---
title: "Planetary Sapience Symposium"
description: "This is the transcript of a two-panel symposium held at the MIT Media Lab in November 2024. Benjamin Bratton moderates both panels and uses them to split the compound term in half."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Various Contributors"
published: "2025-11-21"
original_url: "https://planetarysapience.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5D0A"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/planetarysapience"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Planetary Sapience Symposium

> 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:** Various Contributors
- **Published:** 2025-11-21
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5D0A
- **Original:** https://planetarysapience.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 33k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

This is the transcript of a two-panel symposium held at the MIT Media Lab in November 2024. [Benjamin Bratton](https://antikythera.wiki/people/benjamin-bratton) moderates both panels and uses them to split the compound term in half. The first panel, with Dava Newman, [Peter Galison](https://antikythera.wiki/people/peter-galison), [Nicholas de Monchaux](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nicholas-de-monchaux), [Xin Liu](https://antikythera.wiki/people/xin-liu) and [N. Katherine Hayles](https://antikythera.wiki/people/n-katherine-hayles), takes the planetary side: how Earth came to be seen as a planet at all, through spacesuits, telescopes, satellite composites and the debris that falls back down. The second, with [Blaise Agüera y Arcas](https://antikythera.wiki/people/blaise-aguera-y-arcas), [Stephanie Sherman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/stephanie-sherman), [Robert Gerard Pietrusko](https://antikythera.wiki/people/robert-gerard-pietrusko) and [Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan), takes the sapience side: what life and intelligence are such that a planet could be said to have them, and what history their artificial forms have. Bratton's claim across both is that intelligence is planetary in origin and scope, that it has only recently been disclosed to itself through technological perception, and that the open question is not whether this intelligence is adaptive but how it might be made so.

## The argument

Bratton opens with the programme's name: the Antikythera Mechanism was both a calculating and an astronomical device, so computation began as a way for intelligence to locate itself in relation to its planetary condition. Planetary sapience asks what the relationship is, and must be, between the planetary and intelligence itself, and he gives that relationship two aspects. One is disclosure: intelligence emerged from a planetary condition that was opaque to it until technological perception showed it the Earth. The other is composition: given that disclosure, how evolved and artificial intelligence together might design a more viable coupling of biosphere and technosphere.

The first panel works on disclosure. Newman's space programme is a set of tools for reading Earth's vital signs; Galison's Event Horizon Telescope uses the whole rotating Earth as one instrument; de Monchaux traces planetary simulation back through a chain of physical artifacts from wartime artillery directors to Hollywood effects houses; Liu treats spaceflight debris and the collaged Blue Marble as evidence that the god's-eye view is composite and borrowed; Hayles offers a low-threshold definition of cognition that makes it a biological rather than a human capacity. The discussion converges on one figure: the astronaut as a fetus tethered by an umbilical cord, which Bratton says is a picture of all of us, and which Hayles reads as a warning that any reintroduction of radical individuality ignores the interdependencies that make the suit work.

The second panel works on composition and on definitions. Agüera y Arcas defines life as the computational phase of matter arising from selection for dynamic stability, and intelligence as the ability to model, predict and influence one's future in relation to other intelligences. Sherman reads automation as an evolutionary principle of delegation, with the Fordist assembly line as the primal scene of physicalised AI. Pietrusko shows that Cold War photo-interpretation of vegetation produced the decision trees of early pattern recognition, so that an epistemology of the planet and a model of cognition were built in the same room. Moynihan argues from historical estimates of past and future that a planetary intelligence needs a biography of its own.

Bratton's framing sentence for the second half is that agency preceded subjectivity. Humans were terraforming the Earth for centuries before planetary computation disclosed it, and the artificial crust of satellites and cables that made the Anthropocene thinkable is itself capable of cognition. He connects this to assembly theory, which Sara Walker would have presented had she attended: the most complex things contain the most scaffolds and so the most evolutionary time, which makes the technosphere in a strange sense the oldest thing on the planet, and since the future is by definition more complex, complexity, futurity and intelligence converge. The closing exchanges test this against objections from the floor, that Antikythera is itself anthropocentric and that no one has said what technology is, and end on a guarded hope drawn from Lovelock.

