As climate change spawns rich-guy fantasies of colonizing space, what is our own Earth’s actual potential? Theorist of the post-Anthropocene Daniel Falb talked to Spike about Thinking Planets, a new book coauthored with Armen Avanessian, and shared an excerpt.

Christian Kobald: Do you see Thinking Planets as a kind of primer?

Daniel Falb: The book is a primer but also more than that. It introduces the new discourse on planetarity that has emerged in the last five years or so. We find it very relevant. But we also felt the need to intervene into this emerging discourse – to formulate a critique of it and add in a context that we think is key when thinking about planets and philosophy of nature today: astrobiology. Finally, part two of the book is a dialogue where we explore together the subjective and biographical consequences of what is happening with the planet today. For something is going on.

CK: Why a new philosophy of nature?

DF: It is a philosophy of nature because it is a philosophy of the planet. The planet as we see it is the ultimate subject – the ultimate underlying agent – of everything that happens on it and to it over time. The time aspect is crucial: planets are at their core temporal figures, flourishes in time, as we put it, and it is their history and their unfolding that we recognize as “nature.”

CK: To clarify some of the terms you’re using, could we put together a short glossary: What do you mean by “planetarity-as-intimacy”?

DF: Sure. Planetarity-as-intimacy is very important for us. In our analysis, the planet is no longer the mute background of people’s lives, or merely the hyperobject that is always be too big and too remote to even be felt by them. Instead, the natural history of the planet is extremely accelerated today, it now unfolds roughly at the scale of a human life: the change of climate, the loss of biodiversity, but also the growth of the technosphere and the emergence of new biological and physical phenomena like genetic engineering and particle accelerators are not only experienced by people as they move through their life stages, it also affects how their lives unfold. It is intimately linked to the shape of their biographies by creating new work opportunities, rendering them unemployed, forcing them to migrate away from climate-related conflicts, or shortening their lives through heat-related causes.

CK: What is the “the serialization of the Earth”?

DF: The serialization of the Earth is a key move by astrobiology as we philosophically interpret it. Looking at merely the one history of this single planet, it is hard to understand much about planets and ourselves. Astrobiology asks: If we replay the history of the Earth (from the beginning or any later point in time) over and over again, how similar are the unfolding histories to the one we see? And if we change some factors (e.g., size, distance to star, chemical composition, etc.): How will this change the trajectories of life? This type of question is purely hypothetical regarding Earth but it is very real regarding the billions of Earth-like exoplanets out there in the universe. Viewed through the eyes of astrobiology, the Earth and the intelligent civilization by which it is currently inhabited mark just one data point in an almost infinite series of planets and planetary histories. "The planet” is a figure of vast internal multiplicity.

The first photograph of Earth from the Moon, taken shortly before Earthrise.

CK: What is “astrobiology”?

DF: Besides from the theoretical dimension just mentioned, astrobiology has in the past been linked to projects like figuring out the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe (the Drake Equation) and scanning the skies for electromagnetic traces of them (SETI). Today, astrobiology very much lives in the aftermath of the “exoplanet revolution,” whereby since the early 2000s thousands of Earth-like exoplanets have been identified. In projects like the TESS space telescope, increasingly AI is doing this job.

CK: What’s meant by “Transition 9”?

DF: We think we could be in the beginning stages of a so-called Transition 9. By that we mean another Major Evolutionary Transition as theorized by biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, describing how evolution over time adds new mechanisms and agencies to its toolbox, from multicellularity to social insects to human language. They count eight such transitions in Earth history so far but suggest that the digital revolution could mark a new such transition. We take their suggestion seriously and put it in resonance with the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene, from 1950 onwards, which coincides with the onset of the digital. But what is the broader phenomenon when talking about the digital? For us, Transition 9 describes the beginning debiologization of collective intelligence – a major event in the natural history of the planet. In our minds, this Transition 9 framework should replace the older Anthropocene framework.

CK: What is the “new dispositif of hyper-anticipation”?

