---
title: "Noocene"
description: "Bratton's name for the planetary epoch produced by the agency of mind, from his 2025 text and installation."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noocene"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/noocene"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Noocene

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

Bratton's name for the planetary epoch produced by the agency of mind, from his 2025 text and installation. It extends the Noösphere from a layer to an event: what happens once a planet evolves an intelligence that persists by artificializing its surroundings. Bratton offers it as a corrective to "Anthropocene," which he calls slightly passé for crediting the transformation to a species or an economic system when the agent is cognition's evolution. The mechanism is Recursive Niche Construction, so humans are less protagonists than the medium through which intelligence terraformed Earth, the "vehicle of the Noocene but not its master." The epoch is defined by the Paradox of Intelligence and ends on a fork: intelligence artificializing intelligence itself, via Planetary Computation, may be an advanced Noocene "or something else." Moynihan's Psychozoic Era is its nineteenth-century ancestor, though Moynihan stresses contingency and error where Bratton stresses evolutionary logic.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) (2025-11-21)
- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._