Planetary Defense

Global Collaboration for Defending Earth from Asteroids and Comets
© 2019
Overview

Editors:
Nikola Schmidt
Explores the political feasibility of planetary defense
Provides a comparison and assessment of available political models regarding planetary defense
Suggests a complex policy, as well as engineering and architectural solutions to building a strong planetary defense

Nikola Schmidt | Institute of International Relations Prague - Expertise to impact
https://www.iir.cz/en/nikola-schmidt

Clearest image ever taken of Mars' North Pole. Yes that's water ice.



x.com
https://x.com/MAstronomers/status/1870302169116655757?s=19

Iwona Janicka's lecture explored two main claims against the backdrop of asking how to reimagine humanity's place on Earth in the face of climate change and how to enact collective political change for a life-affirming future. First, she argued that grand narratives are essential for envisioning ecological futures despite their bad reputation. Second, Janicka proposed that these narratives serve as a cosmological rebooting necessary for shaping a better collective future, fundamentally redrawing our ontological understanding and enabling the creation of more habitable worlds for humans and non-humans alike.

The lecture emphasized ecofeminist philosophy, demonstrating how it allows rethinking of human positioning on the planet and conceptualizes a grander scale of cohabitation with non-humans. Hence, Janicka argued for more diverse, ecofeminist grand narratives to reimagine our collective destiny.

The recording of the lecture will be published soon.

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Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague | Centrum pro environmentální a technologickou etiku - Praha — Iwona Janicka’s inaugural lecture: Ecological Grand Narratives | Report
https://cetep.eu/news/iwona-janicka-inaugural-lecture-ecological-grand-narratives/

The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World
Cornell University Press, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 2017
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
description
In The Power of Systems, Egle Rindzeviciute introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, an international think tank established by the U.S. and Soviet governments to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s IIASA in Austria was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide could work together to articulate and solve world problems. This think tank was a rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation, where leading Soviet scientists could try out their innovative ideas, benefit from access to Western literature, and develop social networks, thus paving the way for some of the key science and policy breakthroughs of the twentieth century.Ambitious diplomatic, scientific, and organizational strategies were employed to make this arena for cooperation work for global change. Under the umbrella of the systems approach, East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future and the anthropogenic impact on the environment, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The book shows how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World - Anna’s Archive
https://annas-archive.org/md5/76431f24f4ba18abaa27850274dffa2e

Lukas Likavcan

>> New preprint out <<

The Grass of the Universe: Rethinking Technosphere, Planetary History, and Sustainability with Fermi Paradox

This paper introduces Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history. Elaborating on the "Sustainability Solution" proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum, it advocates that (1) technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into biosphere; (2) planetary history must be understood in a generic perspective that abstracts from terrestrial particularities; and (3) sustainability is not sufficient vector of viable human inhabitation of the Earth, suggesting instead habitability and genesity as better candidates.

[2411.08057] The Grass of the Universe: Rethinking Technosphere, Planetary History, and Sustainability with Fermi Paradox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08057

Exterminations
https://www.amazon.com/Exterminations-Ugo-Bardi/dp/B0DK18GP68/

Human history is full of mass exterminations. We are witnessing more than one right now. Blaming exterminators is not enough: if we don't want to be the next victims, we must understand why exterminations take place, how they develop, what can make them stop. This is what this book is about. Starting from the statistical studies by the author about the past patterns of wars, it takes a wide sweep at the phenomenon that goes from our remote ancestors to the current situation

Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories Kindle Edition
by Quan-Hoang Vuong (Author), Minh-Hoang Nguyen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
To become more useful and efficient in sustaining the Earth's health, economics must undergo a paradigm shift in its thinking. From a humanistic perspective, humans should be the center of everything. However, from the standpoint of physics and the universe, this is not the case. As a species, having a planet among the millions in the universe where humans can survive and thrive is already a great fortune. Through this book, we also try to answer one of our long-standing questions: why has economics learned so little from physics, the oldest and most rigorous academic discipline that studies nature?

Learning from the quantum and information theories, we also provide a new definition of value, which is expected to help economists relax assumptions and loosen established economic principles in order to change and evolve. The new definition is also expected to enable social scientists to address newly arising phenomena or events that are not accounted for by existing value systems, such as environmental crises, artificial intelligence (AI), and interdisciplinary information, more proactively and productively.


https://philpapers.org/archive/VUOBEF.pdf

We present the ExoGaia model – a model of simple ‘planets’ host to evolving microbial biospheres. Microbes interact with their host planet via consumption and excretion of atmospheric chemicals. Model planets orbit a ‘star’ that provides incoming radiation, and atmospheric chemicals have either an albedo or a heat-trapping property. Planetary temperatures can therefore be altered by microbes via their metabolisms. We seed multiple model planets with life while their atmospheres are still forming and find that the microbial biospheres are, under suitable conditions, generally able to prevent the host planets from reaching inhospitable temperatures, as would happen on a lifeless planet. We find that the underlying geochemistry plays a strong role in determining long-term habitability prospects of a planet. We find five distinct classes of model planets, including clear examples of ‘Gaian bottlenecks’ – a phenomenon whereby life either rapidly goes extinct leaving an inhospitable planet or survives indefinitely maintaining planetary habitability. These results suggest that life might play a crucial role in determining the long-term habitability of planets.

Gaian bottlenecks and planetary habitability maintained by evolving model biospheres: the ExoGaia model | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/477/1/727/4935177