The Planetary and its uses: Grounding political economy in an astrobiological perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to explore an astrobiological genealogy of the concept of the Planetary vividly discussed in contemporary environmental humanities and social sciences, and to offer a framework for an articulation of political-economic models based on this concept. Following Bentley Allan, we propose to treat the Planetary as an example of scientific cosmology, thus emphasizing how astrobiology supports a much broader philosophical worldview that shines a new light on persistent problems related to organizing human inhabitation of the Earth. Starting with the analysis and speculative elaboration on Allan’s theory of cosmological shifts in international orders during Western modernity, we associate the Anthropocene discourse as an inaugurating moment in the consolidation of the Planetary’s scientific cosmology, grounded in the astrobiology’s metabolic perspective on complex adaptive systems. The narrative of the paper offers a genealogy of this perspective, including the most recent research about information metabolisms and biosphere-technosphere coupling in astrobiology, which paves the way for the explanation of the economy itself as a metabolic entity. After the review of adjacent philosophical positions associated with ecological economics and the theory of complex adaptive systems, the paper concludes with remarks on the Planetary as a cornerstone of an international order that yields economic imperatives governed by a generic view of the Earth as a member of a potentially large and diverse category of habitable planets.

Keywords

the Planetary astrobiology complex adaptive systems metabolisms global political economy

Introduction

In the broadest sense of the term, astrobiology can be defined as the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe (Nascimento-Dias, 2023). As such, it is a relatively young science, deeply interdisciplinary in its scope, forming its main assumptions and paradigmatic approaches on the go (Jeancolas et al., 2023). Given its deep interdisciplinarity, it has a great potential to cross-pollinate other fields of knowledge-making, spanning not only natural sciences but also humanities and social sciences. Its effects can even spill into everyday affairs of human existence – as we will argue in this paper.

Looking at NASA’s Astrobiology Roadmap, one can find the following articulation of astrobiology’s mission:

Astrobiology recognizes a broad societal interest in its endeavors, especially in areas such as achieving a deeper understanding of life, searching for extraterrestrial biospheres, assessing the societal implications of discovering other examples of life, and envisioning the future of life on Earth and in space. (Des Marais et al., 2008: 716)

This formulation ties together the exploration of life in the universe with the future of life on Earth. One may say that any example of an extraterrestrial biosphere will expand our understanding of the limit conditions of life as such, and in turn, it will help us envision how the terrestrial biosphere may evolve or what its likely pasts are. Beyond that, an even deeper link can be traced between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, at least to the extent that the very worldview that astrobiology offers us shines a new light on persistent problems related to organizing human inhabitation of the Earth, which has been tied to the fate of biosphere in the research of the last decades, most prominently through the concept of the Anthropocene (Waters et al., 2014).

Our interest, however, does not lie in the Anthropocene per se. Instead, we are curious about one of its most potent conceptual offshoots – the Planetary. Recently, this concept has been proposed to mark the discursive shift from the post-1989 intellectual climate, which analyzed cultural, social, economic, and technological problems in a global perspective emphasizing diffusion of local differences in a broad, interconnected network of horizontal commodity trade and information exchange (Blake and Gilman, 2024). Instead of the global-local duality, the Planetary drifts away from purely geographical, spatial analysis, aiming to treat the Earth as a system of feedback processes whose topology cuts across rigid scalar division, thus reaching all the way from the sub-atomic through societal to cosmic dimensions.

This paper aims to explore an astrobiological genealogy of this concept, which seems to be complementary to its emerging conceptualizations in the humanities (Likavčan, 2019; Chakrabarty, 2021). Beyond that, we would like to frame the Planetary as an example of scientific cosmology, following the work of political scientist Bentley Allan. In our opinion, his study soundly describes how scientific ideas influence social, political, and economic reality, thus offering a tool to project possible “cross-pollination” of current or near-future scientific advancements. We believe that astrobiology stands at the forefront of these imminent breakthroughs, and its (often tacit) philosophical assumptions can be translated into a scientific cosmology of a new kind.

To demonstrate the emergence of the new scientific-cosmological paradigm via astrobiology, the paper chooses political economy as an example of the context where an astrobiological perspective on the Planetary may reinforce some ongoing trends and even kickstart new ones. In particular, the ongoing rotation toward embedding economics in ecology leads toward a view on the economy as a metabolism, understood as a thermodynamically open system with a structure of internal feedback loops, as well as a clear set of inputs and outputs (Giampietro et al., 2012). Such a view resonates with how the planet itself is treated in the astrobiological worldview. Hence, this paper proposes to treat the Planetary as a parallel gateway to the metabolic perspective, leading to the broader reconstitution of the “cosmic background” of the political economy and international order.

The structure of the paper proceeds as follows. In Section 2, the paper dives into Allan’s link between scientific cosmologies and the constitution of international orders in Western modernity, culminating in a proposition to treat the Planetary as a potential upcoming cosmological shift. Section 3 turns its attention toward astrobiology, offering the genealogy of a metabolic perspective stemming from this discipline. Section 4 builds upon these insights and presents more recent astrobiology-inspired research about information metabolisms and biosphere-technosphere coupling, which paves the way for Section 5’s explanation of the economy as a metabolism. Section 6 then discusses some further remarks on the Planetary as a cornerstone of an international order, yielding economic imperatives informed by a generic view of the Earth as a member of a potentially large and diverse category of habitable planets. Finally, Section 7 concludes with a brief summary of the article.

