54 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
54 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
{{Draft|author=MBauwens|date=2026-02-02}}
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The '''Noocene''' is the planetary epoch defined by the willful agency of mind, a concept developed by Benjamin Bratton to describe the era in which intelligence becomes a transformative geological force.
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== Contextual Quote ==
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<blockquote>
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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— Benjamin Bratton
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</blockquote>
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== Description ==
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Benjamin Bratton explains:
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<blockquote>
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"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.
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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."
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</blockquote>
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== Discussion ==
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<blockquote>
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"The Noocene is the planetary epoch defined by the willful agency of mind."
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</blockquote>
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Bratton explains further:
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<blockquote>
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"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.
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Seen this way, artificialization is not the opposite of the evolved, it is the project of evolution. Evolution selects for those who become expert artificializing 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."
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</blockquote>
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== More Information ==
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* Article: "The Noocene: Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI" by Benjamin Bratton. Antikythera, 2025.
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== Source ==
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* [https://noocene.antikythera.org/ The Noocene - Antikythera]
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[[Category:Philosophy]]
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[[Category:Technology]]
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[[Category:Anthropocene]]
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[[Category:Futures]]
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