## Section by section

### John Ochsendorf and the Panel 1 introduction

The director of MIT's Morningside Academy for Design welcomes the audience and hands over to Bratton, who announces the [MIT Press](https://antikythera.wiki/people/mit-press) series and the journal and sets the theme. Intelligence should be located in the long evolutionary arc of its own emergence as a planetary phenomenon: the fire apes have folded metal and wire so that rocks can do what only primates could. Because computation is the medium through which life, sensation and intelligence are all being artificialised, it is an existential rather than merely instrumental technology, and the question is how complex intelligence might be made adaptive.

### Dava Newman

Newman frames exploration around three questions: are we alone, are there other habitable planets, is there life elsewhere. She moves from Webb images through the ocean worlds Enceladus and Europa to Mars, where the MOXIE experiment made oxygen from carbon dioxide, and shows her form-fitting pressure suit as an alternative to the 160-kilogram suit used for fifty years. Her conclusion is that all of this is for the planet: Earth-observing satellites report its vital signs, and immersive dashboards let people curate the view down to their own city.

### [Peter Galison](https://antikythera.wiki/people/peter-galison)

Galison describes the Event Horizon Telescope, eight telescopes on six sites imaging black holes whose angular size is that of an atom held at arm's length. The fundamental unit is the baseline between telescopes, and the virtual aperture fills in as the Earth rotates. This makes the Earth an instrument rather than an object of inquiry, and no single telescope's data mean anything alone. He describes the photon ring, light orbiting near the horizon that traces the geometry of spacetime, and a proposed space mission to see it.

### [Nicholas de Monchaux](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nicholas-de-monchaux)

De Monchaux presents an overdue journal essay as a prehistory of the global simulation apparatus Paul Edwards has described, traced through a chain of physical objects. Following David Mindell, he treats cybernetics as the product of a milieu of artifacts, beginning with the motors that linked radar to artillery directors in the Second World War. The same surplus motors let Douglas Trumbull animate the spaceships of 2001; CBS adopted simulation to supplement NASA's lunar visuals; post-Apollo aerospace money flowed into urban simulation; John Dykstra's camera rig, descended from aircraft trainers, simulated Marin County for Kevin Lynch's collaborator and then the dogfights of Star Wars.

### [Xin Liu](https://antikythera.wiki/people/xin-liu)

Liu begins with her own parabolic flight, where she did not fly but felt the ground fall. She presents her work as a rocket hunter: because China's Jiuquan launch site is far inland, rocket stages fall on land, and after two years of archival work and three months of filming she found two. Donated debris that reentry had softened like fabric was classified as weapons material and could only leave China once documented as art. She closes with a series on cryogenics and egg freezing as the same technology of deferred time.

### [N. Katherine Hayles](https://antikythera.wiki/people/n-katherine-hayles)

Hayles distinguishes anthropomorphism, thinking with human brains, which is inevitable, from anthropocentrism, placing the human at the centre, which is not. Her definition of cognition is built to have a low threshold and to scale: interpreting information in context in a way connected with meaning, where meaning for any organism is the continuation of its existence in its own umwelt. Her journal article sets out five criteria, the acronym SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding, anticipating, learning), tests them against plants and bacteria to separate cognition from homeostasis, and applies them to large language models, which sense a conceptual rather than a physical environment.

### Panel 1 discussion

Bratton offers three prompts: meaning-making through the planetary; the astronaut as a fetus-like body tethered to a technical environment, which is a picture of everyone; and the extraplanetary as what defines the planetary. De Monchaux, citing Edwards, says Earthrise was the last time a single artifact captured the whole planet in one frame; since then Earth is seen through systems with no single shutter. Galison says a device meaningful only in connectivity is one machine rather than a collection. Liu notes that the 2012 Blue Marble is a collage of low-orbit images taken at different times and asks whether, seeing through the eyes of gods, we have mistaken ourselves for them.

