This paper aims to explore an astrobiological genealogy of the concept of thePlanetary vividly discussed in contemporary environmental humanities and social sciences,and to offer a framework for an articulation of political-economic models based on thisconcept. Following Bentley Allan, we propose to treat the Planetary as an example ofscientific cosmology, thus emphasizing how astrobiology supports a much broader philosophical worldview that shines a new light on persistent problems related to organizinghuman inhabitation of the Earth. Starting with the analysis and speculative elaborationon Allan’s theory of cosmological shifts in international orders during Western modernity,we associate the Anthropocene discourse as an inaugurating moment in the consolidation of the Planetary’s scientific cosmology, grounded in the astrobiology’s metabolic perspective on complex adaptive systems. The narrative of the paper offers a genealogy ofthis perspective, including the most recent research about information metabolisms andbiosphere-technosphere coupling in astrobiology, which paves the way for the explanationof the economy itself as a metabolic entity. After the review of adjacent philosophical positions associated with ecological economics and the theory of complex adaptive systems,the paper concludes with remarks on the Planetary as a cornerstone of an internationalorder that yields economic imperatives governed by a generic view of the Earth as a member of a potentially large and diverse category of habitable planets.
Likavčan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.