If one were to imagine the Blue Marble, not as an image but instead as a movie that fast-forwards through the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet, we would see continents emerging, splitting, and consolidating, asteroid strikes, and all the rest played out as the biggest “nature video” of all. At the very end of this film, in the last minutes, we’d see the last Ice Age ending and the polar caps retreating, and then in the last seconds of prodigious movie we’d see something very unusual compared to what had occurred up to that point. We would see the planet wrap itself in wires, antennae, cables, satellites—together forming an intricate inorganic crust extending beyond the atmosphere. We would see the emergence of planetary-scale computation as a geological and geophilosophical fact.
The planet is thus now capable of systematic self-sensing, self-modeling, and self-simulation. If you are a Gaia person, you may say that this has always been the case, and I won’t disagree. The “natural computation” of planetary systems—ecosystems, chemosystems, geosystems—is all but infinitely more complex than any artificial version. But that doesn’t dampen the novelty of a planet suddenly folding its minerals into a new sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating things like: How old is the planet? Is the planet getting warmer? “Technical” abstraction at this capacity and scale is a fundamental shift, not just historically but geologically as well. Bear in mind that the minerals that comprise this artificial crust are now thinking too, not just the animals.
Even if we prefer to set aside my astronomic-scale thought experiment and evaluate planetary-scale computation on the comparatively local scales of twenty-first-century geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geoculture, a difficult question remains: What is planetary scale computation for? Is its most rational purpose the modeling of individual Homo sapiens and predicting their next whim? Or is it to contribute to the measuring, modeling, enabling, and enforcement of biodiversity (and abiotic diversity)? Planetary-scale computation is not just an inert fact but an ongoing process over which we have agency. More thought experiments are in order. Should biotic and abiotic diversity be pushed beyond the levels of the Holocene? What can a planet do?