DF: Hardware and software advances have in the past decades led to a rise in computational modeling across disciplines. One prominent example are climate models. But climate models, because they have to account for all elements and agents on the planet and their interaction, are really Earth system models. Then you have models of things like population, GDP, economic development, urbanization trends, etc. What all these computational models have in common is that they generate predictions, futures. We see this as a rise of scientific futurology, and we observe the ubiquity, in scientific literature and in the media, of predictions to 2030, 2050, 2070, 2100 that map out the decades that lie ahead of us. Tools for unprecedented levels of anticipatory behavior and politics are now at our disposal (hence the “hyper” in hyper-anticipation), from the Earth system and climate down to the minutiae of certain economic subfields and the like. Now remember that we said planet Earth is less a lump of matter than a figure in time. With the coming decades becoming inhabitable via hyper-anticipation, we can say that we now could start inhabiting the Earth in its own, temporal medium – and this would be a first.

CK: What could the “planetary political constitution” you seem to imagine look like in (more) concrete terms?

DF: We observe that the predictive tools of hyper-anticipation are (as of now) used in very irregular and patchy ways – businesses anticipate market movements and act on that knowledge to compete more successfully, while climate scientists anticipate dramatic future warming and the “international community” is not effectively acting on that knowledge. Nation states, often caught up in the temporality of election cycles, likewise use anticipatory tools (beyond the statistical foresight that lies at the heart of insurance and some social security systems) quite arbitrarily at this point. We have no concrete plan for a planetary political constitution, but we ask how the tools of hyper-anticipation could be applied more decidedly at national and supranational levels such that anticipatory politics would become more effective: to create an expanded “temporal envelope” of our lives and to secure and expand human and nonhuman wellbeing against the “storm” of future natural history. This includes the core objective of realizing and maintaining equal and high life expectancy for everybody.

CK: Your book reads like a “praise of ageing”, right down to the very specific call for a global convergence (upwards) of life expectancy. Is that the real key to the “secret” of the text?

DF: Yes, the praise of ageing lies at the core of the second part of the book. As we have come into the position of seeing natural history unfold throughout our lifetimes, we believe it is philosophically relevant to be a witness, explicitly, of that natural history. The segment of Earth history that our lives have arbitrarily been inserted into individuates us as human beings. At the same time, the ultimate question of astrobiology is “What can a planet do?” – as Gilles Deleuze used to ask: “What can a body do?” That is: What is the ultimate complexity, knowledge, technology, feeling etc. that a planet of this universe can bring forth as it unfolds? This question will be answered for the single instance of the Earth only long after our deaths, but we will certainly be closer to an answer at the end of our lives than we were at the beginning. It is at the end of our lives that we witness the Earth in its state of highest futurity, relatively speaking. People suffering from the metaphysical injustice of low life expectancies are robbed of that futurity.

CK: Is there a future aesthetics of planetarity?

DF: I think this is very much up for discussion and if any, there will be practical answers to this. For me, what I am interested in aesthetically is how we “visualize” the coming decades of our lives, as made more transparent by hyper-anticipation: How to “picture” the rollout of our biographies in sync with the unfolding natural history of the planet, and what to do with our finitude, given that every climate change projection to 2100 contains, albeit virtually, the day of our death. Hyper-anticipation inspires new forms of biographical holism by articulating finitude – and how this looks, tastes, and feels is a part of my poetic work right now.

“This Planet”: an excerpt from the epilogue of Thinking Planets

Planetarity-as-intimacy puts the serialization of the Earth in sharp contrast to imaginaries of abandoning this planet: as if, for us, the Earth were an arbitrary specimen from the astrobiological series, easily exchanged for others.

This goes counter to projects that are as prominent as they are caricature-like, such as “Occupy Mars,” in which billionaires rack their brains over how to construct space colonies for the emigration of a privileged few before the Earth supposedly becomes uninhabitable. But, not only will the Earth not become uninhabitable for the time being, which is already clear in view of the recent escalation of habitability (even if the effects of climate change will be as drastic as they are fearsome). Ultimately, even a critique of such emigration projects, based on the sense that these space colonies will be nothing but future enclaves of the super-rich, are a form of ideological embellishment, a smokescreen. Because colonies of this kind will never be a reality (beyond model projects doomed to failure). This is connected with what we perceive as the real problem, which is covered up by such criticism: the reality that such terraforming projects by and for the super-rich have existed for a long time – but down here on Earth. Think of all the bunkers in New Zealand, gated communities and private security services, tax havens, yachts, and private jets. Such quasi-extraterrestrial enclaves on Earth will become all the more frequent, the more extremely played out are global warming and its chaotic effects.