Scientific cosmologies: The global and the Planetary

In Scientific Cosmology and International Orders, Bentley Allan proposes that paradigmatic changes in the international order since the dawn of Western modernity occurred in response to major scientific developments. In particular, he argues that scientific discoveries have shaped underlying social imagination, thus forming default perspectives on the organization of institutions and international order, as well as on the dynamics of geopolitical change or the nature of the economic systems (Allan, 2018: 16). He situates these major episodes of scientific change within a broader field of cosmology, which he treats as an epistemic field of widely shared, common-sensical assumptions about “what exists, what counts as knowledge, time, the origins of the universe, and the place of humanity in the cosmos” (Allan, 2018: 3). What he calls cosmological shifts is then much more than just paradigm shifts in a narrowly scientific sense (Kuhn, 2009) – they are the moments when new cosmological assumptions “are introduced into political discourses” (Allan, 2018: 20). To prove his hypothesis, he looks into three cases of such shifts: (1) the translation of Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics into the framework of political thinking during 16th–19th century, (2) the spillover of Darwinian ideas into theories concerning nature of society and its historical development, (3) the emergence of cybernetics, which envisions distinct, controllable and objective systems such as “economy” or “climate” that can be studied as computational models (Allan, 2018: 22–25).

According to Allan, cybernetics has until very recently ruled the cosmological landscape of geopolitics, because the origins of (still hegemonic) neoclassical economic narratives – concerning the nature of economic growth or market dynamics – can be traced back to the studies of self-regulating systems (Allan, 2018: 212–227). In his view, the transfer of metaphors between cybernetics and social sciences established the perspective on an economy as a system representable in computational models, which allow one to study and predict the economy’s behavior (Allan, 2018: 207–209). In turn, it became almost a truism to think about economies as networks of individual actors sorted into various clusters (e.g. consumers, firms, regulators). For this reason, Allan concludes that cybernetics heralded a cosmological shift that brought about a major reconsideration of economic epistemology (via techniques of computational modeling) and the human place in the cosmos (Allan, 2018: 260). The key aspect of the scientific cosmology influenced by cybernetics is the naturalized teleology of control and growth, which also becomes equivocal to scientific and technological progress and, hence, to an increase in human well-being (Allan, 2018: 242–250). The post-1945 geopolitical setting inspired by this vision also petrified some older cosmological assumptions, such as mechanistic object-based ontology, the linear notion of time (linked to Enlightenment historiography), and the notion of progress as a general tendency of the universe (Allan, 2018: 260).

Allan’s cosmological analysis is a powerful demonstration of how to map the evolution of historically contingent but widely shared conceptual invariants across different domains of human practice. We would like to follow his understanding of scientific cosmologies and expand his analysis toward the global present and future. At the end of his book, Allan proposes that the current Anthropocene discourse presents a possible rupture with cybernetic cosmology. The Anthropocene cosmological shift “transforms humanity’s place in the universe by returning humanity to Earth,” “redefines the character of the physical elements of the universe in nonlinear terms,” “places humanity within geologic time,” and “undermines representations of human mastery over nature” (Allan, 2018: 281).

One may object to whether the enlisted transformations in the cosmological background of global society represent a veritable cosmological shift: after all, much of the Anthropocene discourse owes to the cybernetic heritage of Earth System Science (e.g. Latour’s recent reappraisal of Gaia hypothesis, see Latour, 2017), and the understanding of complex biogeochemical processes including climate change is an epistemic achievement of planetary-scale computation (Bratton, 2019: 10). We choose to address this objection by proposing how astrobiology supports the new, emerging paradigm that heralds the perspective on the Earth as a planetary metabolism. This perspective inherits some intuitions of the former cybernetic cosmological paradigm (e.g. the understanding of an economy as a system that can be studied through computational models) but leads to a major reconsideration of how economic systems should be designed, and overall how the sustainable coupling between the community of homo sapiens and its planetary environment can be achieved.¹ The first-order cybernetics that Allen saw supporting the current political-economic cosmology represented the earliest stages of what is now called complexity science (Krakauer, 2024). Since then, the study of complex systems – in which emergent system dynamics result from transits through far-from-equilibrium states (with their requisite cascades of free-energy gradient formation and dissipation) – has gone far beyond the assumptions of mid-20th-century cybernetics. In this respect, the mix of network theory, information theory, biology, and geophysics that enables both astrobiology and Earth System Science to understand biospheres in their various permutations represents a fundamentally new development.

The new planetary perspective is also vividly debated in environmental humanities and social sciences. A wide variety of authors proposes to think about the Planetary as a theoretical concept distinct from the Global: while the latter is associated with a Western, colonial, reductionist vision of the Earth as a passive background for human socio-economic development, the former brings back the planet as a sovereign agent in its own terms, dynamically shaping conditions of human individual and collective existence (Chakrabarty, 2021; Nail, 2022; Spivak, 2012). For example, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour use a metaphor of quicksands to foreground the Earth’s active role in human affairs, destabilizing the clear distinction between what is natural and what is artificial (Latour, 2018; Serres, 1995). That leads to both the expansion and the redistribution of agency in social organization, introducing non-humans as social actors, including the composite more-than-human ecologies of tightly networked biological, technological, and (eco-)systemic agents (Latour, 2005). Hence, the planetary perspective corresponds to Allan’s vision of the Anthropocene cosmological shift, since it reframes humans as limited agents that struggle to situate themselves anew in the temporal register of geological history. Cybernetics, on the contrary, pertains to the linear vision of command-and-control that does not allow for the stratification of temporal registers paramount to the Anthropocene turn (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021).

