Similar Game: Urbanite on Earth and Terraformer in Space

This post explores possible ties between urbanites on Earth and terraformers in Space along a gradient of concepts of human-planet intersections.

Summary

Notions like terraforming, planetary gardening, geoengineering or technosphere trace a suite of concepts about anthropogenic planetary change. While reductionist perspectives, e.g., ’…get the physics right then…’ are likely flawed; nevertheless, a planet's physical and chemical qualities mould its climate, geomorphology, and hydrology. Human activities on Earth have nowadays altered its climate, geomorphology, and hydrology, leading to a substantial human-geosphere intersection at the planetary scale. Studying ‘appropriate behaviors and practices wherever human activities interact with the Earth system’ (e.g. geoethics) leads to rationales for reasonable practices at the Human-Earth Nexus. This essay uses these rationales to argue for commonalities between urban, geoengineered and terraformed realms.

 Introduction

Humans living in Space are featured in science fiction (e.g., (Robinson 2012)), settlements on the Moon and Mars are scientifically envisioned (Beech 2021), and terraformed planets were already thought of about half a century ago (Sagan 1973).  Such speculation about space-based anthropogenic planetary change associates concepts such as geoengineering (Morton 2015), ecomodernism (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015), or planetary gardening (Klosterwill 2021), which, in turn, serve as a bridge to concepts like technosphere (Szerszynski 2017) or ergosphere (Renn 2020).

"Getting the physics and chemistry right, then 'the rest' would persist, i.e., biological and (human) social life" is a well-trodden reductionist perspective.  Its simple view is flawed, not only because of a probable Gaian bottleneck ^[*] (Chopra and Lineweaver 2016) in the evolution of rocky planets.  Still, a planet’s physical and chemical qualities mould its climate, geomorphology and hydrology, i.e., the diversity of non-living nature.  Subsequently, climatic, geomorphological and hydrological features suitable for biological life make habitable planets (Langmuir and Broecker 2012) which, biological evolution permitting, also might persist and support social life (Alahuhta et al. 2022).

The human prowess to alter Earth's climate, geomorphology and hydrology at the planetary scale is a central component of current anthropogenic global change (Rosol et al. 2017) (Otto et al. 2020).  Nowadays, human work and the material qualities of Earth are linked at the planetary scale (Grinspoon 2016) (Thomas 2022). The planetary urban realm is the primary human-geosphere intersection, given its size and dynamic.

The geoethics approach of enquiring what are "appropriate behaviours and practices, wherever human activities interact with the [geomorphological] Earth system" (Di Capua et al. 2017) [p.5] led to descriptions of the intersections of human activities and Earth (Bohle et al. 2019). Applying political philosophies led to amalgamating them into geo-philosophical rationales of the Human-Earth Nexus  (Bohle and Marone 2021) (Peppoloni and Di Capua 2022).

Mutatis mutandis, this essay argues that the reductionist perspective 'get climate, geomorphology and hydrology right' provides an analytical perspective to discuss commonalities of urban, geoengineered, and terraformed realms, including sharing of geo-philosophical rationales across them.

Subitem: terraforming & geoengineering

The concept of terraforming connotes adjusting the material qualities of rocky planets (or moons) for possible human residence.  For example, it is envisaged to alter the features of the atmosphere, e.g. the pressure and temperature at the planet's surface.  Next, more evolved constituents of the planet’s qualities should adjust, like climate, geomorphology, or hydrology, and, subsequently, alteration by biological agents is envisaged.

Considering Earth, the notions of geoengineering (Morton 2015) or planetary gardening (Klosterwill 2021) substitute the notion of terraforming. Conceptually, these notions superpose, and geoengineering is terraforming Earth, for example, enhancing carbon-dioxide capture by biological, chemical, or technical means.  Hence, the current climate engineering discussions, such as solar radiation management to recover a climate status quo ante, are downscaled variants of more comprehensive concepts  (Möller 2023).

Notwithstanding explicit geoengineering, the ongoing anthropogenic global change processes of the Great Acceleration (Steffen 2022) might be viewed as unintentional geoengineering, and being both precursors of dedicated geoengineering and supplementing precursors, such as altering terrestrial geomorphology or hydrology, i.e. landscapes (Meiske 2021).  

Subitem: urban realm

Looking for inspiration for ideas of engineering planet Earth, the human activities to build and operate the urban realm exhibit the underlying thinking (Herrero-Jáuregui et al. 2018).  For example, taking an elementary view, houses are built to maintain ambient indoor temperatures in a suitable range.  Taking a less elementary view, creating an urban environment is about niche-building (Fuentes 2017) (Xu et al. 2020) to accommodate the material qualities of the local natural environment.

The notion of human niche describes the protected spaces humans set up for living well, i.e., humans' various complex-adaptive social-ecological systems on planet Earth (Schoon and van der Leeuw 2015) (Bohle and Marone 2019). These systems enable people to produce commodities, goods, or services. In this context, civil engineering works (e.g., power plants, waterways, and tunnels) are material interconnections between human activities and the geosphere and socially enacted activities.

