---
title: "Inductive Confidence (planetary)"
description: "Moynihan's recurring diagnosis, my label: inferring a secure deep future from an unbroken deep past."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/inductive-confidence-planetary"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/inductive-confidence-planetary"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Inductive Confidence (planetary)

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/inductive-confidence-planetary), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Moynihan's recurring diagnosis, my label: inferring a secure deep future from an unbroken deep past. Once geology lengthened Earth's habitable history and showed climatic self-regulation, Conklin (1921), Jeans (1930), Pokrovsky (1935), Teilhard (1935) and Vernadsky (1944) all "induced forwards" to rule out homegrown catastrophe — the noosphere's own founders explicitly denied a technological civilisation could undermine its conditions of existence. The lecture's unifying account of why planetary stupidity was systematic rather than merely personal: a blindness to *contingency*, broken only by the external shock of Venus's runaway greenhouse.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) (2025-05-10)
- [The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere) (2025-05-10)
- [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._