Our proposal adds to the positioning of the planetary thinking mentioned above by emphasizing the dynamic and generic aspects of the Planetary. Any planet with a biosphere can be viewed as a self-creating agential system rather than a homogeneous cybernetic system. Accordingly, biospheric planets are best modeled as gradients of metabolic processes that compose together an entity that maintains its relative stability over time and actively negotiates the boundary separating itself from the cosmic environment (i.e. an agency of the whole that emerges from the agential contributions of its parts; Likavčan, 2024; Frank et al., 2017). This view stems from how planets are defined in astronomy, and by extension also in astrobiology, where the dynamic context of the planet’s origin – that is, its solar system – presents an active ecology of forces that determine the planet’s composition, evolution, and possible futures.

With the discoveries of exoplanets covered in the next Section, the Planetary’s dynamic and generic aspects will become even clearer. The importance of exoplanets lies predominantly in the possibility to generalize observations about the distribution and evolution of planets in the universe, thus describing the Planetary in terms stripped of the particularities of the terrestrial environment, while also providing sound guardrails for understanding viable couplings between biospheres and technospheres. The political economy then may be understood in generic terms as a structure of metabolic exchange within technospheres, as well as between technospheres and biospheres.

Earth and exoplanets: The prehistory of metabolic perspective in co-evolution of astrobiology and Earth System Science

Our central thesis is that the developments in astrobiology parallel those in Earth System Science, thus opening up a complementary gateway to the coupling of emergent scientific cosmology in Allen’s sense with the up-and-coming political economy of the Planetary. Given that climate change is rapidly shifting the physical substrate on which current political economies operate and depend, our thesis entails exploring how the scientific perspectives embedded in astrobiology can weave the fabric of (and enable the agency for) the emergence of new political economies (and their cosmologies) that are sustainable over long time scales.

We begin by reviewing important developments in astrobiology and then circle back to Earth System Science to understand its development and interplay with astrobiological science. While in the Western canon, the discussion of forms of life on other planets can be traced back to ancient Greece, astrobiology as a modern experimental science began only in the 1950s and early 1960s (Frank, 2018). It is during this period that the first experiments in abiogenesis occur (The Miller-Urey experiments on origins of life), and the first direct search for non-terrestrial life of any kind is performed (Frank Drake’s first SETI search; Dick, 2020; Drake, 1961; Miller, 1953: 82–83). In addition, NASA and Soviet Union had begun sending probes to Venus and Mars. By the end of the 1970s, however, the negative results of the Viking Landers’ life-detection experiments lowered expectations, enthusiasm, and funding for astrobiological studies.

The situation changed dramatically in the mid-1990s. The first important development was the discovery of ALH84001 – a famous Antarctic meteorite of Martian origin that, it was claimed, indicated the presence of microbial life (McKay et al., 1996). While those claims were eventually found to lack credence, significant interest in the possibilities of the ancient Martian microbial biosphere was generated. This led to a well-funded Martian astrobiological program with multiple generations of rovers sent to the Red Planet to conduct experiments. The main goal of these missions was to “follow the water” (since life is expected to require aqueous environments to form and thrive). The missions did, in fact, accomplish the goal by providing convincing evidence that Mars hosted significant amounts of free-flowing water on its surface (McEwen et al., 2007; Osterloo et al., 2008). The recognition that Mars’ warmer, wetter Amazonian eon ended approximately 4 billion years ago also meant that the current desert conditions on the planet might be seen as a fairly dramatic example of climate change.²

Of even greater consequence for our concerns was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star (an exoplanet) in 1995. The existence of other planets is a question with a pedigree as old as that of life on other worlds, with multiple failed claims of planet detections over the centuries (see e.g. van de Kamp, 1963). The discovery of a Jupiter-sized world orbiting extremely close to the star 51 Pegasi was a milestone in astronomy and astrobiology (Marcy et al., 1997; Mayor and Queloz, 1995). Not only did it demonstrate that exoplanets exist, but it also demonstrated that we should expect to be surprised by the variety of solar system architectures that the cosmos configures. As the population of discovered exoplanets increased beyond a thousand, it became possible to calculate statistics for the distributions of these worlds. The results demonstrated that the universe was awash in planets: Almost every star seen in the sky hosts at least one exoplanet. Even more important, one in five of those stars will have a planet in the all-important habitable zone where liquid water – a possible prerequisite for life – might exist on the surface (Frank, 2018). With the “exoplanet revolution” underway, astrobiology began shifting to developing methods to characterize worlds in terms of the potential to support life. The advent of biosignature studies required astrobiologists to investigate how biospheres can leave imprints on their worlds that can be detected across interstellar distances (Walker et al., 2018). It is exactly here where the science of exoplanets and the research in Earth System Science and climate studies begin to strongly interact.

The theoretical basis for biosignature science begins with James Lovelock’s recognition that atmospheres can be used as life-detectors. Contemplating the difference between Mars and Earth, Lovelock saw that Mars’ atmospheric chemistry (composed mainly of CO₂) reflected the fact that it was a “dead” world (Frank, 2018). In this context, “dead” referred to chemical equilibrium. It is the biosphere on Earth that continually pushes high fluxes of gases into the atmosphere, which, in the absence of such fluxes, would quickly react away and disappear from the atmospheric inventory. The Earth’s atmosphere is in a state of profound chemical disequilibrium (Krissansen-Totton et al., 2016). Such disequilibria are hallmarks of life in all its forms. On Earth, it is molecular oxygen, produced by the biosphere as a consequence of ongoing photosynthesis, which highlights the atmosphere’s far from the equilibrium state. In this way, O₂ (along with biogenic methane CH₄) was seen early on as a promising biosignature. If O₂ could be detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it was thought that it would be strong evidence for the existence of an exo-biosphere. This, however, no longer holds, as there are multiple abiotic processes that can produce atmospheric O₂, dependent on the stellar and planetary context (Meadows et al., 2018).