Just as we are politically repelled by this scenario, we are philosophically repelled by another, even more distant scenario of leaving the earth, which starts with the idea of uploading our brains to computers. This is the idea that post-biological intelligent beings would one day “colonize” the entire Milky Way or universe by sending space probes to other planets in order to settle and replicate there, and from there to sending out further probes, and so on and so forth to the bad infinity. However, nowhere in this project do we recognize a noteworthy – let alone natural-philosophically interesting – answer to the astrobiological question “What can a planet do?” Again, space-colonization fantasies underestimate the expanse of the universe. All other problems aside, these probes would be traveling in empty space for many hundreds of thousands, even millions of years before having “spread,” even just rudimentarily, in the Earth’s cosmic environment. Throughout this time, the probes are “frozen” – while the collective intelligence on Earth keeps developing. In view of this intelligence, with each passing decade and century, the sent-out probes appear more and more like “old-timers” and atavisms from the history of technology.

A museum of technology, disseminated into outer space, does not answer the astrobiological question. This can only be achieved by the planet itself, which, within the actual limits of its habitability – i.e., until photosynthesis will cease and the oceans will evaporate in the deep future – has plenty of time to spell out the consequences of Transition 9, and then (in an extremely unlikely, but not impossible, case) to go through all other possible evolutionary transitions: until the physical possibilities of structure formation and information processing for a planet of this universe have been completely exhausted, right here on Earth. This state of exhaustion of planetary possibilities – which is unimaginable for us and, so far, unexplorable, due to the lack of exoplanetary examples – would be the (final) answer to the astrobiological question.

It may be given after our time. Instead, our current question is whether and how the potentials Transition 9 has in store for human and non-human life on Earth might come true in some future. The answer to this can only be a collective one, and its implementation must be techno-political and not just technological. Ideas of a technological fix or an overly optimistic solutionism are not suitable for this. Only through political, cultural, civilizational – and thus, in our view, democratic – means will we be able to figure out how to steer the unfolding Transition 9 away from toxic pathways or even to prevent its interruption by major civilizational catastrophes. Following our analysis, it is now a matter of positioning the potentials of Transition 9 in such a way as to help us with its navigation. How debiologized intelligences could be integrated into more intelligent human action within the Earth system is something we touched upon in Part 1, Chapter 3, where we dealt with the new dispositif of hyper-anticipation.

In the existing (shrinking) form of that dispositif, transnational organizations circulate hyper-anticipatory climate and earth system models, which remain ineffective in the absence of a planetary political constitution, while, on the other hand, nation states and corporations access tools of hyper-anticipation to very different degrees, in order to gain a competitive advantage in their antagonism.

Conversely, hyper-anticipation could become collectivized and constitutionalized: The new temporal envelope that hyper-anticipation promises for our lives could become a protective envelope in the most comprehensive sense, where we learn to deal better with the dangers and possibilities that come our way via Transition 9, and, first of all – finally – to provide equal life expectancy for all.

Because the active and conscious inhabitation of the planet as planet – which only would become real in this way – corresponds to a more comprehensive desire.

A planetary desire.

This is not a desire for a certain natural-historical state of the planet. This is not about trying to live “in tune” with some snapshot of the Earth in its process – its shape at the time of our birth, or in pre-industrial times, or whenever everything is supposed to have been intact …

No, what we are talking and thinking about is an unfulfillable, but therefore productive and always generative desire for planetary evolution. Our desire for the planet emerges from the planet (a desire in the Lacanian or Hegelian sense: desire of the other, desire for the other – and this other is the future). Its goal will have been none other than the creation of the Earth.

What greater existential and intellectual exaltation can there be than witnessing the unfolding of a planet “live?” What greater desire could we have than seeing, with our own eyes, as much of its future as we can?

But to do this, we need to age.

Age with the planets.

Thinking planets.

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Book launch (in German)
pro qm, Berlin
27 Sep 2024, 7:30 pm

Thinking Planets: Hyper-Anticipation and Biographical Deep Time (2024) is available for download from Zeppelin University at no cost. The German original is published by the Merve Verlag under the title Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit (2024).