---
title: "Viable Planetarity"
description: "Bratton's phrase for the goal planetary sapience is meant to serve."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/viable-planetarity"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/viable-planetarity"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Viable Planetarity

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

Bratton's phrase for the goal planetary sapience is meant to serve. Opening the MIT symposium he splits the relation between planet and intelligence into disclosure, technological perception revealing intelligence's planetary origin, and composition, the design of a longer-lived coupling between biosphere and technosphere; viable planetarity names that composed condition, where intelligence can "cohere and compose its own artificial future." Its logic reframes the Paradox of Intelligence: rather than asking whether intelligence is adaptive or ultimately self-extinguishing, ask what preconditions would make it adaptive. The Noema essay behind the symposium calls that project terraforming Earth itself, and After Alignment ends on it, arguing AI should serve long-term planetary viability rather than mirror human self-image (contrast Alignmentism). The word marks where Antikythera's descriptive claims about intelligence turn into a design brief; the essay lists apparatuses such as automation and geoengineering, but no text states criteria for viability itself.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [The Planetary](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-planetary) (2024-11-10)
- [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) (2021-06-17)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._