The characterization of potential biosignatures requires some understanding of the coupling between the living environment (the biosphere) and the other planetary subsystems (the geospheres: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, . . . ). It was in recognition of the strength of such coupling that Lovelock and Margulis developed the Gaia Theory (Frank, 2018; Lovelock and Margulis, 1974). This was, fundamentally, a co-evolutionary perspective on the bio- and geospheres. According to Lovelock and Margulis, the biosphere had essentially hijacked the evolution of the Earth through the development of dense networks of feedback between living and non-living planetary sub-systems. While initially controversial (due in large part to a broad misunderstanding of the idea), the Gaia Theory’s base proposal that the biosphere is a key component of planetary evolution and climate regulation became the basis for much of the modern climate research program (Steffen et al., 2020). The connection to astrobiology comes because the search for – and study of – biosignatures requires the explicit use of climate and biosphere modeling tools drawn from Earth System Science (Walker et al., 2018). While researchers are moving toward the study of agnostic biosignatures (where biochemistries need not resemble terrestrial examples), any planet that hosts life is subject to the same physical and chemical laws. In this way, Earth System Science and Gaia Theory underpin critical aspects of the astrobiological endeavor (Wong et al., 2024).

Recently, astrobiological studies have begun to consider technosignatures (evidence of life that deploys technology) alongside biosignatures (NASA Technosignatures Workshop Participants, 2018). This has required the systematic consideration of technospheres in much the same manner as biospheres serve as the foundation for biosignature research. In terms of practical results, technosignatures studies have demonstrated that spectral imprints of atmospheric Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), fully-fluorinated non-carbon compounds (i.e. SF₆), Nitrous Dioxide (NO₂), as well as surface features like artificial illumination can all serve as technosignatures detectable across interstellar distances (Haqq-Misra et al., 2022a, 2022b; Seager et al., 2023). On a broader level, technosignature studies require systems-level thinking about the interaction of the technospheres, biospheres, and geospheres in ways that speak not only to the possibilities of exo-civilizations but also the human future on Earth.

The metabolic perspective: the role of information in biospheres, technospheres, and Planetary intelligence

Biosignature and technosignature studies in astrobiology are based on what we call a metabolic perspective on the planetary systems. To characterize what biosignatures/technosignatures a given world may manifest, one needs to understand the biospheres and technospheres as energy-dependent systems that put energy to use by transforming it into self-supporting and self-maintaining activity (Kleidon, 2010). It is from this perspective that one may begin to characterize a new kind of “cosmology” with potentially potent impacts on future terrestrial political economy. As we will discuss in this section, much of this impact turns around the critical idea of information architectures.³

From an astrobiological perspective, planets and life must be considered as a co-evolving whole. Biospheres exert strong “forcings” on the evolution of the other planetary subsystems, which, in turn, exert strong feedbacks on the biosphere’s evolutionary trajectory. This coupling manifests itself in modern astrobiology and Earth System Science through the study of complex systems. Their introduction plays a key role in the possible emergence of the planetary-based political economy, so it is worth unpacking to understand their import. A system is considered complex, rather than just complicated, if it can be seen as a set of coupled, multi-scale networks (or subsystems) existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium through which energy, matter, and information flow (Krakauer, 2024). Complex systems channel these flows (or fluxes) in ways that lead to maintaining themselves in non-equilibrium steady states. A hurricane that moves as it taps thermal gradients between ocean, air, and land is an example of a complex system.

Going further, complex adaptive systems (CAS) are usually associated with life in that they are explicitly composed of nested networks (such as networks of chemical reactions, genes, proteins, or organs) comprising a hierarchy of scales in which feedback loops maintain the system in its far-from-equilibrium state (Holland, 1992). Here, the understanding of life as a non-linear, far-from-equilibrium state is crucial. Living systems are thermodynamically open. This means that they take energy and matter from outside the system and use them to do the work of staying alive. To do so, they constantly reduce their local entropy (Prigogine and Nicolis, 1985). Since the second law of thermodynamics demands that entropy must always increase when work is done (or at least not decrease), life performs its local reduction in entropy at the cost of raising that quantity in the environment. This means it must, locally, remain in a state far from equilibrium, as in this case, thermal equilibrium is equivalent to death. In this way, planetary biospheres can be seen as embodying key features of life as a CAS. They are far from equilibrium systems composed of nested hierarchies of structure and control, even if they are not fully Gaian in their ability to maintain planetary homeostasis.

One of the most important behavioral aspects of CAS, and complex systems more broadly, is emergence (Krakauer, 2024: 54). The behavior of such systems cannot be predicted in a bottom-up manner from the system’s components. Instead, new behaviors and properties emerge when the subsystems are assembled into the whole – that is, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, thus echoing our earlier claim about the difference of the planetary perspective (informed by the CAS/metabolic paradigm) from the earlier cybernetic cosmology described by Allan. Because complex systems are fundamentally non-linear in their dynamics, prediction via simple analytic models is usually impossible. Such systems must be directly simulated via their agents as the decisive elements responsible for the emergent behavior. Only then can such behavior be examined via analytic tools. In some cases, there are no governing equations in the usual sense, and the systems must be modeled solely through algorithmic means, such as agent-based modeling (ABS; Cenani̇, 2021).

