“Today is not your first arrival here.” — Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091-1157 CE
Astrobiology is rewiring our understanding of the intimate connection between life and planets as they appear in the universe.
By Adam Frank
Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed life, or is the drama of our Earth a singular cosmic accident? And what about other minds and civilizations? Have others in the universe, through their success as tool-builders and world-makers, also brought themselves to the brink of collapse?
Remarkably, the first answers to these questions are beginning to arrive. Just as Copernicus reimagined the architecture of our solar system five centuries ago, we are once again in a revolution that pivots on planets. A new science called astrobiology has changed the night sky.
It already shows us that nearly every star in the galaxy hosts a family of worlds. Using powerful new instruments and theoretical methods, we’re also learning how to search these distant worlds for alien biospheres. In this way, across the next few decades, we might finally gain answers to the ancient question of our place among life, planets and the cosmos.
Equally remarkable, this timescale will also be pivotal to answering a different set of questions about life and our planet. After so many generations as mere passengers on Earth, humanity has now fundamentally altered the world and its function. Our project of civilization has pushed the planet into the Anthropocene — a human-dominated epoch of dangerous unintended consequences and vast inequalities. As the planet’s evolutionary trajectory has changed, our collective project of living together on it is changing as well. The future of our project is up for grabs.
The simultaneous rise of the Anthropocene and astrobiology is, however, no accident. Both are manifestations of humanity’s first encounter with the true connection between planets and life. The urgency of the Anthropocene and the promise of astrobiology reveal that planets and life — the Earth and its biosphere — are always co-evolving. Anywhere it occurs, life and its host planet must be seen as a dynamic, inseparable whole.
From that perspective, something fundamentally new is rising, offering an alternative to our current stumbling toward disaster. A different kind of human future is now possible, driven by a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. It’s called “the planetary.”
The planetary is a new “cosmology” — emerging as an alternative to the social, cultural and political-economic orders of global modernity. The planetary is a radically new worldview and paradigm grounded in revolutionary scientific advances about biospheres and the planets that support them. It also yields insights into the fate of world-spanning “technospheres” like the one we’ve already assembled that’s driving the Anthropocene. Using this science as a frame, the planetary promises a new design for our future in a climate-changing world.
Given its potential, the planetary deserves our attention and understanding so that we might also understand how to nurture the long path to its fruition. But the broad reach of that potential also requires a journey across wide and wild landscapes, including the discovery of exoplanets, the recognition of Gaia theory and the intricacies of Complexity Science as a new theory of life. Together, these give us the purchase to see the most important of all possibilities: a renewed form of “planetary intelligence,” where human cultures and the biosphere thrive together long into the future.
The planetary’s view is thrilling. The journey is worth the effort. Even more importantly, it also offers something only planets can provide: a new horizon. There is a vast space of opportunities lying within the planetary’s horizon that serve as a path toward a different kind of future, if we have the courage and vision to take them.
What Gets Overturned In A Copernican Revolution
In 1500 CE, most literate Europeans (few as there were) woke each morning and knew the sun was rising over the horizon. This was because everyone also knew that the sun moved around the Earth. Our planet was the fixed center of the cosmos.
Fast forward a few centuries, and most literate Europeans woke each morning knowing it wasn’t the sun that rose upward. Instead, it was the Earth’s horizon rolling down. Everyone now knew the sun was the center of the solar system. The Earth was just another planet moving under its influence.
For most scholars, Copernicus’s reordering of the solar system marks a milestone in the birth of the scientific revolution. What we’ll call the “Copernican turn” affected more than just science, however. Its influence was felt in all the substantive changes sweeping Europe (and eventually the wider world), including the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial economies.
In his book “Scientific Cosmology and International Orders,” political scientist Bentley Allan explored the last five centuries of major scientific revolutions and their interplay with culture. Allan also demonstrated how these revolutions found their expression in the dynamics of politics and economies. Science’s profound success in driving material change is what allowed it to reshape the European cultural imagination. From this perspective, scientific revolutions also change what Allan calls “cosmologies” — meaning both the background epistemology and the ontology of a culture.
Summarizing Allan’s results, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan cleanly expresses the link between scientific and political change at these largest scales. Likavčan writes in an upcoming paper that “emerging scientific cosmologies constrained and determined default perspectives on the institutional organization of international order, the dynamics of geopolitical change and the nature of the international economic systems.” Thus, cosmological shifts exceed the narrow definition of scientific paradigms. They become the moments when new cosmological assumptions “are introduced into political discourses,” as Allan wrote. What begins as a science grows to become the universe of culture, politics and power that societies imagine themselves to inhabit.
The first era of such scientific and political-cultural coupling began with the Copernican Revolution. What started as a purely astronomical re-conception of planetary architecture grew into something broader. When Galileo and then Newton added causal accounts of inertia and forces to Copernicus’s new solar system, a new kind of universe emerged. It was materialist, rational and mathematically expressible as unchanging laws of physics. This was the cosmology that displaced the long-lived synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Catholic theology. …
https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-second-copernican-revolution/
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