---
title: "Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere"
description: "Thomas Moynihan's essay, the written version of a lecture to Antikythera's studio researchers, argues that planetary intelligence has a prehistory made largely of error."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Thomas Moynihan"
published: "2025-05-10"
original_url: "https://babynoosphere.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5CZT"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/babynoosphere"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Thomas Moynihan
- **Published:** 2025-05-10
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZT
- **Original:** https://babynoosphere.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 9.2k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan)'s essay, the written version of a lecture to Antikythera's studio researchers, argues that planetary intelligence has a prehistory made largely of error. If the Earth is now acquiring memory and foresight through climate science and its instruments, that capacity was assembled out of two and a half centuries of confident misjudgements about what the planet is and what humans can do to it. The gallery runs from Buffon's plan to warm a cooling Earth with livestock, through Koene's proposal to burn coal as an atmospheric disinfectant and Abbott's scheme to set fire to every coal seam, to the refusal of Teilhard and Vernadsky to imagine that the noosphere could fail. The turning point is Venus: once probes showed in the 1960s that Earth's "twin" had run away into a greenhouse hell, the assumption that all planets follow one script collapsed and planetary catastrophe became thinkable. The closing move, via Stanisław Lem, is that the distinction between artificial and natural on which the whole story depends may itself be a parochial artefact of the last three centuries. The bildungsroman of the title is meant literally: sapience is earned by correcting mistakes, so a record of planetary stupidity is evidence of how far the planet's self-awareness has come.

## The argument

Moynihan opens with what psychologists call mental time travel, the ability to recall a past and project a future, and asks whether a planet can acquire it. His claim is that it partly has. Until recently no part of the Earth was aware of where its present sat relative to its past or future; through humans and their instruments, the Earth system has begun to reconstruct its deep history and model its trajectories. Climate science is the name for the planet becoming "apperceptive, even autobiographical." He adds the premise the essay turns on: intelligence is a physical force whose characteristic activity is manipulating its environment, continuing what life has done blindly since the beginning. Products of life are products of histories, and histories admit contingency; seeing it in the past is what makes it possible to see it in the future, and therefore to steer.

From this follows the central thesis. Wisdom is forged only from error, because it is earned through the precedent of revision. So the prehistory of planetary sapience is necessarily a record of planetary folly, and the project of predicting nature in order to manage its risks has generated its own anthropogenic risks. Moynihan's method is to retrace that record chronologically, from the seventeenth-century belief that the Earth was already artificial because God designed it, to the moment when Venus forced planetary science to accept that planetary histories can diverge catastrophically.

The recurring flaw he identifies is a single inferential habit, inductive confidence. Because life had evidently persisted through an immense past, thinkers from Ward to Conklin to Jeans to Teilhard to Vernadsky inferred an equally secure future, and so could not take seriously the possibility that a technological civilisation might undermine its own conditions of existence. The same habit appears cosmologically as the assumption that all planets run one developmental arc, differing only in age. What broke it was an external shock rather than an argument: Mariner II and Venera IV revealed that Venus had followed a different script, and Ingersoll's runaway greenhouse model gave the divergence a mechanism. From the 1970s, Sagan and Donahue could ask whether Earth had a runaway point too.

The last movement turns outward and then back. SETI's silence and the absence of any detectable astroengineering prompt Lem's speculation that advanced intelligence stops standing out from nature and becomes it, so that a billion-year-old civilisation would have no instruments but the laws of physics. Moynihan treats this as a caution rather than a cosmology: the artificial/natural distinction is indispensable and also fragile. He ends by refusing both complacency and despair. Awareness of our effects on climate is an achievement visible only against the pile of earlier errors, and the capacity to have corrected them is the reason to think a symbiotic rather than parasitic technosphere is possible.

## Section by section

### Introduction

A written abstract precedes the transcript of the talk. Moynihan defines a bildungsroman as a narrative of growth from childhood to adulthood and asks the audience to keep it in mind, then sets out the framing above: the amnesiac planet, the cure administered through sensors and simulations, intelligence as a force continuous with life's manipulation of its environment, and the dependence of foresight on a grasp of contingency.

### Artifacts or Ancient Fact?

In the 1600s everyone already believed they lived on an artificial Earth, designed by God; Thomas Browne's 1642 line that "nature is the art of God" sets the tone, and mountains were a theological puzzle solved by blaming the Fall. Geology's maturation in the 1700s replaced design with impersonal forces acting over prehuman time, which raised the question of how conditions might change again. Buffon in the 1770s supplied the first comprehensive theory of past and future: a molten Earth irreversibly losing a finite fund of heat toward terminal freezing. Moynihan's interest is in two things Buffon did in passing: locating humans as a phenomenon that emerged from the Earth system and would disappear from it, and treating civilisation as an agency within that biography, able to delay the freeze by multiplying humans and livestock, "little furnaces of heat."

