Epilogue: The Post Planetary Age

The relevance of scale has been an important theme in this book, especially regarding the significant divide at the planetary level where larger scales become entirely devoid of architectivity. It appears to me that humanity is in the process of crossing this divide, most notably with the advent of space travel in the 1960's. This crossing is a process, not a singular event. It probably started with the intellectual understanding of the Earth as a participant in a greater solar system together with the circumnavigation of the planet in the 16th century, and extending to our appreciation of galaxies and humanity's first steps on the moon in the 20th century. And it is happening not only in a geophysical sense - commerce, culture and communication are rapidly approaching a full globalization of the planet.

I believe there is a momentous consequence of this, for it means we are also approaching the spatial limit of architectivity. Beyond this limit the architective features of newness, complexity and creativity become increasingly meaningless. Approaching this limit, concepts of authority and control fragment and disappear, as I believe we are currently experiencing with the rise of scepticism in institutional authority, religious, political, academic and corporate. We are becoming 'individuata', each of us a law unto ourselves, no longer believing in any ultimate religious authority. The internet has all but obliterated any sense of authority in traditional media. We are also witnessing a backlash - a last stand by religious conservatives in the US, Islamic jihadists and extremes of political censorship in Russia and China. Our Planetary Deity does not want us to go cosmic.

Humanity is on the cusp of what might be called a "post planetary age", not only because we are extending ourselves beyond our planet but because we are extending ourselves beyond the limit of architective possibility. To go any further we are going to have to learn how to manage situations at a planetary and extra-planetary scale without it. Of course, at the scale of our individual bodies we will still be architectively coherent and susceptible to its forces, but we are going to have to learn to do without these in our cosmic enterprises.

This we have already started to do. The cosmic consciousness afforded us by psychedelic drugs has given many of us a taste of things to come, for to negotiate that consciousness successfully requires an abandonment of architectivity. We cannot possibly communicate architectively with sentient beings in other star systems but we can communicate with them connectively through the song of the cosmic holism.

Cosmic school has opened. We just have to recognize it.