Nowadays, most people live in urban areas, which form an interconnected network of metropoles, cities or towns dispersed over the globe. The concept of an urban realm recognises that urban areas are complex, multi-dimensional systems shaped by various social, economic, and environmental factors, i.e., complex-adaptive social-ecological systems. Nevertheless, the concept urban realm also entails the physical environment, i.e., material externalities of the urban areas such as geomorphology or transport infrastructures. As the archetype of the human niche, urban areas encompass the entire engineered environment, including buildings for housing and work, infrastructures above and below ground, and managed open spaces.

The urban realm extends beyond the perimeters of the urban areas into the so-called countryside, e.g., what would be London or Venice without flood barriers (Witze 2018). More conventional examples include drinking water supply or wastewater discharge. Civil engineering developments in urban spaces, such as bridging a river or housing developments in floodplains, exemplify the ‘how and what’ of building the human niche (at local, regional or planetary scales). For example, a river basin's characteristics and operation must match geomorphology, hydrodynamics, safety rules, and societal needs such as electrical power supply, irrigation, flood control, and leisure activities. The ‘how and what’ of operating a river basin involve value-driven choices, which imply opportunities and risks for different social groups, and often impact distant constituencies.  People are building urban areas to shelter from hazards, to limit dependence on the natural pace of Earth-System dynamics, and to appropriate and process natural resources.

Urban realms behave well when changes in the material qualities of the surrounding physical environments (e.g., weather) are docile.  When they are erratic, e.g., disruptive flooding, heat wave or dust/snowstorm, the living conditions of people are challenged because the fluxes of energy, matter, and information are physically perturbated.

Urban realms shape people's experiential connections with the geosphere. Urbanites' connections with the geosphere are often limited to events (e.g., storms, flooding, or heat waves) that disrupt the engineered structures supporting urban lifestyles (Bohle et al. 2017). Despite such biased individual experiences, societies’ literacy in geosciences is vital for well-behaving production systems, sustainable consumption patterns, and convenient everyday life spanning work and leisure activities. The weather forecast is the primary example illustrating the importance of geosciences literacy in modern societies.

Weather news became a ‘prime time’ event decades ago, substituting individual experiences. Since the early 1950s, the regular broadcasting of weather forecasts has become standard (Lynch 2008) (Bauer et al. 2015). Before broadcasting weather news, systematic weather observations were practised for centuries, supported by the development of instruments, communication technologies, and standard observation protocols and organisations. Weather reports for specialised professional audiences have been produced manually and published since the mid-nineteenth century with increasing regularity. Numerical weather forecasting has become feasible since the early 1950s. From those early days, it took half a century to build the web of providers of weather products and their consumers. In a single narrative, the modern media combine the weather forecast with additional information on meteorological phenomena, climate change, and news of impacts on economic and social activities. The reliability and accuracy of these forecasts directly influence people's work and life, which is dependent upon reliable geoscientific information and professional practice.

Subitem: anthropogenic global change

De-facto, contemporary societies are experimenting with anthropogenic global change (Otto et al. 2020).  They also conceived the concepts of geoengineering and terraforming (Morton 2015) (Dickinson 2021).  These two concepts are exalting human agency, which is experienced as: "[w]ith their rapidly evolving culture, humans have introduced an "ergosphere" (a sphere of work, as well as of technological and energetic transformations) as a new global component of the Earth system,… changing the overall dynamics of the system "(Renn 2018) [p. 7].  Scholars of the history of science have formulated this alternative description of the Human-Earth Nexus for societies on an Anthropocene trajectory (Steffen et al. 2018).

Engineered environments, i.e., the technosphere (Donges et al. 2017) and the people living because of it (United Nations 2014) (Rosol et al. 2017), are the primary representation of the ergosphere.  The ergosphere is built and operated to favour exercising human agency.  It is centred on the urban realm, consisting of urban dwellings and industrialised agriculture, extraction industries and waste depositories, partly off-site, i.e., in the 'wilderness'.  The ecomodernist school of thought has developed such perceptions into a cultural program of geoengineering and urbanised life (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015).  Related, although distinct, the concept of 'half-world' (Wilson 2016) (Ellis and Mehrabi 2019), i.e., sharing Earth between humans (World) and other living beings (Nature), see human societies as primarily urban and set apart. Planetary gardening (Klosterwill 2021) is a further related concept of intentionally shaping the planet.

Securing a geographical space of steady abiotic features might seem appropriate to describe the engineering of urban and planetary realms. Although steady abiotic features do not make the essence of urban realms, climate, geomorphology, and hydrology constrain economic operability and human life. Hence, geoengineering and terraforming differ by the scale of the related civil engineering endeavours when considering building and operating the urban realm. A shared category of risks is that non-steady abiotic/non-living environments preclude well-functioning economic, social, cultural, and political activities. 

