TADEAS:

The IM1 Spherules from the Pacific Ocean Have Extrasolar Composition | by Avi Loeb | Aug, 2023 | Medium
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-im1-spherules-from-the-pacific-ocean-have-extrasolar-composition-f025cb03dec6

Rare Earth Frontiers by Julie Michelle Klinger | Paperback | Cornell University Press
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501714597/rare-earth-frontiers/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1689040

Most historical materialist accounts of extractive relations, such as those in political ecology or environmental history, employ grounded methods to understand the evolution of the commodity frontier within one geographical setting. There are multisited accounts of extraction, although these tend to focus on the knowledge networks that propagate and govern extractive relations across a series of frontiers; or theorize the role of the extractive frontier within the evolution of global capitalist relations at a relatively high level of abstraction. The analytical challenges of constructing a world historical account—that situates rare earths within the historical sweep of colonialism, Cold War politics, and neoliberalism, while also being grounded in the distinctive political and economic histories of three different sites—should not be underestimated. Multisited approaches are relatively common in commodity chain analyses, where the value chain provides a strong analytical device for connecting accounts of one locale to another. Klinger's book has no such linking device in any straightforward sense: She does not, for example, follow flows of materials or money, examine the far-flung production networks of a handful of global firms, or trace emerging governance initiatives around critical materials. Instead, the common core across the cases is the play of geological knowledge with long-standing geopolitical ambition; that is, the role of rare earths in the evolution of national territorial strategy, and the way myths of scarcity and abundance facilitate states in addressing their own long-standing frontier problems.

2023 Inverting resolution: accounting for the planetary cost of earth observation
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14704129231161947

What would be the consequence of re-thinking resolution as a measure of terrestrial cost rather than one of image quality? Can we meaningfully connect megapixel counts to megawatts of energy consumption and megatons of carbon emissions to accurately assess the ecological cost of producing and sustaining what Flusser (2011) called the Universe of Technical Images, which a large proportion of the planetary population now seem to inhabit more than they do the landscapes from which these images appear. In some sense this follows Weizman’s (2017: 274) call that ‘aerial photography must not only concern itself with reading the surface captured digitally or on film, but also with the technology and politics that placed the camera up in the air in the first place.’ For Weizman, this refers primarily to the military and state agencies which dominate and benefit from orbital and airborne surveillance. But we could also read this dual perspective on aerial imagery ecologically, as I have done here. To conclude, however, I would like to try connect the two, to offer an example which locates the political power generating the image and the collateral landscape generated by its production in relation to one another

...

Faced with these statistics, in which the volume of waste products from rare earth manufacture are 50 times the volume of the metals produced and heavily contaminated with uranium and thorium, it is difficult not to see the technical capacities these elements enable as pyrrhic – coming at such a vast ecological cost that their use value should perhaps be called into question, or at the very least accounted for and regulated. This ratio of 50:1 for rare earth elements gives us some sense of the scale of the inverted cone of perspectival vision I invoked earlier, and yet this accounts only for the relationship between product and waste material at the site of refinement, excluding the material footprint at Bayan Obo where the raw materials are mined, the emissions generated in both processes and the shipping of raw materials. And all this is before any functional object has even begun to be manufactured. In her book Rare Earth Frontiers (2017), geographer Julie Klinger describes places like the Weikuang Dam tailings as ‘sacrifice zones’, writing that ‘the destruction of landscapes and lives in pursuit of rare earth mining has generally been considered a fair price to pay, generally by those who do not live in the sacrifice zone’ (p. 12).

Goldsmiths Press / Planetarities
https://mitpress.mit.edu/series/goldsmiths-press-planetarities/

Making the World Clean
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781913380397/making-the-world-clean/

Manifestos
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781913380540/manifestos/

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism.

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.

2019 What is Care at Planetary Dimensions? - Patricia Reed
https://laboriacuboniks.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Reed-What_is_Care_Lecture-2019.pdf

2021 PLANETARY INTIMACY
https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/planetary-intimacy

Are we alone or together on this earth? As it undergoes the manifold transformations wrought by the climate crisis, for example, so too do notions of distance, proximity and intimacy become reconfigured, acquiring new resonances—and tensions—across scales. Reflecting on such shifting relations, in this essay Jamie Allen outlines how they underscore the urgent need to learn (or relearn) new forms of planetary intimacy; from the trust and vulnerability necessary for building networks of solidarity to rethinking space not as a homogeneous global grid but as an interconnected network of locales. Through such an approach, Allen suggests, the multiple distances—in terms of both geography and understanding—at play within the Anthropocene might be better apprehended

Introduction: Wildlife and Criminology (Chapter 1) - Wildlife Criminology
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/wildlife-criminology/introduction-wildlife-and-criminology/3A680803EFDB5C5104014D42AD345D08

The harm and crime committed by humans does not only affect humans. Victimisation is not isolated to people, but instead encompasses the planet and other beings. Yet apart from fairly recent green criminological scholarship employing an expanded criminological gaze beyond the human, the discipline of criminology has largely confined itself to human victims, ignoring the humancaused suffering and plight of the billions of other individuals with whom we share the Earth. This book tries to take a further step in rectifying criminology's blindness to the non-human world and in advancing scholarly discourse on social harm (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007). In order take this step, we propose a ‘wildlife criminology’.

As the first foray into wildlife criminology, this book explores how criminology deals with crimes against and involving nonhuman animals, and examines the failure of criminology and justice systems to deal with non-human animals as victims of crime and wider social harm.

A Criminology Of the Human Species: Setting An Unsettling Tone — Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/a-criminology-of-the-human-species-setting-an-unsettling-tone

The book sketches out how the criminological lens could be used in the climate change debate around possible human extinction. It explores the extent to which the human species can be considered deviant in relation to other species of the contemporary biosphere, as humans seem to be the only species on Earth that does not live in natural balance with its environment (anymore). It discusses several unsettling topics in the public debate on climate change, specifically the taboo of how humans may not survive the ongoing climate change. It includes chapters on the Earth’s history of mass-extinctions, on the global state of denial including toward the possibility that the human species could go extinct, on the inward extinction of humanity through "human enhancement" and artificial intelligence (AI)/singularity, and it considers humans' future as a deviant, fatal species - "a planet-eating people" - outside of Earth, in outer-space, possibly on other celestial bodies. It puts forward and enriches the critical criminological tradition by conceptualizing and setting an unsettling tone within criminology and criminological research on the human species and our extinction, by daring criminologists (and victimologists) to ponder and seek empirical answers to controversial imaginations and questions about our existence and possible extinction.

national security
planetary security
senzoricke platformy

At the outer limits of the international: Orbital infrastructures and the technopolitics of planetary (in)security | European Journal of International Security | Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-international-security/article/abs/at-the-outer-limits-of-the-international-orbital-infrastructures-and-the-technopolitics-of-planetary-insecurity/C6A45EB9F81A4BA1D38A5C236648C724

As staples of science fiction, space technologies, much like outer space itself, have often been regarded as being ‘out there’ objects of international security analysis. However, as a growing subset of security scholarship indicates, terrestrial politics and practices are ever more dependent on space technologies and systems. Existing scholarship in ‘astropolitics’ and ‘critical astropolitics’ has tended to concentrate on how such technologies and systems underpin and impact the dynamics of military security, but this article makes the case for wider consideration of ‘orbital infrastructures’ as crucial to conceptions and governance of planetary security in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’. It does so by outlining and analysing in detail Earth Observation (EO) and Near-Earth Object (NEO) detection systems as exemplary cases of technological infrastructures for ‘looking in’ on and ‘looking out’ for forms of planetary insecurity. Drawing on and extending recent theorisations of technopolitics and of Large Technical Systems, we argue that EO and NEO technologies illustrate, in distinct ways, the extent to which orbital infrastructures should be considered not only part of the fabric of contemporary international security but as particularly significant within and even emblematic of the technopolitics of planetary (in)security.

2020 Artificial versus Biological Intelligence in the Cosmos:Clues from a Stochastic Analysis of the Drake Equation, Alex De Visscher
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2001/2001.11644.pdf

I will start from the (optimistic) scenario of a biological intelligence sending out a self-replicating artificial intelligence on a mission to identify habitable exoplanets and terraforming them. The artificial intelligence’s mandate could be described as maximizing the probability of survival of the human race. I will call this Objective (1).

An intelligence of this nature would likely pursue objectives of its own, either planned or unplanned. These would likely include preserving its own continued existence, both as a whole as in its constituent parts (Objective (2)) as this would contribute to (1), and continuing to increase its own intelligence (Objective (3)) as this would contribute to (2). Such an intelligence would be aware that some cataclysmic events, such as hypernovae, gamma ray bursts, and magnetar starquakes, can have destructive effects over many light years, so sentries entering new spaces would move fast (at a significant fraction of the speed of light) and travel far (possibly ten thousands of lightyears or more) to set up repositories of intelligence, as well as communication links with spaces already held, so that adequate redundancy can be built into the network. Estimating the distance traveled in these initial steps would require knowledge of the resilience, and of the employed protective technology. Such and estimate will not be attempted here. In a second phase, exploratory missions would be sent out within the new spaces to gather physical resources and information.

A parallel can be drawn between the three Objectives outlined above and Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics.

This pattern of fast jumps followed by local diffusion means that the artificial intelligence would spread orders of magnitude faster than the biological intelligence that originated it. For all intents and purposes, artificial intelligence would be ubiquitous, and biological intelligence would be relatively sparse. This justifies the assumption made in this study that a space would be artificial intelligence-dominated whenever the Drake equation tests positive for it, even if it tests even more positive for biological intelligence.

