Frederic Jameson, the one-time doctoral advisor of author Kim Stanley Robinson, once quipped, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”1 Robinson himself realized that many of his own works of imaginative science fiction hewed to this pattern, and so he challenged himself to imagine the beginning of the end of capitalism and the beginning of the beginning of responsible planetary stewardship in his 2020 Ministry for the Future.

This chapter contemplates the evolution of the economy from one of free human-centered markets to one of planetary circulatory system. In it, much of what economists term “demand” derives not from humans, but from Gaia's brain and body. The shift I describe here is already underway, driven by evolutionary forces. But its realization will require bold policies informed by a clear notion of the processes in motion and the ends they point towards. It is no longer radical to claim that the capitalist economy as currently conceived is killing its host, and needs to be reconceived and redesigned to reflect its role within the wider biosphere. In the economic language I introduced in Chapter 5, this involves “internalizing externalities”: bringing into the human economy those costs of our actions that currently fall outside of it. The notion has been percolating for some time in the alternative economic literature.2 Still though, when discussing the “economic value of nature,” economists usually rely on estimates of how damage to natural systems might adversely affect the human economy.3 And indeed, those are huge. But rarely is the larger picture clearly shown.

When I was a child, my parents would bring me to meetings of the Creative Initiative Foundation, of which they were members. It was a group originally founded in Palo Alto, California as a sort of church seeking to unite religion and science, and to promote inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. In 1982, it had been secularly reformed with the goal of averting nuclear conflict and bringing about a world “beyond war.” Largely composed of California Bay Area intellectuals and ex-hippies, Creative Initiative was in many ways emblematic of peace movements of the 1980s: it shared with similar movements of its time a dread of nuclear holocaust and an idealistic focus on building “peace on Earth.”

In the years since, as we have seen, global rates of violent death steadily declined up until around 2010, bottoming out at around 0.5 per cent. Despite persistent threats of nuclear war and international conflict—threats that may grow as prospects for “Great Power” military confrontations mount—we are likely living during the most peaceful period in all of human history. Yet, as noted in Chapter 1, levels of violence against the planet's non-human populations are catastrophic. It would seem that our conception of peace was too limited, describing a state (or a dynamic process!) that existed only between humans. As we seek to define a larger “We,”1one that embraces some portion of the environment we depend on and with which we are entwined, a simple switch of preposition hints at a fundamental shift: from “peace on Earth” to “peace with Earth.”

The first part of this book sought to identify the historical drivers, principles and logic that might support an argument for the evolution of a planetary brain. We now set our course in a more speculative direction, to consider the form and functions of the planetary brain (Gaiacephalos) and nature of the planetary conscious mind it will birth (Gaianous); what “peace,” the economy, and politics might look like if Gaianous emerges; and what it all means for a universe in which planets themselves are becoming sentient. For now, let us focus on the first question: Assuming Gaianous does emerge, what will it look like? How will it behave and function? What will its interests be?

My response to these questions, which I first sketched in the Introduction, involves a portrait of Gaiacephalos as a kind of digital government: a hierarchically organized society of AI entities evolved to facilitate analysis and global decision-making at tremendous speeds and without resorting to violence. But I cannot hope to offer definitive answers to these questions. My conceptual framing of Gaianous is part thought experiment. In sketching out a portrait, I necessarily beg questions of structural parameters. At best, I can try to let my imagination roam within those parameters, but even they are poorly discerned. Some I think I know exist, but don't fully understand: organizing principles or limitations I believe apply at multiple scalar levels.