One of the distinguishing features of life as a CAS is its ability to set, build, and maintain itself. This property, sometimes called autopoiesis (Varela et al., 1974), sets life apart from machines, including artificial intelligence. In essence, an organism creates the processes and products which create the processes and products which allow the organism to continue living. A concrete example is the cellular membrane, which allows the cell to endure. Since the membrane is what selects which compounds pass into and out of the cell, and since those compounds are what the membrane is built of, the membrane itself is that which allows the membrane to be created and maintained. In this way, autopoiesis is associated with what has been called “organizational closure” (Montévil and Mossio, 2015). Living systems are closed as to their organizational structure because they contain and maintain the flows of information controlling the fluxes of matter/energy that make up the organism.

From this perspective, it follows that metabolism may be declared to be the most fundamental aspect of living systems (Schrodinger, 2013). The modern emphasis on autopoiesis and organizational closure is, fundamentally, a recognition that the self-organizing and self-maintaining capacity of living systems represent their defining capacities and central open questions. This is true both when life is viewed at the level of individuals or the level of communities (from microbial biofilms to distributed ecosystems). Indeed, as astrobiology attempts to broaden its understanding of life beyond Earth’s single example, there is a need for an “agnosticism” that can identify features of non-terrestrial life (Cleaves et al., 2023). In this stream of thinking, the attention once again turns to metabolism – identified as the organizational architecture controlling matter and energy fluxes. As noted above, there are a variety of scales from microbial communities to ecosystems over which life maintains such metabolic architectures. A central question opened by Lovelock and Margulis in their work on Gaia Theory was the degree to which these dense networks of feedback, which represent the organization of metabolism, can be extended to planetary scales. Their central proposal was that such feedback could operate across the whole Earth system to reduce both exogenous and endogenous perturbations. One example of such a planetary feedback system would be the atmospheric chemical networks, which were studied and quantified in terms of their topology as closely approximating the structures of organic metabolic networks (Solé and Munteanu, 2004; Wong et al., 2023).

Margulis saw the Gaia system as fundamentally autopoietic (Clarke, 2019). Indeed, its embodiment of the essential capacity for self-repair is evidenced by the biosphere’s almost 4 billion years of continuous history of keeping Earth both habitable and inhabited (Nicholson et al., 2018). Such self-repair is most pronounced when considering the biosphere’s capacity to pass through multiple mass extinction events. This capacity for self-maintenance and self-repair via dense webs of feedback has also led to the question of whether the biosphere embodies a version of distributed cognition. Many versions of life on Earth are now seen as examples of distributed intelligence or “liquid brains.” From eusocial organisms like termites and bee colonies to the possibility that forests act as a collective whole via root-bound fungal networks, research on distributed intelligence raises questions about the spatial and temporal scales over which cognitive activity (“knowing” and response) can operate (Solé et al., 2019). From this view, the question of planets as Gaian systems also raises the question of distributed cognition operating at planetary scales. “Planetary Intelligence” is the name that has been given to the consideration that biospheres operating autopoietically can maintain their states to ensure the capacity for self-creation and self-maintenance (Frank et al., 2022). Tracing the history of the biosphere, it has been suggested that it passed from an “immature” to a “mature” state when the network of feedbacks became dense enough for causal closure and autopoiesis to be achieved (we note that consideration of this possibility from both network and information-theoretic perspectives is an ongoing field of research).

Since technospheres emerge from biospheres, which themselves emerge from geospheres, it is possible to see our current predicament in terms of the themes embodied in Planetary Intelligence research. The metabolic organization of our current version of the technosphere is inherently “immature.” It is not sufficiently autopoietic because it actively undermines its own ability to persist, and the function that would allow it to self-maintain (Haff, 2014). From this perspective, the goal of the next cosmology (in Allen’s sense) would be to reconfigure the manifold layers and forms of feedback in order to bring the exchange flows of matter, energy, and information into a mature state.

Political economy of Planetary metabolisms

From the information-metabolic perspective inherent to the CAS framework, one may approach classical and neoclassical economics as a fatal misunderstanding of the scope of economic exchange. Instead of dealing with real-world material flows and feedback networks, economic exchange has been bracketed off and transported into a dematerialized world of balance sheets and monetary transactions. That is true even though exchange stands among the most basic economic concepts – it usually connotes an exchange of goods, services, or monetary exchange, where money functions as an intermediary for value transactions.

Looking back at the history of exchange as an economic concept, its centrality in the theory of economics was not always the case. As described by Adam Smith, it was only the transformation of agrarian economies into modern industrial economies that allowed the decisive shift toward the exchange economy (Skinner, 1993: 25–30). However, Smith’s meaning of exchange is extremely specific – it relates to the trading of surplus production for profit. Yet there is also a more generic sense in which exchange can be invoked in an economic context, that is, exchange as intercourse, in the sense of a bi-directional flow of resources between different subsystems, for example, between farm and land: a view that approximates the vision of the feedback networks described in Section 4. Such understanding is deployed by Moses Hess in his mid-19th-century treatise On the Essence of Money, which is then picked up by Kojin Karatani to present a general theory of exchange spanning both the human relationship to the environment and the relations between humans in the socio-economic system. As Karatani recollects, Hess used to describe this “intercourse” by the German term Stoffwechsel, meaning material exchange, or in more modern parlance – metabolism (Karatani, 2014: 15–16).