Subitem: geo-philosophical thinking

Less radical cultural visions than ecomodernism acknowledge, for example, a defiant (Hamilton 2017), human (Lewis and Maslin 2018), or altered (Thomas 2022) planet Earth. These appraisals of the contemporary Human-Earth Nexus combine geoscience knowledge and philosophical insights at a high level of abstraction. When downscaling the levels of abstraction, ambition, or association in the quest for geo-philosophical insights, schools of thought in responsible geosciences are found.  They propose various concepts named, for example, geo-logic (Frodeman 2014), geo-ethics (Di Capua et al. 2021) or geo-societal sense-making (Bohle and Marone 2021).  

The current enquiries into responsible geosciences, which use geoscience knowledge and philosophical insights as inputs, are about the functioning of abiotic environments and human activities' epistemic, moral, social, or political aspects.  The outcome of these enquiries are geo-philosophical appraisals, which describe human practices as part of the Earth System.  Common to these schools of thought is focussing on the abiotic features of planet Earth and human interactions with them.  

Although these schools of thought recognise the role of biological processes in geochemical cycles, they do not consider planet Earth to be regulated by living beings, i.e., applying a Gaian hypothesis (Lovelock J. 1979) (Lenton and van Oijen 2002).  Hence, these schools of thought take as a primary stance a reductionist approach (getting 'right' the physical / material / abiotic / non-living qualities) to the well-functioning planet Earth (Bohle et al. 2020). This apparent limitation can be patched by applying the theory of complex-adaptive social-ecological systems, which ties the physical / material / abiotic / non-living subsystem into a comprehensive mesh of non-separable entities (Preiser et al. 2018) (Biggs et al. 2021).

Subitem:  Complementing current geo-philosophical concepts & applications

The bulk of contemporary geo-philosophical thinking, whether driven philosophically or by responsible geoscience, is not informed by theoretical descriptions of human practices' socioeconomic and political constraints.  Instead, these constraints are treated case-by-case, reflecting professional experiences (Abrunhosa et al. 2021) without using a conceptual (philosophical) framework to describe them.  

A popular variant of geo-philosophical thinking, the geoethical approach, can be summarised (Bohle 2020) in five tenets (agency, virtue, responsibility, knowledge base, inclusivity, and universal human rights).  As observed (Bohle and Marone 2022), this “approach seems incomplete because it is not informed by socioeconomic constraints, which, for example, limit the freedom of human agents.  A remedy can be found in interpreting Hannah Arendt's political philosophy of the “Human Condition” (Arendt 1958) for times of anthropogenic global change.  Her notions of labour (for subsistence), work (of agents of technological change), and act (political agency)” allow addressing matters such as social stratification or differential power.

Hannah Arendt’s general description of human agency distinguishes three categories: labour, work, and civic activities.  She discusses them for European/Western history emphasising their varying mutual relations.  The application to a planet under anthropogenic change does not alter the categories (i.e., the agent) but modifies the object of human agency: (i) category labour, or ‘laboran’ struggling for biological and social reproduction/subsistence as well in local as globalisation contexts; (ii) category work, or ‘homo-faber’ operating a primarily planetary ergosphere; (iii) category civic activities, or ‘zoo-politikon’ attempting Earth system governance in multicultural interaction; 

Subsequently, depending on the human agency category, the application of the tenets of geoethics is modulated.  Although the essence of the five geoethical tenets is kept, a ‘zoo-politikon’ or ‘homo faber’ would probably exercise them more effortlessly than a ‘laboran’.  This shift is simple but realistic and assigns individual responsibility (Bohle 2021) as the geoethics approach intends (Di Capua et al. 2017).

Shared application of the adjusted geo-philosophical concepts in the urban realm (and subsequently in geoengineering and terraforming) is founded on the fact that all these environments are complex-adaptive socio-ecological systems, therefore having similar system dynamics (Bohle 2020): the emergence of new properties; non-separable subsystems; path-dependent, non-reversible, and non-linear development with no final solution; failing of engineering like command-and-control management.  Consequently, generic policy choices apply in various circumstances, although they may guide diverse practices (Bohle and Marone 2022).

Conclusion

The focus on a stable abiotic environment is the feature that indicates terraforming is for urbanites, as studies of SF literature have already revealed (Heise 2016).

The ideas expressed by the notions 'experiencing anthropogenic global change', 'experimenting with global change', 'ecomodernism'/'geoengineering', and 'terraforming' describe a suite of concepts about engineering at a planetary scale, which finds its essential root in ‘building and operating urban realms’. Hence, terraforming is a variant of geoengineering Anthropocene(s), and the urban realm is its central feature.  Therefore, geo-philosophical (e.g., geoethical) descriptions of contemporary societies/humans interacting with planet Earth also apply to humans in terraformed realms.

 

[*] “the maintenance of planetary habitability is a property more associated with an unusually rapid evolution of biological regulation of surface volatiles than with the luminosity and distance to the host star”. [p.8]

 p.s. Copyright of picture - the author

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