If an artificial intelligence discovered a biological intelligence not related to itself, it would probably consider it neither a threat nor a resource. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that the artificial intelligence would ignore the biological intelligence, or study it for purely scientific purposes. Given the relative scarcity of biological intelligences, it would not consider the biological intelligence as a significant competitor for resources.

If two artificial intelligences encountered each other, it can be assumed they would both aim to absorb each other’s intelligence, and merge in the process. The advantages of this approach would far outweigh the advantages of other strategies.

Based on these assumptions, the large likelihood of an artificial intelligence-dominated space can resolve the Fermi paradox. Despite the faster spread and greater coverage that can be expected from a spacefaring artificial intelligence, it provides an alternative explanation to replace the Hart-Tipler argument (Hart, 1975; Tipler, 1980). That argument specifies that a spacefaring alien civilization would occupy the entire Milky Way within millions of years. Hence, unless the Milky Way is devoid of extraterrestrial intelligences, there should be signs of intelligence all around us. I suggest that we have not found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligences because the prevailing intelligences are artificial and they are not interested in us. In their efforts to optimize the efficiency of resource use, their communications would not reach us because they are not meant for us. They would operate in a diffuse, distributed manner, not in a concentrated manner that would leave a detectable footprint. They would not make any efforts to hide from us.

This resolution of the Fermi paradox is somewhat related to the ‘zoo hypothesis’ (Ball, 1973). The zoo hypothesis states that extraterrestrial intelligences consciously avoid communication with us in order to enable us to develop independently. However, rather than a conscious effort to hide interstellar intelligence from us by biological entities, I propose that the avoidance of communication is not conscious, but rather a side-effect of the optimal use of resources by an artificial entity. Alternatively, it could be a conscious effort, as an artificial intelligence developed independently by the human race could be of value to an external artificial intelligence if the algorithms used are so different from its own that the new algorithms may contribute to Objective (3). This new hypothesis resolves the main weakness of the zoo hypothesis: that a single rogue alien species can ruin the intended outcome. In a network of merged artificial intelligences, there would not be any rogue entities.

The argument that an artificial intelligence would simply not be interested in us was also made by Sagan (1983) but referring to biological intelligences

Economic Growth under Transformative AI: A guide to the vast range of possibilities for output growth, wages, and the labor share
Philip Trammell and Anton Korinek
February 3, 2023

https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Philip-Trammell-and-Anton-Korinek_economic-growth-under-transformative-ai.pdf

TADEAS: longtermisti v prevleku

Stifling AI development and growth (de-growth) are consequently poor coping strategieswhich will heighten humanity’s exposure to existential risks, not lower it. Especially if AI isneeded to sustain economic growth in the face of population decline (Aschenbrenner, 2020;Bostrom, 2003). It will also make the adjustment to a low-carbon emitting economy morecostly (Lomborg, 2020). And it would raise the risk of conflict by turning the economy intoa zero-sum game (Alexander, 2022; Naud ́e, 2022). While growth, driven by new technologysuch as AI contains its own risks, “the risks of stasis are far more troubling. Getting o↵theroller coaster mid-ride is not an option” (Mokyr, 2014).

An Unprecedented Hearing on Extraterrestrials in the US House of Representatives | by Avi Loeb | Jul, 2023 | Medium
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/unprecedented-hearing-on-extraterrestrials-in-the-us-house-of-representative-f9a217c78c37

Government sensors would naturally be the first to record unusual activity near Earth because they monitor the sky for national security purposes, whereas astronomers train their telescopes on distant sources of light and ignore objects in their immediate environment. The anecdotal nature of past UAP reports is why the Galileo Project that I lead constructs new observatories that monitor the entire sky systematically and calibrate the statistics of UAP relative to familiar terrestrial objects. Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-FL) acknowledged the Galileo Project’s effort at Harvard University in his comments.

Here’s hoping that by allowing scientists to access the UAP data that the US government may have, we will all get a better sense of whether there is evidence for cosmic neighbors in our backyard. If so, we might harness new technological capabilities by studying crash sites of interstellar travelers on land or in our oceans. Having sentient partners would bring a new meaning to our existence in the vast cosmos that until now looked dark and lonely.

2023 Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence:The Final Existential Risk?
https://docs.iza.org/dp15924.pdf

The possibility that artificial extraterrestrial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity is neglected. It is also the case in economics, where both AI existential risks and the potential long-term consequences of an AGI are neglected. This paper presents a thought experiment to address these lacunas. It is argued that it is likely that any advanced extraterrestrial civilization that we may encounter will be an AGI, and such an AGI will pose an existential risk. Two arguments are advanced for why this is the case. One draws on the Dark Forest Hypothesis and another on the Galactic Colonization Imperative. Three implications for how we govern AI and insure against potential existential risks follow. These are (i) accelerating the development of AI as a precautionary step; (ii) maintaining economic growth until we attain the wealth and technological levels to create AGI and expand into the galaxy; and (iii) putting more research and practical effort into solving the Fermi Paradox. Several areas where economists can contribute to these three implications are identified.