### Disturbing the Globe

The first visions of climate control arrive with Fichte in 1799, who imagined calculation so complete that hurricanes, earthquakes and plagues could be forestalled and the planet's formation "completed." In the same decades geologists asked whether humankind was a new force in geohistory, and coal was understood as fossilised sunshine, finite and accumulated over aeons. The resulting panic about exhausting coal, voiced by Tyndall and Buckland, is Moynihan's example of a harmless error: the motive was wrong but the prescription, burn prudently, would not have caused unforeseen damage.

### Disinfecting the Sky

The essay's most detailed case is the Belgian chemist Corneille-Jean Koene, whose 1856 lectures Moynihan reads as at once the first announcement of anthropogenic climate change and one of the first acts of climate denial. Koene correctly inferred that the early Earth lacked free oxygen, that the first organisms were anaerobic, and that plants built the atmosphere. He then reasoned that CO2 was declining as animals fixed carbon, that coal burning could not offset this, and that the planet would cool until "in cold and hunger, all life will perish." His remedy, delivered amid the cholera decade, was to burn more coal, because its sulphurous emissions were disinfectants against miasmas; he ridiculed citizens complaining about factory smoke, to applause. Moynihan's point is that Koene was decades ahead on biogeochemical feedbacks and a textbook case of motivated reasoning, being a patent-holding industrialist.

### Psychozoic Age Dawning

The same year, Eunice Newton Foote described the greenhouse effect and was ignored. Geologists began naming a human-dominated epoch: Dana's Era of Mind, Stoppani's Anthropozoic, LeConte's Psychozoic. Dana's cephalisation, evolution moving "headward," justified the name, and Kapp in 1877 compared telegraph wires to nerve fibres. This era's progress myths excluded side effects, and the confidence extended to the cosmos: planets were read as stages of one arc, so Venus was Earth's Carboniferous past and Mars its Psychozoic future with Lowell's canals. Lester Ward's 1907 calculation, subtracting Earth's 72 million years from Mars's 96 million to give humanity 24 million Psychozoic years to come, is the section's emblem of insensitivity to contingency.

### Failing Structure or Sturdy Home?

Evidence of multiple ice ages, including very early ones, let Thomas Chamberlin reject Buffon's "sliding down the scale" in favour of an Earth that is a self-regulating equilibrium capable of severe oscillations. Chamberlin also named atmospheric CO2 as the long-term climate governor and in 1903 warned that humans might alter the climate for generations tens of thousands of years hence. Moynihan records the ironic consequence: the discovery that Earth maintains itself made it seem invincible. A lengthened past was induced forward into a secure future, so that Conklin, Jeans and Pokrovsky could dismiss all but astronomical catastrophes.

### Immolating Mines, Draining Oceans

In that climate of confidence, those who understood the coal-warming link drew brash conclusions. Arrhenius in 1908 welcomed warming for its crops. William Abbott, touring America in 1927, proposed returning trillions of tonnes of buried carbon to the air by burning coal seams in situ to turn polar countries temperate; Moynihan quotes his instruction that the fire should "rage day and night," carbon dioxide the product and power incidental. Boris Weinberg's 1927 Soviet "scientific fantasy," narrated from the year 23,000, records the founding in 2007 of a Department for the Eradication of Oceans, the draining completed by 10,000 AD, a population of 280 billion, and the loss of nature compensated by replicas. Moynihan calls this the perfect act of ecophagy and notes that it was catalogued as a utopia.

The text then moves, without its own heading in the written version, to superorganisms. Wheeler's 1910 observation that ant colonies behave as organisms anticipates major-transitions theory and raised the question of whether globalising humanity was becoming a superorganism. Lionel Britton's play Brain builds a mechanical brain in the Sahara from the whole human race, celebrated by its communist author for erasing individuality; Moynihan reads it as an early speculation on artificial superintelligence. After the First World War the visions darken, in Döblin's melted Greenland icecap and Gurk's Tuzub-37, where a smoothed, poisoned planet ends with machines destroying each other.

### Noosphere

Moynihan grants the cli-fi authors an intuition of catastrophe but no account of causation. That begins with Vernadsky, whose encounter with a Nature report of a 43-billion-tonne locust swarm led him to see life as "a moving rock formation endowed with free energy." The Biosphere (1926) argued that much of the atmosphere and geosphere is biogenic; the Great War convinced him that cognition would reorganise the biosphere as life had the geosphere, and he borrowed Teilhard's noosphere for the new layer. Moynihan separates the two versions. Teilhard's is a "thinking superstratum" cephalising toward a divine Omega Point, and he stated in 1935 that microbial invasions, sterility and war were theoretically possible yet "for a higher reason" would not happen. Vernadsky was materialist and foresaw atomic energy in the 1920s, yet writing in 1943 and 1944 he denied that scientific thought as a geological force could contradict the process that created it, and called the noosphere's formation inevitable and immune to the accidents of history. Both views, Moynihan concludes, preclude the thought that a civilisation might undermine its own conditions of existence.