Hayles sketches a history in which Enlightenment individuality gave way in the late twentieth century to interdependence, with Lynn Margulis's symbiogenesis as the pivot, and reads the spacesuit as a tempting metaphor for radical individuality with the umbilical cord as its refutation. De Monchaux adds that Skylab astronauts devoted their congressional testimony to ecological interdependence; Bratton ties this to what his keynote called allocentrism. From the floor, Newman says she knows no good reason to colonise another planet, and Galison contrasts CERN's headquartered governance with the EHT's voluntary affiliation without a centre, a small hopeful gesture in a time of ultra-nationalism.

### [MIT Press](https://antikythera.wiki/people/mit-press) and the Panel 2 introduction

Nick Lindsay and Noah Springer describe the Press's history with the Media Lab and the new series, naming Stanisław Lem as its patron saint. Bratton then restates the premise for the sapience side: Earth folded its matter into creatures capable of abstraction, and its artificial crust of satellites, data centres and cables now realises hybrid animal-machine cognition with terraforming-scale agency. Planetary computation disclosed climate change and so the Anthropocene, but humans had been terraforming for centuries before: agency preceded subjectivity. The panel's theme is the tension between blind evolution and highly guided artificialisation.

### [Blaise Agüera y Arcas](https://antikythera.wiki/people/blaise-aguera-y-arcas)

Agüera y Arcas presents What Is Life?, the first chapter of the larger book printed standalone in the manner of Schrödinger's 1944 book, and admits that Bratton pointed out neither book defines its term. Life is the computational phase of matter arising from evolutionary selection for dynamic stability; intelligence is the ability to model, predict and influence one's future, evolving with other intelligences into a larger symbiotic intelligence. He rejects the choice between RNA-first and metabolism-first abiogenesis in favour of symbiogenesis, molecules in mutualism forming loops that mesh like cogs, and extends the principle downward: even quarks persist because they are stable. Von Neumann's self-reproducing automaton puts a Turing machine at the heart of anything alive, with DNA as its tape. His experiment, random byte tapes spliced and run as code until reproducing programs emerge, shows function arising from randomness. Chatbots are auto-complete; so is life, and the word "just" is the only error.

### [Stephanie Sherman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/stephanie-sherman)

Sherman presents her project on Fordian prehistory as planetary platform automation, from the 1908 assembly line to the coining of "automation" at Ford in 1947. Platforms are a general systems type spanning geology, architecture, infrastructure and stage, flattening complexity into a foundation that generates further complexity. Automation, following Buckminster Fuller, is an evolutionary principle by which a once-deliberated action solidifies into protocol, so that planetary systems are already automated and automation is a logic of delegation rather than replacement. Autonomous vehicles are better thought of as a distributed urban sensing swarm, and the design problem is the environment rather than the device: a platform unconscious that can produce ecological intelligence or utter stupidity.

### [Robert Gerard Pietrusko](https://antikythera.wiki/people/robert-gerard-pietrusko)

Pietrusko's case study concerns the planet as an epistemic thing. Remoteness in "remote sensing," coined by Evelyn Pruitt in 1961, is an epistemological category born of Cold War geopolitical blockage. Because similar climate and geology produce similar vegetation regardless of borders, North American test sites served as proxies for Soviet territory; plant species reveal slope, soil and permafrost depth, which affect military mobility; and these correlations were codified as diagnostic keys, chains of yes-no decisions about tone and texture that let interpreters with no botanical expertise act as sensors. The result was a direct lineage to decision-tree pattern recognition in the 1960s, and a change in what mapping meant: a region counted as mapped once its key existed. Cultures of vegetality, he suggests, preceded cultures of digitality.