The history of ecological economics may serve here as an example of a heterodox strand of economic thinking that furthers the materialist undertow of Hess’ (or Marx’s) political economy into the present and hence provides a groundwork for a fruitful synthesis of political economy with an astrobiological perspective on the Planetary, thus working against the grain of mainstream economics. As an example, consider Inge Røpke – one of the founding figures of ecological economics – who sums up the worldview of her discipline in the following terms:

Human society is also always nature; social processes are integrated with metabolic processes, and the enormous increase in human population and economic activities imply that nature’s basic support of human life can be threatened. This understanding called for new approaches to conceptualize the relationship between society and nature [. . .]. (Røpke, 2004: 301)

By these new approaches, she means especially the work of scholars like Herman Daly or Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who physicalized economics by emphasizing Earth’s biogeochemistry and, more specifically, thermodynamics. In a striking consonance with Allan’s aforementioned description of the Anthropocene cosmological shift (that we choose to identify with the emergence of the Planetary), Georgescu-Roegen opens his critical assault on neoclassical economics by stating how little economic theory reflected fundamental changes in the natural-scientific understanding of the physical world over the 20th century. He refers especially to the mechanistic, object-oriented worldview, inherited from Newtonian physics, which mainstream economics seemed to be firmly wedded to back in Georgescu-Roegen’s days. The crucial limitation of a scientific cosmology based on such metaphysics is its inability to account for irreversible change (Georgescu-Roegen, 1975: 347–348). Georgescu-Roegen puts it as follows:

The consequence of this indiscriminate attachment to the mechanistic dogma, whether in an explicit or a tacit manner, is the viewing of the economic process as a mechanical analogue consisting as all mechanical analogues do of a principle of conservation (transformation) and a maximization rule. The economic science itself is thus reduced to a timeless kinematics. (Georgescu-Roegen, 1975: 348)

To cure this flaw, Georgescu-Roegen proposes to incorporate thermodynamics into the basic economic axioms, thus accounting for entropy as an index of a qualitative change of energy within a system. This would, however, fundamentally change the default view on the economy as such: from circulation and exchange in a closed equilibrium market system, we get to an open process with inputs and outputs. Consequently, one would have to proceed with identifying categories of vital inputs and outputs, which are by definition treated as environmental externalities in neoclassical economics – for example, ecosystem services or sources of raw energy. In his version, Georgescu-Roegen sums up his theory of economic process in his flow-fund model, which represents the economy as a structurally closed but thermodynamically open system with a clear set of inputs, internal capacities, and outputs (e.g. natural resources, capital, production materials, products, waste; Georgescu-Roegen, 1971: 231–232). This model opens the door to the thermodynamic view of the human economy as a throughput of materials, energy, and information, nested in an assemblage of natural ecosystems that constrains possible economic configurations. For this reason, ecological economics talks today about metabolic patterns of the socio-economic systems – a term that aptly describes the qualitative characteristics of the economy tied to fundamental thermodynamic laws, as well as the principles of planetary biogeochemistry (Giampietro et al., 2012).

In the contemporary analysis of the socio-economic metabolic patterns, the structure of the economic process is invariant to the structure of the metabolism in biology. It features both the deconstructing, energy-extracting side – catabolism – which creates the resource surplus that can be harvested by the productive, synthetic side of the process – anabolism (responsible for “using the surplus to generate higher-level functions” of the system, thus keeping its autopoietic engine running; Giampietro et al., 2012: 178). On the ontological level, the identification of a metabolic pattern is more important than the classification of the system displaying this pattern in terms of its organic/inorganic composition – the metabolic language of ecological economics is thus decisively substrate-agnostic in this optics, focusing on persistent structures of relations instead of arbitrary building blocks, hence paving the way to the assemblage or actor-network ontologies for political economy (Likavčan and Scholz-Wäckerle, 2018; Latour, 2005).

The vision of ecological economics also echoes the theory of general economy devised by the French philosopher Georges Bataille:

Economic phenomena are not easy to isolate, and their general co-ordination is not easy to establish. So it is possible to raise this question concerning them: shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be considered in terms of the modifications it receives from its surroundings or brings about in its surroundings? In other words, isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework? (Bataille, 1997: 182–183)

In line with Bataille’s call for a new economic framework, the ecological-economic perspective redefines what legitimately counts as an economic problem or economic factor by inflating the realm of economics to the size of the planetary ecology. From this vantage point, much of the cosmological labor lies ahead of us in terms of fitting the planet into the political economy of the 21st century – the metabolic puzzle that does not necessarily mean a literal or metaphorical shrinking of the economy to the size of the planet, as rather an actual expansion of the planet into the so far narrow terrain of mainstream economics (which still seem to inform many public and policy discourses). Ecological economics proves that an alternative political economy is possible, and it can find a valuable ally in the astrobiological understanding of the Planetary.

Now, how can a political economy based on the metabolic picture inherited from astrobiology (and Earth System Science) cope with the status of information, for the sake of constructing a new paradigmatic framework for treating various planetary exchange flows? The notion of information itself is, after all, well reflected in neoclassical economics, as demonstrated by the idea of market price mechanisms as information engines or the theories of information asymmetries on various markets. However, these reflections miss how the information acts upon itself to both bootstrap novel forms of organization and set guardrails for these structures’ longevity. With the notion of complex adaptive systems, the metabolic perspective offers analytical tools to address flows of materials and energy that kickstart the evolution of intricate foldings of the Earth into emergent layers, exemplified by the biosphere or technosphere.

In this respect, the political economy of the Planetary is generic in the double sense: (1) It explains the generation, persistence, and collapse of various socio-economic organizations through their (mis-)alignment with the biosphere and geosphere, and (2) it prescribes a generic view on the planet itself as a metabolic process instantiated in many possible versions/substrates (per astrobiological worldview that treats the Earth just as one planet among many). With this scope of inquiry in mind, the political economy of the Planetary expands to a normative dimension by adopting the notion of habitability from astrobiology as a guiding vector for maintaining the Earth hospitable to not just human life, but life in general as an emergent planetary layer, that is, biosphere.