### Farewell Fantastic Venus!

The same confidence sustained belief in an inhabited Venus; Vernadsky asserted it "without a doubt" in 1944. Mariner II's flyby in December 1962 and Venera IV's atmospheric entry in 1967 showed a surface hot enough to melt lead. Ingersoll then modelled the runaway greenhouse, in which warming evaporates water, which traps more heat. This is the essay's hinge: it proved planetary histories are not scripted, and it seeded terrestrial worry, as in Donahue's remark that Venus "opened up the possibilities of a runaway on earth." Moynihan adds that fossil emissions probably cannot trigger a true runaway here, while maintaining that Venus gave climate science its worst-case orientation.

### SETI, stellivores, and Lem

The untitled final movement asks what lies beyond the Solar System. Radio SETI from 1961 found silence; Dysonian SETI replaced the search for messages with a search for metabolism, via Dyson spheres, the Soviet Pokrovsky shell and Kardashev's scale, and found nothing either. Lem's response to the "psychozoic vacuum" is to drop the assumption shared by every thinker in the essay, that intelligence's environmental disturbance grows with its power. That coupling holds for three centuries of terrestrial industry and need not hold elsewhere. Moynihan points to biocomputing and organoids as signs that capable technology may already be weaving into natural systems, and quotes Lem's New Cosmogony (1971) on civilisations whose only tools are the laws of nature. This loops back to Browne: perhaps all nature is art, which Moynihan calls "obviously absurd" while keeping the point that the boundary breaks down under stress.

### Conclusion

Moynihan warns against reading climate breakdown as proof that technology is irredeemably fallen. Awareness of our climatic effects is the only species-level awareness of biospheric perturbation there has ever been, and it had to be earned. This is a summons to action rather than self-satisfaction, on the principle that having corrected colossal error before implies the capacity to do so again. A symbiotic technosphere looks impossible today in the way that dating the Earth looked impossible a few generations ago.

## Key concepts

- **[Planetary Stupidity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-stupidity)** — The accumulated record of confident, mistaken planetary-scale proposals that Moynihan treats as the necessary prehistory of planetary sapience, since wisdom is earned only through revising error.
- **Planetary sapience** — A planet's acquired capacity for mental time travel: reconstructing its deep past and forecasting its futures through the sensors, models and collective sciences its inhabitants have built.
- **[Inductive Confidence (planetary)](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/inductive-confidence-planetary)** — The inference from an immensely long past of biospheric persistence to an equally secure future, the shared error of Ward, Conklin, Jeans, Teilhard and Vernadsky.
- **[Psychozoic Era](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/psychozoic-era)** — The nineteenth-century name for an epoch in which the flows of living matter are dictated by mind; Moynihan reclaims it at the end for a future that would have to be earned.
- **[Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noosphere)** — Vernadsky's and Teilhard's term for the Earth's new layer governed by thinking life, treated here as a genuine discovery yoked to a refusal to consider that the layer could fail.
- **[Lem's Decoupling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/lem-s-decoupling)** — Lem's proposal that beyond some threshold intelligence stops disturbing its environment and becomes indistinguishable from it.
- **[Superorganism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/superorganism)** — Wheeler's ant-colony model extended to globalising humanity, imagined by Britton as a world-brain and by Pawlowski as an unconscious Leviathan.

## Connections

- [The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere) is the Vernadsky text Moynihan reads against. Vernadsky there expects barbarism to cease within a few hundred years by "the natural thrust of the geological process"; Moynihan's essay is a critique of that inevitabilism from inside the same framework.
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) shares the premise that thought is a terraforming force and that artificialization is the project of evolution, but Bratton frames the epoch prospectively around computation, where Moynihan's concern is the errors that made it visible. Both hold the natural/artificial distinction to be unstable.
- [Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain) is Moynihan's earlier treatment of the locust swarm, Vernadsky, Teilhard and the world-brain tradition, with less emphasis on error.
- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl) takes up the same SETI and Kardashev material from the opposite direction: Likavčan argues that technosignature search, freed of terrestrial bias, dissolves the artificial/natural distinction, which converges with Moynihan's Lem section but treats it as a programme rather than a caution.
- [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) and [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) give Bratton's version of the Earth-seen-from-outside story through the Lunar Orbiter image and Heidegger; Moynihan tells the same theme through planetary science.


## Terms used

- [Agency Precedes Subjectivity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/agency-precedes-subjectivity)
- [Cephalization](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cephalization)
- [Creatures of the Dawn](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/creatures-of-the-dawn)
- [Historical Things](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/historical-things)
- [Inductive Confidence (planetary)](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/inductive-confidence-planetary)
- [Lem's Decoupling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/lem-s-decoupling)
- [Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noocene)
- [Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noosphere)
- [Paradox of Intelligence](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/paradox-of-intelligence)
- [Planetary Stupidity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-stupidity)
- [Psychozoic Era](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/psychozoic-era)
- [Superorganism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/superorganism)
- [Temporal Orientation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/temporal-orientation)

## Related works

- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl)
- [The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere)
- [Infinity Mirror](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/infinitymirror)
- [Latent Spacecraft](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/latentspacecraft)
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene)