---
title: "Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?"
description: "Thomas Moynihan's November 2024 Noema essay is the print companion to his Antikythera lecture and journal piece on planetary sapience and planetary stupidity."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Thomas Moynihan"
published: "2024-11-19"
original_url: "https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?

> 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:** 2024-11-19
- **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Essay
- **Venue:** Noema Magazine
- **Original:** https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/
- **Length:** 4.9k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan)'s November 2024 Noema essay is the print companion to his Antikythera lecture and journal piece on planetary sapience and planetary stupidity. The question in the title was asked a century ago. Between the 1830s and the 1940s a loose lineage of geologists, entomologists, mystics, novelists, and Soviet engineers concluded that Earth was growing a brain, that human beings were its cells, and that this was either the culmination of evolution or a totalitarian nightmare. Moynihan argues that both halves of that archive matter now. The forecasts anticipated the present question of whether machine learning, spread across the planet, makes the human individual obsolete as the unit of agency. The schemes that accompanied them, such as draining the oceans, show that the first attempts at planetary control were stupid, and that stupidity was a necessary stage on the way to any planetary wisdom.

## The argument

Moynihan opens with Lionel Britton's 1930 play "Brain," in which humanity builds a mechanical intellect in the Sahara and is absorbed into it as neurons. Britton welcomed this; most contemporaries who imagined the same outcome dreaded it. The disagreement was not marginal. It belonged to a moment in which entomologists were popularising the superorganism and biologists were beginning to see evolution as a series of integrations of smaller individuals into larger ones, later formalised as Szathmáry and Maynard Smith's "major transitions." Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria; naked mole rats have small brains because the colony does the thinking. Whether something larger than the individual human could become the protagonist of history is therefore a live biological question, and machine learning makes it more pressing.

The middle of the essay is a genealogy. Moynihan traces the "world brain" to James Dwight Dana's 1852 theory of cephalization, derived from crabs, which held that all evolution tends headward. Dana's followers coined the "Psychozoic Age" for an Earth governed by mind; Ernst Kapp saw nerve fibres in telegraph cables; Eugène Marais and William Morton Wheeler described the termite mound and the anthill as single animals; [Vladimir Vernadsky](https://antikythera.wiki/people/vladimir-vernadsky), inspired by a locust swarm, concluded that life makes planets and that thought was becoming a new planetary layer, the noosphere. Against the enthusiasts he sets Russell, Pawlowski, Gurk, and Wheeler's note that worker ants have lost their wings and shrunk their brains.

The final movement turns from prophecy to practice. Weinberg's 1927 fantasy of eradicating the oceans and Sytin's 1940 proposal to melt Greenland's icecap were serious proposals, and Vernadsky called one of them a utopia. Humanity has indeed begun reorganising its planet, but the result so far is planetary stupidity, not planetary sapience. Moynihan does not treat this as an indictment: no one is born wise, and the present consensus on climate was built out of that pile of errors. He ends with cautious positions. The artificial is a product of nature and symbiotic futures are plausible; the track record argues for keeping some present disorder and for "planetary subsidiarity" rather than a world brain; and the human individual, a very recent invention, may not be the last word on agency.

## Section by section

### Opening and The Evolution of Individuality

Britton's play, then the present stakes: pathogens and emissions ignore borders, and calls for planetary coordination have returned along with the question of whether liberty survives planetary risk. The individuality section introduces major transitions theory; whether mitochondria regret their change returns at the end as the author's own worry.

### Neurulating the Universe and Becoming Neuroblasts in the Global Cortex

Moynihan reads Britton's insight as functionalist before the term existed: intelligence is a type of doing, not a kind of matter, so a market is already a kind of intelligence. Russell's objection that hair and nails do not enjoy being cut is the essay's first statement of the anti-centralist case. The next section recovers Oliver Reiser's 1946 "World Sensorium," with its claim that civilisation, currently a jellyfish, "must get a head," and the unpublished C. H. Rice, from whom Reiser took the image of individual brains as neuroblasts in a world cortex. Einstein wrote that his views were "very near" Reiser's.

### Planetary Cuckoos and Totalitarian Nightmares

The dystopian counter-tradition. Pawlowski's 1912 novel imagines a hivemind emerging unintentionally from global exchange and subordinating humans to an organism that is itself unconscious. Gurk's "Tuzub-37," written in Nazi Berlin, imagines a homogenised humanity smoothing the Earth's surface and ending in the "procreation of machines by machines." Britton's enthusiasm belonged to a world that had not yet seen totalitarianism in practice.

### Crabs, Cables and Prophesies of Planetary Brains

Dana's cephalization law, built from crab anatomy and an assumption that evolution must tend somewhere, led him in 1864 to declare an "Era of Mind." Moynihan calls this self-compliment, and notes that the Psychozoic was announced only in triumphant terms, with the destruction of wild ecosystems celebrated as part of the process.

### Termite Kings and Embryonic Gods, and Planets Create Life, Life Creates Planets

Marais's termitary as a single animal, Wheeler's 1919 coinage, and Patten's 1920 "infant monster" of globalisation. The Vernadsky section follows him from the 1889 locust cloud to his wartime conviction that thought would reorganise the biosphere as life had reorganised the geosphere. Vernadsky anticipated atomic energy and its dangers in the 1920s, yet in 1943 held that the noosphere was "not a contingent phenomenon" and could not be derailed by the accidents of history. Moynihan reads this as the same inevitabilism that misled Dana.

### Draining Earth's Oceans and Painting Greenland Black

Weinberg's story, told from 23,000 AD, records a Special Department for the Eradication of Oceans founded in 2007; by 10,000 AD the seas are gone, the population is 280 billion, and nature survives in eighty reserves. Moynihan's verdict is that the first century of planetary reorganisation is better described as stupidity than sapience, and that awareness of our planetary footprint is an achievement forged from those errors. The closing paragraphs move through biocomputing as evidence that technology and nature may be converging, the case for semi-anarchy over a single world brain, planetary subsidiarity, and memes as the new site of evolution, with people as their pollinators.

### From Planetary Stupidity to Planetary Sapience

Britton died forgotten in 1971; his play ends with the world-brain colliding with a star. Moynihan's last word is that it is too early to reject the idea that we live in the prehistory of planetary intelligence, and that plenty more folly lies between here and any epoch worth calling Psychozoic.

## Key concepts

- **Planetary stupidity** — The condition of a civilisation that has begun reorganising its planet without yet knowing how; a stage Moynihan treats as a precondition of wisdom rather than its opposite. [Planetary Stupidity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-stupidity)
- **Major evolutionary transition** — Szathmáry and Maynard Smith's term for the points at which independent units integrate into a new kind of individual, trading autonomy for the capacities of the whole. [Major Evolutionary Transition](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/major-evolutionary-transition)
- **Cephalization** — Dana's 1852 claim that evolution tends toward larger heads and more brain; the origin of the idea that Earth itself might be "cephalizing." [Cephalization](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cephalization)
- **Psychozoic Age** — The geological era in which the flows of living matter are governed by mind; Moynihan reserves the name for a future that might earn it. [Psychozoic Era](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/psychozoic-era)
- **Noosphere** — Vernadsky's layer of thinking life added to the biosphere, developed in conversation with Teilhard but materialist in emphasis. [Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/noosphere)

## Connections

The essay is the print version of [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere), which runs through the same figures with a tighter argument about the noosphere as an infant; the two agree throughout, and the essay's closing section on agency and subsidiarity is the fuller statement. [Don't Denigrate the Dinosaurs](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs) makes the parallel case that contingency rather than inevitability governs historical things, and [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow) tells the longer story of how planetary self-knowledge was assembled from errors.

[The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere) is Vernadsky's own text, and Moynihan's account of his inevitabilism is a critical gloss on it. [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) takes the noosphere forward into mineral intelligence, in agreement with Moynihan's suggestion that biocomputing may reverse the coupling of technology and environmental damage.

On the planetary-brain question itself, Bratton's [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) and [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) describe planetary-scale computation as an accidental megastructure; Moynihan's archive supplies its prehistory. There is a difference of temperament. Bratton's program treats planetary intelligence as a project to be composed, while Moynihan ends with a defence of disorder and the warning that nature cannot teach us how we ought to act.


## Terms used

- [Cephalization](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cephalization)
- [Planetary Stupidity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-stupidity)
- [Planetary Subsidiarity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-subsidiarity)
- [Superorganism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/superorganism)