As per biosphere, the technosphere – understood as the material-infrastructural reality of the political economy – displays autopoietic, emergent behavior pertinent to complex adaptive systems. It thus approximates a type of metabolism capable of (so-far limited) waste management, and it displays structural dynamics similar to those of non-anthropogenic planetary feedback networks. For this reason, it must also be treated as an agential assemblage, not a first-order cybernetic system with a stable set of control feedbacks. The information architecture that governs the metabolic exchanges within the technosphere is also an evolving rulebook, and the technosphere transforms by exploring the phase-space of its possible constitutions through opportunistic re-interpretations of its rule-sets, rather than by resorting to repetitive strategies. Nevertheless, as the technosphere emerges out of the biosphere’s agency, there is still a set of basal conditions that the technosphere must maintain to sustainably explore its evolutionary possibilities, meaning that the biosphere forces it to steer itself within the pre-set limits. This dynamic tethering of technosphere to biosphere resembles a form of natural, negative, cybernetic governance, where the information architectures of the biospheric metabolisms translate to the emergent technospheric metabolisms nested within the planetary ecology.

Designing political economies with the maintenance of the Earth’s habitability in mind then means building complex adaptive systems of economic exchange broadly defined, via information capture from the biosphere (e.g. using large-scale computation infrastructures that act as sensing and monitoring systems of the emergent planetary intelligence), or even via different forms of information husbandry (e.g. utilizing synthetic biology or bio-programming as methods of intentional, artificial complexification of agent-based adaptive systems across both technosphere and biosphere) that may lead to robust, self-sustaining systems, with built-in productive redundancies. In other words, the directive for human communities as agents within the planetary political economy is to design with and through the autopoietic capacities of the biosphere and technosphere – a directive that contains constraining conditions for such endeavors to succeed.

Finally, it is worth considering the degree to which metabolism is used in a planetary political economic context as a metaphor or is intended to reflect something isomorphic to its use in biology. Beginning with the work of philosopher Hans Jonas (Jonas, 2001), several theorists addressed whether metabolism should be treated beyond the boundaries of biochemistry. Meanwhile, researchers like Robert Rosen, Humberto Maturana, or Francisco Varela focused on metabolism as the crucial and unanswered concern concerning the organization of the organism – we have already encountered their results in the concepts of organizational closure and autopoiesis in Section 4 (Rosen, 1958a, 1958b; Varela et al., 1974; Vega, 2023). From this perspective – embodied in the growing list of works about complex systems science (Krakauer, 2024) – understanding the technosphere through the lenses of metabolic organization goes indeed beyond the extent of a mere metaphor. When Haff introduced the idea of the technosphere, he intended to see it as something humans created and participated in, but which also possesses an independent systemic status. The emphasis on organization, which means an adaptive pattern and design sustained through time, suggests that the metabolic perspective can be taken as a meaningful domain of research with regard to the technosphere, asking questions such as: How can we understand the technosphere’s emergent organization instantiated at any moment by coordinated flows of energy, matter, and information? While articulating the mathematical and computational details of this perspective goes beyond the scope of this paper, we believe it will represent the good work of future studies resting on earlier formulations referenced in this paper.

Discussion

The vision of the political economy of the Planetary this paper offers is firmly embedded within the metabolic perspective emerging from the vocabulary of CAS, and it is derived from an astrobiological conception of biospheres that look at information architectures of planetary layers driving their dynamic interaction and evolution. Such a vision is well-suited to take the stage within the rising cosmology of the Planetary, as articulated in Bentley Allan’s conviction that the Anthropocene marks the cosmological shift away from the cybernetic paradigm of the post-WWII era. As we have reviewed in this paper, Allan offers us a useful historical outlook on the genealogy of scientific cosmologies (from Newtonian through Darwinian to cybernetic cosmology), and at the same time develops a tangible understanding of what scientific cosmologies are and how they serve as the intermediaries between the realm of science and the realm of existential human affairs. Inspired by his approach, we have decided to expand on his research program to hypothesize about the shape of the coalescing scientific cosmology for the Anthropocene, and we highlighted the role of astrobiology as the driving force behind the constitution of the concept of the Planetary as the theoretical anchor of this upcoming paradigm.

Astrobiology appears in our paper as a shadow twin of Earth System Science, which generalizes the insights derived from the study of the biogeochemical complexities of our home planet. Or perhaps the other way around: Earth System Science is an applied branch of astrobiology. As we have revisited in the paper, the Gaian viewpoint was originally formulated in the context of astrobiological search for biosignatures, and only later applied to understand the biosphere’s pivoting role in the “terraforming” of the Earth. Further, looking into the cutting-edge research on the possible properties of biospheres and technospheres in contemporary astrobiology, we have emphasized the importance of an information-theoretical approach that treats these planetary layers as CAS – that is, systems that behave in a way unexplainable by the language of first-order cybernetics, but that requires an agent-based approach which allows for contingent occurrences of emergent behavior.

While applying the metabolic perspective to political economy, we have first noted how the concept of material and energetic exchange became crucial to heterodox economic theories, such as the ecological economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and his contemporary followers. Their case nicely illustrates how economics may account for thermodynamics – a branch of physics that laid the groundwork for the scientific understanding of information and metabolism alike. Economies are metabolisms, self-organized, causally closed systems featuring an input-output flow of energy, materials, and information, which is simultaneously used to build and maintain structural components of the metabolic system in an autopoietic fashion.

