Noocene
Contextual Quote
"Slowly and then suddenly, the Blue Marble grew a crust, a sensory layer. Cities, satellites, and supercomputers are part of an evolving technosphere that expands the functional diameter of the planet. This is more than a global tool, it is an armature of cognition that has evolved over the last century.
Zooming in, planetary computation is seen as a single interlocking stack, an accidental megastructure. It is as big as the globe's surface, and extending into Low Earth Orbit, and it is as small as 3 nanometers, the size of the logic gate on advanced chips.
As of this moment the total utilized computational capacity of planetary computation is roughly 1 zettaFLOPS, or 1021 floating point operations per second. That is 1 Planetary Computing Unit. 1 PCU = 1 zettaFLOPS.
Over the last decades that total has doubled every 30 months. If that holds then it is 2.5 years to 2 PCU, 6 years to 10 PCU and 16 years to 100 PCU, which would be a world as unfamiliar to us as 1 PCU is to your grandparents, and yet most of us will soon live there.
What are the lessons to be learned in advance from this arc? How should it be located in the geophysical history of its host planet? What does it mean for that planet to artificialize its preferred engine of information cognition?
The most durable lesson is the protean nature of the ground itself, unfixed and unfixable. The Earth terraforms itself over and over and will do so now and into the future. The present Earth is the result of past unintentional terraformings—such as the mass extinction events that produced our atmosphere—and its present form is the precondition of equally profound metamorphoses in the future."
Benjamin Bratton [1]
Description
Benjamin Bratton: “ The “Noosphere” is the sphere of thought that emerges from the geophysical and biological spheres of Earth through the interaction of minds. It is not metaphysical; it is the cumulative result of matter becoming cognitive, and partially aware of itself. Crucially, the evolution of intelligence at planetary scale is also the cause of a comprehensive artificialization of Earth: the Noocene. This epoch is defined by a paradox. At the same historical moment that complex intelligence begins to grasp its own evolution, it also begins to recognize that its success may undermine the foundations of its future.”
(https://noocene.antikythera.org/)
Discussion
Benjamin Bratton:
< The Noocene is the planetary epoch defined by the willful agency of mind. " >
Bratton explains:
"In the human era, however, intelligence plays a much more agential role, though one that is never omniscient nor even capable of fully grasping the cascading consequences of its own action or inaction. The abrupt artificialization of the Earth known as the “anthropocene,” a now slightly passé term but with still much to teach us, is, I argue less the result of the industry of a particular species as such, or a particular economic system favored by it in recent years, than the evolution of complex cognition itself.
The Noocene is the planetary epoch defined by the willful agency of mind. It is what happens when a planet produces not only complex life but a complex intelligent life that is successful in reproducing itself because it is successful in artificializing its environments.
Posed directly, regardless of who or how it happened, once a planet brings forth sapient life capable of collective abstraction, symbolization and mechanization, is it inevitable that this life will terraform the planet in its image? We have only one example to consider, our own, and so it is impossible to compare alternative timelines. We look forward with similar uncertainty but with some awareness. Traversing the course between path dependency and contingency, decision and evolution, the next Earth coheres with or without us, but most likely through us and through myriad technologies to which we are inextricably attached.
Seen this way, artificialization is not the opposite of the evolved, it is the project of evolution. Evolution selects for those who become expert artificialization their environments, such as the precocious fire apes. The transformation runs in both directions. In remaking the world in its image, intelligent life remakes itself. Evolutionary biology calls this niche construction, the universal process by which life doesn’t merely adapt to an ecological niche but alters it in such a way that doing so allows it to capture more energy and matter, producing more information. Doing so allows the population to not just persist but also to scale. To get good at this project, that species must become intelligent in order to develop effective techniques, some of extraordinary complexity."
(https://noocene.antikythera.org/)
More information
Article: The Noocene:Computation and Cosmology from Antikthera to AI. [Benjamin Bratton]. Antikythera, 2025.