Inductive Confidence (planetary)

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.