As we arrive at the ninth and final chapter, let's note that there's something special about the number nine. Dante's inferno consisted of nine levels. The Norse cosmology comprises nine worlds. The Greek hydra boasted nine heads. Sauron deceived nine human kings with rings of power in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Adherents of the pseudoscientific Enneagram assert nine personality types. Our happiness, in the English expression, lives on “cloud nine.” Ferris Beuller's high school recorded him absent nine times (before he hacked into its computer to change it). More relevant to the thesis of this book, we mentioned nine environmental systems that must be kept within quantifiable limits for humanity to endure indefinitely, according to one famous ecological science article.1 Hinduism reveres the number nine as the perfect end to a cycle: the last single numeral before a change in the order of magnitude in a base-10 number system, bringing with it wisdom and fulfillment. Perhaps relatedly, Mnemosyne, the Titaness personifying memory in ancient Greek mythology, was associated with the number nine, as well as with all things that memory makes possible: the progression of history, the growth of knowledge, the development of art. After lying with Zeus for nine straight nights, Mnemosyne bore the nine muses, who in turn nurtured the nine creative arts—those acts of generation that seem like they come from thin air (or from the heavens), but perhaps represent radical upgrades in the organization of our previous modes of sharing ourselves and cultivating empathy. Fitting, then, that we come to rest here, at the cusp of radical upgrade—one predicated on a long progression that foreshadows change to come.

One rule of thumb for the design of government, often termed the “subsidiary principle,” is to allocate decision-making authority to the smallest scale of governance institutions that can still manage the problem.1 It's a good rule. The approach generally works for several reasons: it keeps government as closely tied to the problem and those affected by it as possible, rendering it more accountable. It also reduces the free-rider problem, in which one actor (or institution) fails to take effective action in the hopes of benefiting doubly when others expend the resources to do so. It also generally supports a balance of power in government, placing more checks on authority.

But what about when the problem is global in scale? Pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, and nuclear proliferation are just a few of the problems justifying a global governance level. In the language of economists, their “negative externalities”—problems flowing across borders—must be internalized. That is, they must be brought within the boundaries of a newly expanded economic actor that has the incentives to deal with them. This internalization doesn't necessarily imply the creation of a single, central authority; it could be a cooperative arrangement like a treaty, but it needs to be one that is self-reinforcing, locking its participants into their cooperative commitments and perhaps even overriding a recalcitrant minority. In this sense, it must be superordinate.

This chapter argues that the evolution of a unitary planetary economy is firstly, rational, and secondly, that it requires coordinated planning at the planetary level.

In the torchlit gloom of a portentous night, an unnaturally pale face peers from beneath a hood. Gripping a gnarled staff, the cloaked figure grandly intones the famous lines:

Prospero has summoned his mystic power one last time before renouncing the occult and re-embracing his rightful political position as Duke of Milan. And in this casting, Prospero is played by Commander Data, an android on the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the seventh season of The Next Generation, Data's character was accustomed to refining his Shakespearean acting skills as a means of approaching humanness. He does so now aboard the Starship Enterprise, specifically on the “holodeck,” a room in which the ship's computer is able to convert energy to matter and thereby construct convincing simulations of hypothetical realities. But as the ship's cultured captain, Picard, stands to offer constructive criticism on Data's performance, a white light appears, growing brighter as a whistling and clatter fill the air and the two leap out of the way of … the Orient Express, chugging incongruously across Prospero's island.

What could have caused this merging of imaginary worlds?

This chapter will take us on a whirlwind tour of the first five worlds—episodes of biological and social history in which the organization of life made a jump in scale and the predation–production dichotomy was transcended. The first four worlds cover the historical rise of (1) prokaryotic cells, (2) eukaryotic cells, (3) brainy multicellular organisms, and (4) centralized states. The fifth world will be speculative, although the first phase of its development is already well underway.

As described in Chapter 1 (see Figure 1.1), these instances of dialectical transcendence begin with a period of predation and appropriation (phase 1.1). This then provokes an intense competition for remaining resources (phase 1.2) and a process of radical inclusion (internalizing the resources within a wider community) to protect and nurture them (phase 1.3). Such internalization is followed by the rapid development of capacity for coordination to harmonize and support the functions of the newly integrated systems. These coordination systems may eventually, given sufficient incentives for memory or planning, result in centralization of information processing (phase 2.0). Such centralization redefines the unit of analysis, effectively changing the scalar level to which the predation–production dialectic operates.

