The Impossibility of a Planet

Abstract

There are people in the world who are acutely aware of the planet they live on. Due to various and chosen pathways, attentions, vocations, situations or surroundings, these people use or choose the Earth as their frame of reference; the ground from which they think and act is planetary. In the geosciences and natural sciences this includes those who sample and interpolate data all over the globe, or derive large scale models of planet-wide systems. In economics and geopolitics, this includes those who monitor, template and influence things like currencies and economies, trade and shipping, conflict and policy. In the humanities and social sciences it is those who take up topics of the Anthropocene and the technosphere, those whose tendency is to attempt to describe the historical importance and transitions of (our always natural) global histories.