### [Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan)

Moynihan says ours is the first species to ask where "now" is: how much past produced the present and how much future remains. Time is the medium in which actions matter, so the extent of our influence behind and ahead is decisive, and that reasoning must now extend to a planetary agent. He has collected scientific estimates of the ages and future habitability of Earth and universe and shows a scatterplot in which the sense of available future balloons in the last century; with Lisa Strausfeld he is turning it into The History of Now. If humans are a conduit of an emerging planetary intelligence, the planet should be given a biography of its own.

### Panel 2 discussion

Agüera y Arcas defends an idea of progress against Gould's claim that nothing is more evolved than anything else: eukaryotes are matryoshka dolls of older cells, the ribosome's core is its oldest layer, and the light bulb was invented a dozen times at once because every innovation recombines existing parts. This is path dependency, not determinism. Moynihan says his graph is a canvas of upper bounds within which contingency unfolds. Sherman describes automation as time absorbed into process and cites Herbert Simon's watchmaker parable about stable subassemblies. Pietrusko admits landscape architecture's mournful modesty against its potential as the design of systems that unfold in time, citing James Corner on Freshkills: the project was to let topsoil grow.

Asked whether intelligence is relational before it is individual, Agüera y Arcas says it is both: anything selected for exists more than once, so the environment of any living thing is other living things and all intelligence is social, with theory of mind as what built cities. He differs from Walker on the Earth, which she says cannot be alive with a copy number of one; for him a recursive structure needs a top and Earth is a good place to put it. On whether AI is alive, he answers Christof Koch's objection that a simulated fluid is not wet: within the simulation it is, and a functional definition brings platform independence. Moynihan closes by saying that Agüera y Arcas and Walker are showing what Darwin showed: that we were born of time, not slime.

### Panel 2 questions

Andrea Capra argues that Antikythera is anthropocentric and that this is no bad thing, since one cannot step outside one's frame of reference, and proposes "anthropomaximalism" for what is actually being criticised. Sherman answers that sapience makes humans one conduit among others rather than the centre; Agüera y Arcas agrees there is no view from nowhere but rejects the great chain of being for networks of mutual dependency. Bratton distances the programme from a post-humanism that levels all cognition into sameness, and says his target is the idea that the response to climate change is to subtract agency, the worst way to deal with a house on fire.

Asked whether technology can emerge across species, Bratton says technology has always been co-evolutionary rather than a tool grabbed by a Vitruvian agent; Moynihan notes ants invented agriculture, and Bratton replies that agriculture invented ants. Agüera y Arcas says what is unique to human technology is that it has theories behind it, which AI is now poised to do. Asked who will take care of the future, Bratton answers "what" rather than "who": configured forms of agency whose outcomes we will not live to see. Agüera y Arcas ends with Lovelock's line that Gaia will keep the peace, qualified: Gaia is intelligent only because we are, and every averted nuclear annihilation since 1953 was an individual refusing to push the button.

