---
title: "Planetary Stupidity"
description: "Thomas Moynihan's counterpart to planetary sapience, titling his 2025 London studio lecture."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-stupidity"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/planetary-stupidity"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Planetary Stupidity

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

[Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan)'s counterpart to planetary sapience, titling his 2025 London studio lecture. A planet cannot become wise without first having been foolish: if sapience means learning from one's mistakes, it presupposes mistakes to learn from, so a self-correcting Earth's prehistory is necessarily one of error. The subtitle's "baby noösphere" is the immature planetary mind these episodes educate. The errors were systematic, Moynihan argues, rooted in inductive confidence that a long past guarantees the future; the schemes run from Koene burning coal as a disinfectant to Abbott firing every coal seam and Weinberg draining the oceans. Having corrected such error once, he infers, is evidence it can be corrected again. Relates to Noösphere, whose founders share the blind spot, and to Temporal Orientation; Bratton's Noocene shares the premise that thought terraforms but not the stress on contingency and error.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) (2025-05-10)
- [Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain) (2024-11-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._