The consideration of intelligence in astrobiological studies has, however, tended to regard it solely as the property of one or more species which evolve on a planet and then go on to create a technological civilization rather than as a collective property existing in groups of organisms or societies. climate change: Rockström et al., Reference Rockström, Steffen, Noone, Persson, Chapin, Lambin, Lenton, Scheffer, Folke, Schellnhuber, Nykvist, De Wit, Hughes, van der Leeuw, Rodhe, Sörlin, Snyder, Costanza, Svedin, Falkenmark, Karlberg, Corell, Fabry, Hansen, Walker, Liverman, Richardson, Crutzen and Foley2009). They may also drive the planet into new states of its coupled systems (atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc.) which truncate the civilization's evolution (i.e. Conversely, those same technological capacities may lead the species, or at least its global civilization, into a kind of suicide (i.e. On the one hand, a civilization's technological and energy-harvesting capacities may allow it to ‘engineer’ the world, creating new planetary-scale behaviours and functions allowing that civilization to survive over longer timescales than would otherwise be possible. From Earth's evolution, we see that once intelligence manifests in the form of a global technological civilization, it has the power to reshape a planet in profound ways. The appearance of intelligence in the evolution of life may represent one of a series of major transitions in a planet's history (Leigh, Reference Leigh1995 Carter, Reference Carter2008). Understanding the current state of intelligence on Earth and steering its future will require understanding how human and technological systems are integrated, and might display collective intelligence at a planetary scale. An open question is whether or not intelligence can operate at the planetary scale, and if so, how a transition to planetary-scale intelligence might occur and whether or not it has already occurred or is on our near-term horizon. These examples serve to highlight the fact that intelligence, broadly construed, operates across diverse length and time scales. Humans are also intelligent, and our intelligence primarily derives from our social behaviour which is currently global in its reach. Examples include collective-decision-making by social insects (Mallon et al., Reference Mallon, Pratt and Franks2001), slime mould navigating mazes (Reid and Latty, Reference Reid and Latty2016), and even intelligent behaviour of individual cells and viruses which are themselves a collective of chemical processes. However, it can also be a property of collectives (Wolpert and Kagan, Reference Wolpert and Kagan1999 Malone and Bernstein, Reference Malone and Bernstein2015). We argue that explorations of planetary intelligence, defined as the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at a planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems, can prove a useful framework for understanding possible paths of the long-term evolution of inhabited planets including future trajectories for life on Earth and predicting features of intelligentially steered planetary evolution on other worlds.Ĭonventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. We explore ways in which the concept may prove useful for three distinct domains: Earth Systems and Exoplanet studies Anthropocene and Sustainability studies and the study of Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals.

Astro empires version 2 planet limit