## Key concepts

- **Planetary sapience** — Bratton's claim that intelligence is planetary in origin and scope, disclosed to itself only recently through technological perception, and now faced with composing a [viable planetarity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/viable-planetarity).
- **[Agency precedes subjectivity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/agency-precedes-subjectivity)** — Bratton's formula for the irony that humans terraformed the Earth for centuries before planetary computation disclosed the fact.
- **[Planet-sized instrument](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planet-sized-instrument)** — Galison's Event Horizon Telescope, which uses the planet's extent and rotation as one machine whose parts are meaningless unless connected.
- **[SIRAL](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/siral)** — Hayles's five criteria for a cognitive system, resting on her definition of cognition as interpreting information in context connected with meaning; LLMs meet them in a [conceptual environment](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/conceptual-environment) rather than a physical one.
- **[Dynamic stability](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/dynamic-stability)** — for Agüera y Arcas, the principle that what exists is what persists, so that life is the computational phase of matter selected for the stability of cycles rather than of fixed points.
- **[Assembly theory](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/assembly-theory)** — Walker's view, relayed by Bratton, that the most complex things contain the most [scaffolds](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/scaffolding) and so the most evolutionary time, equating complexity, futurity and intelligence.
- **[Platform automation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-automation)** — Sherman's fusion of platform as a general systems type and automation as Fuller's evolutionary delegation of deliberated actions into protocol.
- **[Remoteness](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/remoteness-epistemic)** — Pietrusko's reading of remote sensing's "remote" as an epistemological category of inaccessibility, answered by vegetation as a communication channel and by diagnostic keys that became decision-tree algorithms.
- **[Temporal orientation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/temporal-orientation)** — Moynihan's concern with where "now" sits between an estimated past and an estimated future, and his claim that a planetary agent needs a biography.
- **[Anthropomaximalism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropomaximalism)** — Andrea Capra's proposed name, from the floor, for the bad part of anthropocentrism, so that the human as conduit of planetary intelligence need not be denied.
- **[Functionalism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/functionalism)** — Agüera y Arcas's position that life and intelligence are defined by what they do in context: a simulated abiogenesis is abiogenesis.

## Connections

The symposium is a live preview of the journal's first issue, and nearly every contribution exists as a finished work. Hayles's SIRAL criteria and LLM reading appear in [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition); de Monchaux's chain of artifacts is [Some Movements of Models](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels); Sherman's Fordian prehistory is [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto); Moynihan's scatterplot became [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow). Galison's Earth-instrument and Liu's collaged Blue Marble anticipate [Planetary Vision](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetaryvision). The published work should be preferred for each argument.

Agüera y Arcas's talk compresses [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) and its standalone first chapter, What Is Life?, and supplies the one-sentence definitions he says the printed books lack.

Bratton's framing restates the Noema essay [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience), which he names as the origin of the term, and is developed in [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere), where the biography metaphor and the question of how sapience is made adaptive are worked out at length. The "agency preceded subjectivity" formula belongs to [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene); [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech) gives the vocabulary for computation as existential rather than instrumental; the programme overview is [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research).

Two tensions recorded here recur across the corpus. Agüera y Arcas and Walker disagree about whether the Earth can be alive given a copy number of one, which bears on the planet-as-organism lineage in [The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere). And Bratton's refusal of a post-humanism that levels all cognition sits uneasily with Hayles's position on the same stage: she distributes cognition across every species, he accepts the distribution but not the inference that all cognition is therefore equivalent.


## Terms used

- [Agency Precedes Subjectivity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/agency-precedes-subjectivity)
- [Allocentrism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allocentrism)
- [Anthropomaximalism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropomaximalism)
- [Artificialization](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/artificialization)
- [Assembly Theory](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/assembly-theory)
- [Autocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/autocene)
- [Biospheric Reproduction](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/biospheric-reproduction)
- [Cognitive Exoskeleton](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-exoskeleton)
- [Dynamic Stability](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/dynamic-stability)
- [Epistemological Technology](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/epistemological-technology)
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/existential-technologies)
- [Integration vs. Aggregation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/integration-vs-aggregation)
- [Life](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/life)
- [Model Epistemology](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/model-epistemology)
- [Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noocene)
- [Paradox of Intelligence](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/paradox-of-intelligence)
- [Planet-Sized Instrument](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planet-sized-instrument)
- [Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-computation)
- [Remoteness (epistemic)](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/remoteness-epistemic)
- [Scaffolding](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/scaffolding)
- [SIRAL](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/siral)
- [Size in Time](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/size-in-time)
- [Symbiogenesis](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/symbiogenesis)
- [Temporal Orientation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/temporal-orientation)
- [Terraforming (of Earth)](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/terraforming-of-earth)
- [Viable Planetarity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/viable-planetarity)

## Related works

- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition)
- [Some Movements of Models](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels)
- [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto)
- [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow)
- [Planetary Vision](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetaryvision)