strangeness of living systems and their capacity for agency, autonomy and even sentience (i.e. experience) became just an epiphenomenon of sub-atomic particle motions. Life, in and of itself, was secondary. Compared with atoms or space-time, life was not of fundamental importance in the hierarchies of this mechanistic scientific ontology.
As this science gained power, so did any philosophy that purported to speak for it. It is no surprise therefore that the industrial political economies that would rise over the 18th and 19th centuries would imbibe materialistic, mechanistic visions of life and the Earth.
Whether the political economy was capitalist, socialist or communist, it relied on a cosmology where mountains and fields could only be seen through reduction. They were “nothing but” resources to be mined or farmed. The Earth as a living planet was invisible. At best, there was “the environment,” which was simply a blank space into which the tailings of industry could be dumped.
Given this planetary blind spot, it is no surprise that existing political economies refused to acknowledge climate change and its consequences for so long. Effectively understanding global warming and the planetary impact of human activity requires a broader view than humans as “homo-economicus.” It also requires seeing life as more than just machines made of tissue and bone.
Looking back across five centuries, we can see how deeply flawed the cosmology emerging from the Copernican turn was. I note that recognizing this flaw is different from rejecting modern science or denying it as a profound and profoundly important human achievement. One can honor science and still see how many of the crises we face today are the result of a worldview, a metaphysics and a cosmology that claims to speak for it. But science is not a metaphysics or a political philosophy. It is a powerful method for entering into a dialogue with nature. It is also not static.
Astrobiology and Complexity Science are new threads in that dialogue, and they reveal new insights about the universe. What is most crucial for the emergence of the planetary is that they show us a vision of planets and life that goes far beyond the dead world of the old cosmology.
First came the recognition that life, as the biosphere, was an equal player in the coupled Earth systems of air, liquid water, ice and rock. This was the accomplishment of Gaia theory and its subsequent transformation into Earth Systems Science.
Once climate change was recognized, the technosphere was added to Earth Systems thinking. Suddenly, the question of life, planets and their co-evolution took on a new urgency. Then, beginning in the mid-1990s, the discovery of exoplanets brought astrobiology to the frontier of astronomical science. Thousands of new planets were available for exploration.
A new field aimed at identifying biosignatures emerged that depended on a Gaian view of biospheres and their power to alter planets. Scientists were using that power to imagine how any kind of life, on any world across galaxies, might create detectable imprints of its existence.
Eventually, the same question was asked of alien technospheres. Studying the capacities of exoplanetary technological species to reshape their world and leave detectable technosignatures became an ongoing international research program.
These new discoveries and new research programs all demand a different understanding of life and its place in the universe. Earth Systems Science is explicit that life and the planet must be seen at the systems level. Living planets are, in other words, epistemic wholes.
It might be useful to reduce some problems into their parts to understand Earth (or any planetary) system. But reductionism as a totalizing philosophy finds no foothold in this view. This is the first significant departure from the cosmology of the Copernican turn.
Going further, Complexity Science is what powers the “bio” in astrobiology, and it demands life be seen as an emergent phenomenon. As theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman puts it, life is “based on physics but beyond physics.” The central tenant of Complexity Science is that emergent systems are more than the sum of their parts. They create, innovate and surprise.
Without leaning on any form of vitalism, this is how the astrobiological perspective steps past materialism. Living systems are more than “just” matter because they are the only physical system that uses information. In their achievement of autopoietic self-organization, life makes the semantic aspect of information central to its own organization. Meaning matters just as much as matter. That too is a significant step away from the Copernican turn’s cosmology.
From the new view of life as emergent complex adaptive systems, a broader integrated understanding of life and planets becomes possible. Earth, or any world transformed by biospheres and technospheres, has been shaped by metabolism evolving at a planetary scale. Most important, once co-evolution begins, the networks of energy, matter and information flowing through them bequeath that world with the possibility of planetary intelligence.
Mature biospheres are systems with the capacity to channel infalling stellar energy to serve the goal of maintaining viability. They form a single self-maintaining system that must be treated as such for scientific investigation or for the construction of long-term sustainable cultures. This includes the design of political economies, which must now be seen as a new form of planetary-scale metabolism.
Thus, the astrobiological perspective on life and planets becomes the astrobiological turn. It is the foundation for a new ordering of human concern because it offers an imperative, a prescription and a teleology that can directly shape the construction of a new world system. Technospheres emerge from biospheres, which emerge from non-living geospheres. Planets have rules. Woe be unto the species that believes its creations can trump those rules and the planet on which it depends.
As Vernadsky reminds us, “the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth.” This is the pivot point of the astrobiological turn. It is the ultimate ground for the new cosmology of the planetary because it is not just true for humans on Earth but for all life on all planets wherever they might occur in the cosmos.
The goal therefore must be to harness those energies and mature the technosphere, bringing it into accord with the biosphere and other geospheres. Given what we know of the biosphere’s own history, seeking such maturity and planetary-scale intelligence is the only path toward longterm human flourishing. It is the only trajectory into what astrobiologist David Grinspoon calls the Sapiezoic Eon — or, the era of wisdom.
“Mature biospheres ‘know’ something and use that knowing to maintain their own planetary-scale viability across geologic time.”
Visions Of The Planetary & A Planetary Vision
What would actually change if a new planetary cosmology were to emerge and take hold? What kind of cultural organization and political-economic orders would follow? These are not simple questions to answer, as this kind of emergence is inherently open, creative and evolutionary.
What will form depends on how it forms. It will also take more than a single lifetime to see the answers. Imagine a merchant or scholar in the late 16th century. Could they have sketched even the bare contours of how Copernican science would end up deeply implicated in market-based capitalism?
Still, we can see at least some implications of the planetary with its astrobiological perspective and foundations in Complexity Science. In particular, we can ask how might the cosmology of the planetary organize itself?
A mature technosphere is the ultimate goal of the planetary. It would be a re-emergence of planetary intelligence as it followed the organizational design of the mature biosphere which preceded it. But how would that kind of technosphere organize its material, energetic and informational structures? The essential innovation is that those structures would make it impossible to degrade the technosphere’s capacity for self-maintenance. Better yet, it would make such degradation unthinkable.
Consider the current organization of the technosphere with all its networks of governance, finance and production. If I wanted to go to a bank and get a loan to build a nuclear weapon, I’d quickly find that to be an impossible proposition. The loan officer wouldn’t need to check any rulebooks. It would simply be unthinkable to use global finance for that purpose. Likewise, one can imagine that in a future shaped by the planetary, getting a loan for a coal-fired power plant would be equally unthinkable. Everyone would know what coal-fired power plants do to biospheric metabolism. “Of course, you can’t have funds to build something like that,” a shocked bank manager would tell me.
Thus, the planetary means recognizing that the organization of culture is always situated within planetary metabolic feedback loops. For right now, as the planetary is still emerging, it also means that any new theory of political economy that doesn’t have the word “planetary” in its intent has already lost the thread.
Rooting the planetary in Complexity Science’s view of life also allows us to imagine that getting a loan for industrial meat production would be equally unthinkable. Vegetarianism certainly would remain a personal choice. But as our vision of life slides away from the machine metaphor and toward the acknowledgment of agency as a basic measure, our willingness to treat animals as simply economic resources for industrial-scale exploitation may shift.
Even if planetary intelligence is seen as just a metaphor or guiding principle, it’s still an acknowledgment that sentience exists across the biosphere in many different forms. This acknowledgment has already occurred in science as demonstrated by “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.” In the statement, a diverse group of scholars argued that current scientific research indicates widespread animal consciousness is a realistic possibility. The declaration raises serious questions about the ethical implications that should follow.
Rooting a new world system in the cosmology of the planetary also takes us into entirely new territory in the stories we tell about what we know and who knows it. Singular “Theories of Everything” were a demand of the older materialistic, mechanistic cosmology. The planetary does not require such totalizing narratives to be taken from a single perspective. There is an epistemic pluralism inherent in the planetary because it recognizes that phenomena can always be seen from multiple standpoints.
This view is built directly into Complexity Science, which relies on many paradigms of research focus and method. Each of these can tell different kinds of stories about the same question. As the complexity theorist David Krakauer writes, “complexity science should help us understand why a plurality of paradigms is not only of utility but is inevitable.”
There is, therefore, no one culture or cultural history that can establish hegemony over others in the planetary. This is also how it can escape what philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour identified as the source of previous ecological movements’ political ineffectiveness. By embracing the multiple perspectives and multiple scales on which biospheres and technospheres function, the local is never subsumed into the global. There is always a place for people to stand, stand by and stand for. There is home and land with its specifics of life and culture to attach to. The planetary is never disembodied.
Timing, as Shakespeare said, is everything. The timescale for astrobiological science to obtain the data relevant to the question of life on other worlds will be measured in decades. It will be a story unfolding across the 21st century. The Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA’s life-hunting future flagship observatory is expected to launch in the 2040s or 2050s. The observations it will make over the following decades will provide the best views of if, and where, life exists among the stars.
This timing means our first answers about life in the universe will come just as the climate crisis, and the greater polycrisis in which it plays a pivotal role, reaches crescendos of urgency and response. This is the time when the new planetary cosmology can also rise and take hold.
Nothing is guaranteed of course. There are many darker futures that might hold the human project captive for a century or more. But like the Copernican Revolution and all that followed, the planetary begins with a new vision of planets. The first views from that perspective have already been gained.
In that way, the living fibers of story, logic and design that are the planetary are already growing. There is already momentum building, driven by the very fires that threaten us, for a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. If we can build on that momentum, then we might find ourselves at the exact moment when the Earth and its children can leave their adolescence behind and mature.