Put otherwise, competition among small “individuals” for dwindling resources drives the formation of collectives that protect and nurture those resources. Those collectives are then centralized into new, larger “individuals” who can again compete against one another. This process necessarily implies that individuals from prior “worlds” will outnumber those from later ones by orders of magnitude: prokaryotes vastly outnumber eukaryotes, eukaryotes vastly outnumber brainy multicellular organisms, etc.

If this book's introduction sought to convince you to accompany me on a trek to a distant (and yet not-so-distant) destination, then my task now is to provide you with an intellectual map showing our route, and to acquaint you with the basic analytical engine that will propel us along that route. The engine is a mental model of a naturally recurring cycle that has driven the complexity of life on Earth. It is a process composed of two reciprocal movements. The first entails an expansion, initially involving predation, but giving way to mutualism as resource scarcity deepens. The second entails a centralization: a reorganization of information-processing functions to coordinate the new mutualistic relationship.

This chapter seeks to articulate the phases of this cycle, and to introduce the four scalar levels of life's organization (what I call four “worlds”) whose emergence I explain by way of that cycle. I will make an elision between this process of self-organization and what we commonly call “progress,” and explain why the emergence of a conscious planetary entity—a new, fifth world—is a logical next step. These are abstract concepts, however. Humans have always understood abstract concepts most fundamentally through myth. So let me introduce you to a mythology involving a people inhabiting a fourth world and anticipating their accession to a fifth.

In the relief-giddy, post-diluvian days, as the wrath of God finally ebbed and the drowned Earth re-emerged from the floodwaters, humanity's remaining torchbearers, it is told, unified by a single tongue and a single purpose, made their way East.

When they arrived in Shinar, the land some would later call the Fertile Crescent, the survivors encamped and set about building a great city from which rose an even greater tower “for fear the earth / Should once again be drowned.”1 So great would this product of humanity's collective endeavor be that not only would it ensure humanity's security against acts of divine violence, it would reach even unto Heaven, depriving God Himself of His monopoly on Earth–Heaven transit. Perhaps the endeavor was a form of simple self-preservation. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion by the survivors of a genocidal project against their divine assailant. Perhaps it was hubris. Whatever the case, God wasn't having it: He splintered and confounded their language so that they could no longer cooperate on this massive undertaking. Craftspeople worked at cross-purposes, and works were destroyed as quickly as they were built. Conflicts broke out, “for in the mason's mind / All chisels but his own are butcher blades.”2 Humanity was scattered over the face of the still trauma-soaked Earth, never to unite again. God, it seems, was the original union buster.

Early on the morning of 14 April 2018, the mercury in Brooklyn, NY had almost bottomed out at 18°C. A trim, handsome, clean-shaven man wearing fashionable spectacles left his house and made his way on foot to Prospect Park. His name was David Buckel. He was a successful 60-year-old gay lawyer whom friends and colleagues would later recall as witty, wry, compassionate, morally upstanding, and deeply engaged with the issues he cared about, LGBTQ rights and environmental sustainability foremost among them.

Prospect Park lay in the opposite direction of David's office, a wellknown legal outfit specializing in discrimination and economic justice in downtown Manhattan where David had served as counsel in some of the most iconic cases of the gay and trans rights movement. Whether to the park, the office, or the large-scale composting operation he had developed at a local community garden, David preferred to walk whenever possible. He led a largely frugal and ascetic existence geared towards the conservation of fossil fuels and the minimization of waste, which he considered abhorrent. On this morning, David walked with a canister of fossil fuel. The irony was intentional.

At the park, David found a grassy hillside just off the road and sent a prepared statement to a number of media organizations by email. He then doused himself in gasoline, and set himself ablaze. Park strollers found his charred remains a short while later, and he was declared dead at the scene at 6:30am. The mercury started its daily ascent. It would eventually reach 27°C that afternoon—almost 10 degrees hotter than the daily historical average in what would be recorded as the fourth hottest year on record, 0.82°C higher than the 1951–80 average temperature.