Stressing the importance of information in the organization of metabolic exchange, we finally arrive at the point where we can theorize about the key coordinates for the political economy of the Planetary. Such a political economy represents the following features:

Focuses on information as the source of both organizational stability and evolutionary novelty (as per the definition of metabolisms and CAS)

Treats the Earth in the generic framework of astrobiology as just one possible permutation of what a planet may be

Adopts habitability as the guiding principle for maintaining successful technosphere-biosphere coupling

Views the economy (and thus the technosphere at large) as CAS, hence capable of autopoiesis

Maintains the necessity to monitor, model, and act upon biospheric constraints that set the basal conditions for any successful evolution of the planetary intelligence

Proposes to creatively elaborate on the complex information architectures of the technosphere and biosphere, thus fostering robust agent-based systems capable of emergent behavior

The metabolic view on the Planetary thus prefers bootstrapping of complexity, agency, and emergent behavior rather than complete control over the planetary economy. It is not a master plan, but a recipe for surfing on the waves of the evolutionary contingencies pertinent to the rise of the technosphere out of the biosphere.

The political-economic arrangements that fit into the picture of the Planetary necessarily privilege agile economic organizations capable of adaptive responding to the metabolic affordances of environments, while simultaneously shaping these affordances through exploratory, productive activities of synthetic recreation. To achieve this, heterogeneity and redundancy are highlighted as instrumental aspects of CAS. For this reason, the scientific cosmology of the Planetary presents an opportunity to open up the space for political-economic imagination bred upon the generic platform of our planet. New scientific cosmology implies new organizational models, as poignantly noted by philosopher Patricia Reed in her discussion of Allan’s scientific cosmologies: “[T]here exists an immense gap between what we know of the world and the structures we have put in place to organize it, evidencing a cosmological incompatibility (if not outright injustice), in urgent need of reshaping” (Reed, 2019).

We consider it highly unlikely that our vision of political economy can be imposed from above by some form of technocratic, planetary government. We are convinced, not because it would represent a morally corrupted form of government, but because it seems to be an impossible utopia already unsuccessfully tried twice during the 20th century, with the establishment of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. Hence, far from the revival of the globalization narrative of the 1990s and early 2000s, one-world narratives of the 1970s, or much older visions of the world’s unification in the peak Enlightenment by authors such as Immanuel Kant, we suspect that the Planetary embraces multipolarity as a generative condition for further evolution of political-economic models. Yes, previous rounds of cosmological shifts were largely baked within the space of the European hegemony, but the Planetary seems to be the first cosmological shift happening outside of this hegemony after a long while.

Finally, we note that streams of recent research indicate that, indeed, humans have experimented for extended periods with a variety of political forms, some of which did not include rigid, static, vertically aligned hierarchies (e.g. Trypillia megasites in Chalcolithic Eastern Europe, see Gaydarska et al., 2020; Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Thus, with the emergence of new cosmologies, we should expect the possibility of new political-economic forms as well, gesturing beyond those human societies grew accustomed to over the last handful of centuries. The kind of technosphere we have today on our Earth, sleepwalking into the possible emergence of planetary intelligence, requires a type of organizational capacity that can be unified via a set of generic rules derived from the constraints on biosphere-technosphere coupling, not via political institutions repeating the patterns inherited from the construction of nation-states.

Should the transition to the political economy consistent with the cosmology of the Planetary fail, the global society may be on a trajectory toward what some authors label as asymptotic burnout, characterized by “superlinear scaling” of endogenous interactions between agents within the system (e.g. companies, consumers, cities, households, states), driven by unsustainable energy inputs and eventually leading to collapse (Wong and Bartlett, 2022: 4). Such an outcome is necessitated by the dynamics of dissipative structures such as CAS, which break down once the energy inputs sustaining their superlinear scaling are drained. For this reason, we strongly suggest exploring the metabolic constraints of the planetary economy and incorporating insights from the foundational studies of thermodynamics, astrobiology, and CAS into governance and policy-making proposals.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to explore an astrobiological genealogy of the concept of the Planetary vividly discussed in contemporary environmental humanities and social sciences, and to offer a framework for an articulation of political-economic models based on this concept. The paper first looked into Bentley Allan’s analysis of the role of scientific cosmologies in the shifts of Western international orders since early modernity, which led us to propose the Planetary as a cornerstone of a new, emergent scientific cosmology. As explained in the paper, our take on this term emphasizes astrobiological roots of the Planetary, thus supporting a generous philosophical worldview that shines a new light on persistent problems related to habitability and hospitability of Earth-like life, and humans in particular. Our speculative take on Allan’s theory of cosmological shifts also touches upon the Anthropocene discourse, understood as an important vehicle for the consolidation of the Planetary’s scientific cosmology, grounded in a metabolic interpretation of complex adaptive systems (CAS) strongly supported by the paper’s astrobiological perspective. This perspective includes the most recent research about information metabolisms and biosphere-technosphere coupling, paving the way for the explanation of the economy itself as a metabolic entity or process. Hence, the paper also discussed ecological economics and thermodynamics-inspired philosophical accounts of the economic process that are instrumental to the treatment of the planetary economy as a metabolic system or CAS (e.g. Kojin Karatani, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Georges Bataille). In the end, the paper highlights the Planetary as a cornerstone of an international order that yields economic imperatives governed by a generic view of the Earth as a member of a potentially large and diverse category of habitable planets, and suggests further study of the political economy of the planetary metabolism from the integrated standpoint of the interdisciplinary theories reviewed in our research.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Lukáš Likavčan

Adam Frank

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work on this paper has been supported by the project funded by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education of Slovak Republic - VEGA no. 2/0110/24 “Tasks of Political Philosophy in the Context of the Anthropocene II”

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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