
Does Planetary Intelligence exist and if so, what would it advise us to do?
An approach.
For all to experience, we are living in a time of upheaval. Planetary-ecological, social, technological and of course economic.
However, the economic upheaval is not so self-evident. The old yardstick of GDP still applies, consumer ideology is unbroken and social development is still largely equated with economic development. Entrepreneurs, and increasingly women entrepreneurs, are the heroes of the present. Yet most of them give growth-driven answers, and this at a time when the interests of the planet and its non-human inhabitants would first demand resource conservation and consumption reduction. All too often we hear old answers to new questions. Failed solution strategies are continued in modified, greenwashed form. Let's just take this example: a man who wants to throw millions of new cars onto the planet, legitimized by the bogus innovation of the electric motor. In everything he pursues old maximization thinking: gigalefficiency, gigafactories, giga-share price, space conquest, Mars romanticism.
One is strongly reminded of boyish dreams from the 1950s of the last century, when progress was the order of the day. Individual mobility is being pushed forward in an electric guise instead of asking fundamental questions about mobility. Shouldn't we rather limit ourselves in this point, shouldn't we rather facilitate group mobility on existing infrastructure? Shouldn't we rather not set up more infrastructure with vacuum tubes for people in capsules? Another entrepreneurial hero runs the world's largest commercial enterprise, driving its littering. A third worships the first - the car hero - so much that he imitates him in everything and does not recognizably deviate from the maximization paradigm. A fourth wants to abolish reality altogether and let us do everything in his metaverse as playmobil-like avatars. Server energy consumption of a medium-sized state included. So what? It can be done, so it will be done.
Granted, this is a snapshot, and a very striking one at that. But it does make us wonder about the planetary intelligence of our species: Planetary intelligence, what is that anyway? For us, it is not, first of all, a classical analytical ability, which has brought us to where we are, namely to the brink of the collapse of the life-support systems on Earth.
Planetary intelligence is rather a sum of characteristics and behaviors, which makes an ant, which maintains its habitat, appear planetary smarter than us, or a blue whale, which fertilizes the plankton and thus the food of its energy source krill with its excretions.
In such a mode of observation, where does the urban pigeon stand and where the domestic dog?
By which criteria do we measure planetary intelligence?
What can we humans take over from planetary intelligent species, what not?
One seems in any case completely clear, from us they can learn nothing. Even the domestic animals will scratch themselves soon thoughtfully the head, if we move further as before on the maximum planet desolation path ahead. Because then their fodder becomes scarce. But we should ask ourselves whether mankind can still afford a billion-dollar industry that revolves solely around the nutrition and well-being of domesticated animals. Or another, much larger one that tortures and kills farm animals, creating one of the largest ecological footprints.
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