The Weekly Planet #2

This week traces a dark arc through our planetary condition, from the unspeakable cruelty of factory farming to the looming space race, from the technosphere's grip on human agency to the twilight of Western hegemony. Yet threading through these seemingly disparate topics is a single, uncomfortable truth: we have constructed a planetary machine that treats life—all life—as mere fuel for its operation.

Helen Lundeberg, Blue Planet, 1965

The Seventy-Five Billion

Let me start with chickens, because their fate encapsulates everything wrong with how we've organized planetary life. Seventy-five billion chickens are slaughtered annually—a number so staggering it defies comprehension. Each one bred to burst from its biological constraints, bones breaking under the weight of engineered flesh, confined to spaces so small they cannot turn around. This isn't agriculture; it's a biological assembly line that has transformed sentient beings into protein units.

Humans have always been capable of cruelty, but its industrialization has taken it to a whole new order of torment. We've created a system where the suffering of billions of beings is not just acceptable but necessary for the smooth functioning of our food system. The environmental impacts are equally staggering: a single chicken house of 22,000 birds produces as much phosphorous as the sewage from a community of 6,000 people. Multiply that by the countless industrial operations worldwide (remember that we have to get to 75 billion!), and you begin to grasp how factory farming has become a planetary force, poisoning waterways, destroying soil, and contributing massively to greenhouse gas emissions.

But the perversity doesn’t end here: as concerns about beef's carbon footprint grow, we're doubling down on chicken production, engineering these birds to be even more "efficient" converters of feed to flesh. Some environmentalists actually celebrate this as progress. We're optimizing suffering in the name of sustainability.

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" - Mark 8:36

The Electrostate and Its Discontents

China's transformation into the world's first "electrostate"—a nation where electricity is the primary form of energy at every scale, should be cause for planetary celebration. And in many ways it is. China has added approximately 268 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity (including solar, wind, and hydropower) during the first half of 2025 - compare this with all of India’s installed electric capacity, which is 476 GW. At this pace, China could supply all of India’s electricity needs with just a year’s worth of effort. This is the kind of rapid transformation climate scientists have been begging for.

But the electrostate represents something more profound than an energy transition. It's a transformation in the very organization of power—both electrical and political. Unlike the distributed autonomy of fossil fuels (fill up your tank and drive wherever you want), the electrostate requires total integration into a centralized network. You're either plugged into the grid or you're powerless. This is both energy infrastructure and a new social contract, one where individual autonomy is traded for collective capacity.

China understands this trade-off and has embraced it. The question is whether the West, with its mythology of individual freedom and fossil fuel autonomy, can make the same bargain. The resistance to Chinese EVs and solar panels may also be resistance to a new vision of how society should be organized: networked, integrated, interdependent.

The electrostate doesn't just change how we generate power; it changes how power is generated.

The Space Race

Speaking of power, the new space race between the U.S. and China reveals just how divorced from planetary reality our leadership has become. SpaceX's Starship program faces delay after delay, with multiple test failures (newsflash: last week’s Starship launch was a gigantic success) pushing back NASA's Artemis moon landing to 2027 at the earliest. Meanwhile, China methodically advances its Chang'e missions, having already landed on the moon's far side and returned samples—something the U.S. has never done.

The slogan "crawl, walk, run"—perfectly captures China's approach. While Musk dreams of Mars colonies and NASA struggles to recreate what it achieved 55 years ago, China is systematically building the infrastructure for sustained lunar presence. But step back and consider the absurdity of this competition. We're racing to plant flags on a dead rock while our living planet convulses with heat waves, droughts, and floods. We're planning to mine the moon for resources but what about the Earth's bounty? The space race is a desperate lunge toward escape velocity from the mess we've made, dressed up as pioneer spirit.

Von Neumann's Prophecy

John von Neumann, the man who gave us game theory, the digital computer and many other acts of genius, once observed that science was shifting from problems of "energy, power, force and motion" to problems of "control, programming, information processing, communication, organization, and systems."

Ain’t that the truth

We now live in what Robert Skidelsky calls a "machine civilization," where we no longer use machines but live inside them. The technosphere isn't just our devices and infrastructure; it's the entire self-organizing system that determines how we think, work, and relate. As Skidelsky notes in his remarkable book Mindless, we face a paradox: "every increase in our own freedom to choose our circumstances seems to increase the power of technology to control those circumstances."

We're born into infrastructure, enrolled from birth in systems of electricity, water, transportation, communication. We work for these systems as much as they work for us. When part of the grid fails, swarms of human and automated activity immediately work to restore it. The system defends itself, repairs itself, as if it were alive.

The technosphere represents the ultimate expression of a world where the primary challenges are no longer about harnessing energy but about managing complexity. And we're failing spectacularly at this management, because the technosphere operates according to its own logic.

The Twilight of Western Hegemony

Amitav Ghosh's Erasmus Prize acceptance speech cuts to the heart of our planetary moment. "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion," he quotes Samuel Huntington, "but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

That superiority is now gone. Not just militarily—though the quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya certainly demonstrate that—but economically and morally. The BRICS nations now command a larger share of global GDP than the G7. The West's attempts to maintain hegemony through sanctions and military interventions have created the very crises (massive refugee flows, political instability) that are now tearing Western societies apart from within.

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But Ghosh goes deeper, connecting this geopolitical shift to a more fundamental transformation. The anthropocentric worldview that justified both colonialism and environmental destruction is collapsing. We're beginning to recognize what indigenous peoples never forgot: that we share this planet with many kinds of beings who are richly alive, that the Earth itself is watching and judging us.

We cannot ensure a future for humanity without recognizing that we've never been alone on this planet.

The Fallacy of Endless Growth

One of the ‘ur-documents’ in the path to planetarity is The Limits to Growth. Published in 1972, attacked viciously by economists, dismissed by politicians, this MIT study has proven remarkably, terrifyingly accurate. Its core message was simple: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

The models showed that any system based on exponential economic and population growth eventually crashes. The "business-as-usual" scenario suggested collapse would begin around the middle of the 21st century. Recent analyses have found that we're tracking closely to these projections. As Graham Turner concluded in 2014, "the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway."

The book even outlined scenarios that didn't end in collapse—they just required "a deliberate, controlled end to growth." But that was unthinkable to a civilization that treats growth as sacred, that cannot imagine prosperity without expansion, that would rather risk planetary collapse than question the fundamental assumptions of capitalism.

The attacks on Limits to Growth weren't scientific, but quasi-religious: Reagan captured this perfectly when he declared there are "no such things as limits to growth" because "it's not what's inside the Earth that counts, but what's inside your minds and hearts." This is the same magical thinking that now has venture capitalists talking about mining asteroids.

The Geological Sublime

When hitting up against those limits, what Lewis Hyde calls "the geological sublime," offers perhaps the one genuine source of hope—though it's a strange kind of hope. We're experiencing a massive temporal vertigo as human history collides with geological time. Climate change has compressed millions of years of carbon cycling into a few human generations. We're simultaneously incredibly powerful (a geological force) and incredibly insignificant (a blip in deep time).

This collision is producing what I'd call "Anthropocene feedback loops"—where our attempts to solve problems created by technology lead to more technology, which creates new problems, which require more technology. Every technological advance generates new risks, increasing pressure on ecosystems already at their breaking points. We're not solving problems; we're displacing them into ever more complex forms.

Snow Storm, Turner, 1842

A Planetary Perspective

The cruelty of factory farming, the rise of the electrostate, the new space race, the grip of the technosphere, the collapse of Western hegemony, the limits to growth—these aren't separate issues but facets of a single transformation. We're witnessing the end of one way of organizing planetary life and the emergence of another. This transformation is already underway, but whether we'll navigate it consciously or stumble through it blindly is up to us.

We're in the early stages of a shift in material, moral and political order as significant as the agricultural or industrial revolutions. The machine civilization we've built is approaching its limits, yet paradoxically, this moment of maximum danger is also one of unprecedented possibility. As Ghosh notes, we're rediscovering truths that modernity suppressed: that consciousness isn't unique to humans, that the Earth is alive and responsive, that other ways of being are not just possible but necessary. The electrostate, for all its authoritarian overtones, shows that rapid transformation at planetary scale is possible. The failure of Western hegemony opens space for other voices, other values, other ways of organizing society.

But here be monsters. Dennis Meadows, reflecting on Limits to Growth nearly 50 years later, no longer sees an "orderly and cooperative descent toward a socially just sustainability." He sees "system shock" followed by "geopolitical turmoil and resource wars." The authoritarian tsunami sweeping across democracies may be our response to limits—a desperate attempt to maintain order as growth ends and distribution becomes zero-sum.

We can’t claim ignorance. Scientists have charted the trajectories, activists have sounded the alarms, writers imagined alternatives. We're like addicts who understand perfectly well that our behavior is destructive but can't stop because the addiction has rewired our brains, our institutions, our entire civilization.

In writing the Pauper, I made a choice: instead of lamenting the end of the Globe, can we be realists about the Planet? Every day, we make decisions that either perpetuate the machine civilization or begin to imagine alternatives. We can choose to see chickens as sentient beings rather than protein units. We can recognize the technosphere as a human creation that can be modified or dismantled.

We're part of a planetary system that's much older and more powerful than our species. We've had a good run pretending otherwise, but that pretense is ending. Planetarity opens up new vistas, new avenues for imagination and action. A new age of exploration awaits if we set aside our settler colonialist models for doing so.

We should be embracing it!

Evelyne Alcide, Seisme, 2010