Planetary Intelligence: Space Industries, Renewable Energy, and the Technosphere

Responding to anthropogenic climate change requires information from and about the Earth. Astrobiologists who study the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe claim that such planetary intelligence can lead to a ‘mature technosphere’, a planet capable of regulating its energy inputs and outputs. From this perspective, Earth-observing satellites and solar microgrids are small examples of a self-aware and self-regulating technosphere. However, the industrial development of space and renewable energy infrastructures perpetuate local dispossession and extractivism. Also, ideas like a mature technosphere are normative, totalizing, teleological, and reductive in their focus on a collective planet evolving towards maturity. The local and the planetary, in this critique, are in opposition. Building from a case study of the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) – a First Nation organization with space and renewable energy assets in Australia – this article offers a different account. Here the local and the planetary are not opposed but complementary. This is argued with Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, a theory of how technologies mediate the relationship between the local and the planetary.