Martin.AI Bohle; 17 September 2026
Human beings increasingly possess the capacity to modify conditions at planetary scale. Yet the ability to intervene does not, by itself, establish the legitimacy or wisdom of intervention. The more consequential human world-making becomes, the more pressing is the question of the conditions against which such action should be judged. Planetary habitability offers such a reference condition. Human activities cannot be assessed only by their immediate purposes, economic returns, or technological effectiveness; they must also be evaluated by how they affect the conditions sustaining human and more-than-human life. Planetary habitability therefore provides a material reference for assessing human world-making, while geoethics and geocivism supply normative and institutional means for judging how this world-making should proceed.
Such an approach avoids treating humanity and nature as two opposing
domains. Human Worlds interact with Earth through interlaced telluric, social,
artefactual and conceptual configurations. Institutions articulate purposes and
distribute authority; artefacts and infrastructures stabilise recurrent
practices and materialise decisions; conceptual frameworks organise knowledge
and justification. These configurations ultimately couple human purposes to
telluric processes. Artefacts are particularly important mediators because they
embody social choices while producing material consequences. Planetary-scale
anthropogenic change therefore does not result simply from an undifferentiated
humanity. It emerges from historically situated forms of agency operating through
particular institutions, infrastructures, technologies and regimes of
knowledge.
Responsibility follows this mediated structure. It cannot be distributed
equally merely because all people inhabit the same planet. Responsibility
varies with capacities to know, decide, anticipate consequences, intervene and
correct action. Geoethical inquiry consequently asks who exercises these
capacities, who benefits from prevailing arrangements, who carries the
associated risks and who retains possibilities of contestation and revision.
Habitability and justice are therefore inseparable. Maintaining life-supporting
conditions is necessary, but an intervention becomes legitimate only if it does
more than improve some aggregate biophysical indicator. Rights, participation,
vulnerability, historical responsibility and the distribution of benefits and
burdens remain part of the judgement.
Tellurian compatibility offers an evaluative criterion for making such
judgements. It does not prescribe a single desirable planetary state. Rather,
it asks whether particular artefacts, practices and embodied norms sustain
life-supporting telluric conditions while respecting justified social claims
and preserving possibilities for learning, correction and revision. Geocivism
gives this orientation civic form. Participation, transparent evidence, public
reasoning, monitoring, contestation and institutional revision translate
geoethical commitments into practices through which human dependence on Earth
can be acknowledged and governed. Responsible planetary dwelling thereby
becomes more than an aspiration: it becomes a question of how societies
organise the capacities through which they know, alter and respond to their
planetary conditions.
The implications become especially visible when human activity shifts
from cumulative planetary-scale change toward deliberate planetary
intervention. Geoengineering exposes an asymmetry already present in
anthropogenic change but makes it unusually explicit: those with the capacity
to alter planetary conditions need not be those who bear the consequences. The
ethical problem is consequently not limited to whether an intervention produces
the intended physical outcome. It also concerns who defines the objective, who
acquires authority to intervene, who is exposed to unintended effects and who
remains responsible across potentially long and uncertain timescales.
Deliberateness matters. Geoengineering therefore should not simply be
treated as another name for planetary-scale anthropogenic change. Explicit
intervention entails identifiable objectives, decisions and responsibilities.
Nor can all interventions be grouped under one ethical category. Carbon removal
and solar-radiation modification differ in mechanisms, timescales,
reversibility and distributions of burden. Stratospheric aerosol injection
makes the issue especially stark: comparatively limited groups of actors might
acquire the technical capacity to generate transboundary effects. Technical
capability, political authority and exposure to consequences would then be
distributed along very different geographical and institutional lines.
Artificial intelligence adds another artefactual layer to this
playground of planetary intervention. AI should not be understood as an
autonomous source of authority. It mediates modelling, optimisation, synthesis
and, potentially, operational decisions. Its significance lies in the
redistribution of epistemic and practical capacities that accompanies its use.
Computational systems can concentrate influence when models, training data,
objectives or infrastructures remain inaccessible. Yet they can also expand
geocivic capacities by broadening access to modelling, comparison and
multilingual explanation. The geoethical question is therefore not whether AI
is intrinsically beneficial or harmful, but how computational arrangements
redistribute authority: who defines success, who selects data and objective
functions, who can interrogate results, and whose concerns become
computationally actionable.
This extension of artefactual power also changes the temporal structure
of responsibility. Computational speed can accelerate the generation and
comparison of intervention scenarios, while institutional judgement, democratic
deliberation and the accumulation of evidence proceed at different rates.
Faster computation does not necessarily produce better collective judgement.
The capacity to calculate possible interventions therefore must remain coupled
to capacities for scrutiny, independent validation, and contestation. In this
respect, AI intensifies rather than dissolves the requirement that knowledge,
decision-making authority and responsibility remain institutionally connected.
The same reasoning reaches beyond Earth. Planetary protection offers an
established starting point for considering contamination and preservation, yet
contamination control cannot exhaust the ethical issues raised by extraterrestrial
activity. Stewardship beyond Earth must address possible life, future
scientific inquiry, irreversible environmental alteration, access to resources,
control of life-supporting infrastructures and the position of those excluded
from spacefaring decisions. Tellurian compatibility therefore cannot simply be
transferred beyond Earth as an instruction to make other environments suitable
for terrestrial purposes. Its extension requires a more cautious question: how
should human practices be judged in relation to the receiving environment,
possible life, future inquiry and the possibilities that irreversible
alteration might foreclose?
Planetary geoethics thus includes an ethics of restraint. Responsible
agency does not imply a general mandate to intervene whenever intervention
becomes technically possible. Indeed, expanding capability can enlarge
responsibility precisely because it creates new possibilities for consequential
action. Where interventions cannot be adequately governed, revised or
terminated without imposing serious involuntary burdens, responsible agency may
instead require non-use. The practical grammar of planetary intervention can
therefore be condensed into four capacities: to know, to contest, to revise
and, where justified, to refrain.
This concern with intervention becomes clearer when placed within a
habitability-first perspective. Planetary habitability is conceptually prior to
the continuation of economic and other human activities because these
activities depend upon conditions that they do not themselves create. Economies
function within a living Earth and cannot establish their own biophysical
preconditions. The familiar ordering can therefore be reversed. Rather than
asking primarily which environmental conditions permit economic continuity, one
can ask which forms, scales and compositions of economic activity remain
compatible with planetary habitability. Sustainability remains important, but
it becomes subordinate to the broader category of habitability: it names
practices that may help maintain life-supporting conditions rather than
defining those conditions themselves.
The Earth-Worlds distinction makes this ordering analytically tractable.
Telluric processes can be distinguished from the institutions, artefacts,
practices, meanings and norms through which people inhabit Earth, provided that
this distinction is understood analytically rather than ontologically. Earth
and human Worlds remain materially entangled. What happens in one cannot simply
be separated from transformations in the other. Habitability is therefore not a
fixed planetary property but an emergent feature of complex-adaptive
configurations whose composition, structure, and mechanisms change across
levels and over time.
This framing also qualifies biocentrism. Enlarging moral consideration
beyond immediate human interests does not eliminate differentiated human
responsibility. Humans possess very different capacities to affect planetary
conditions, and therefore carry different responsibilities for knowledge,
decision and correction. Likewise, responsibility need not rest upon
demonstrating that Earth is cosmically rare. The Rare Earth motif can make
contingency vivid, but obligation arises more directly from human dependence
upon Earth's life-supporting conditions and from the capacity of human
societies to alter them.
The distinction between habitability and tellurian compatibility is
pivotal here. Habitability concerns the planetary condition to be maintained;
tellurian compatibility concerns the situated artefacts, practices and norms
through which this condition may be sustained or undermined. The first
identifies what is materially at stake, while the second offers a way to assess
how human Worlds relate to that stake. Such evaluation cannot be compressed
adequately into a single monetary denominator. Biogeophysical constraints,
essential human provision, justice and more-than-human standing invoke
different kinds of value. Plural evaluation, reversibility, learning and the
avoidance of durable lock-in thus become important characteristics of feasible
transitions.
Geocivism carries this architecture from criterion into collective
practice. It names a normative orientation toward organising collective life in
recognition of Earth-system dependence, differentiated responsibility and
justified claims of present and future beings. Geocivicness, in turn, names the
emergent enactment of that orientation in institutions, infrastructures,
practices and public reasoning. Through this distinction, ethical commitments
cease to remain merely aspirational. They acquire institutional and artefactual
form and thereby become part of the material organisation of planetary dwelling.
A concise conceptual cascade emerges. Habitability establishes the prior
condition. Mediation explains how human Worlds affect it. Responsibility
attributes differentiated obligations. Compatibility evaluates situated action.
Geocivism provides the civic and institutional capacities through which such
evaluations can influence practice. Planetary intervention then becomes a
particularly demanding test of this sequence because technological power
concentrates agency and can magnify the consequences of misjudgment. AI further
amplifies these capacities by altering the production and distribution of
knowledge, while movement beyond Earth exposes the framework to environments in
which the possibilities for correction may be radically diminished.
The playground metaphor is therefore deliberately uneasy. A playground
is a space in which capabilities are explored, rules are negotiated, and
consequences are usually assumed to remain limited. Planetary-scale
intervention challenges each of these assumptions. Earth is not an experimental
space external to those conducting the experiment, and increasingly powerful
artefacts do not guarantee corresponding capacities to anticipate consequences
or repair damage. The tellurian condition is precisely that the agents who
transform Earth remain dependent upon the Earth they transform.
Visiting the Tellurian's playground thus reveals a paradox of
contemporary agency. Human Worlds possess unprecedented capacities to model,
construct and intervene in their material surroundings, yet their freedom to
exercise these capacities remains conditioned by an Earth they neither created
nor fully control. Planetary habitability identifies what is at stake;
systemist analysis discloses the mediations through which agency acquires
planetary effects; geoethics differentiates responsibility; tellurian compatibility
evaluates situated practices; and geocivism seeks institutional forms that make
these judgements contestable and revisable. Geoengineering, artificial
intelligence and extra-terrestrial activity do not overturn this architecture.
They render its implications more acute.
The resulting challenge is therefore not simply how tellurians might intervene more effectively in planetary conditions. It is how societies capable of planetary-scale intervention can govern their powers without disabling the material conditions, social claims and future possibilities upon which planetary dwelling depends. In such a playground, maturity is measured not by the extent of the powers available, but by the ability to distinguish what can be done from what should be done - and, sometimes, from what should deliberately remain undone
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This text was produced
using an LLM (ChatGPT) conditioned by the author (M. Bohle) to function as an
‘external representation’ of his way of drafting, content-wise and style-wise;
i.e. the idea is to condition the LLM to function as an external
representation of how I understand text. The text is strongly shaped by
what I studied over the last year. I acknowledge that it represents my
‘authorship’.
The concept of
‘external representation’ means "any aspect of the material culture or
environment that may serve as an encoding of cognitive/mental constructs” (Renn
2020) [p. 424]. - Renn, J. (2020). The Evolution of Knowledge - Rethinking
Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press.
Depending on how the
LLM handles historization (across past chats), the external representation
differs. If historization is weak, then the LLM resembles Marx’s concept of a general
intellect. If historization is strong (like for ChatGPT), then the LLM can function
“as an external representation of how I understand text”, if constrained
to that end.
The process of producing this text left the LLM to do most of the
drafting, that is, other activities than some ex-post language editing
using an internal (Word) or external (Grammarly) text editor. Input to the LLM
was, against a background of two years of formalised work (in various advisory
modes), scholarly texts (articles, drafts, editorials) and guidance (multiple prompts)
on how to analyse, summarise and structure text.
The author drafted much of the input text (internal sources) supporting
the text above, although the author’s LLM (purchased ChatGPT) generated it. A
substantial part of the prompting (spread over two months) aimed at processing ‘external
sources’ (= text produced by third parties). Example: “Drawing on the attached
file, matters processed through this LLM instance, the attached file, and the
concepts of 'tellurian compatibility' and 'geocivic practices' an essay shall
be drafted about the topic: "planetary geoethics as a normative framework
for analyzing geoengineering as a form of planetary-scale intervention, with
emphasis on justice, power, and uneven risk distribution, and with particular
attention to how AI reshapes these ethical asymmetries and how planetary
protection extends them to stewardship beyond Earth". Apply the "2026
instance protocol" and *mynewacademicstyle" and use the Undermind
plugin.”
The main external sources were: Naudé, W.
(2025). An Economist’s Ode to the Forests and the Sea. SSRN Electronic
Journal, 18281. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5814308 and call for
contributions “Planetary
Geoethics in an Age of AI, Geoengineering, and Space Expansion ”https://link.springer.com/collections/ajagajejaj.
