Toward Planetary Maturity
The RAND Corporation's new proposal for astrographic standardization will help to provide a standard grammar for planetary sapience, thus helping mature the technosphere
In an era defined by accelerating technological advancement and a growing human presence beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the RAND Corporation’s new report, Charting the Cosmos, represents a timely and useful document. While overtly an inevitably dry technical proposal for a standardized lexicon and framework for mapping space, its implications go far beyond mere cartography. When viewed through the lens of two convergent philosophical concepts — Benjamin Bratton’s Planetary Sapience and Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker’s Mature Technosphere — RAND’s proposed astrographic standardization represents a necessary and foundational step toward humanity’s long-term survival and evolution as a species with planetary-scale intelligence. The report provides the essential cognitive and infrastructural grammar required for a fragmented, self-destructive human civilization to evolve into a coherent, self-sustaining planetary system.
The core of the RAND report’s argument is that the current lack of a shared, accessible, and durable astrographic framework poses a significant risk to the future of space activities. The cosmos, once primarily the domain of theoretical physics and distant observation, is now a bustling theatre of human endeavor, encompassing everything from competing satellite constellations and deep-space scientific probes to nascent commercial ventures in lunar tourism and resource extraction. However, this proliferation of activity is not a coordinated effort. Instead, it is a mosaic of competing national, commercial, and scientific interests, each operating with its own set of technical terms, operational zones, and mapping conventions. The report warns that this fragmentation is a recipe for miscommunication, operational friction, and, ultimately, conflict.
To address this, the report proposes a four-part framework for defining the cosmos: the surface environment, near-body space, the celestial neighborhood, and deep space. Each region is defined with a generalized and a Cislunar-specific definition, providing a concrete example for its immediate application.
Surface Environment: This region is defined as the volume contained within a celestial body’s lowest stable orbit, or “minorbit sphere.” For Earth, this extends from the surface to 100 km above mean sea level, encompassing atmospheric and subsurface activities. For the Moon, it’s the surface up to 100 km above the mean surface level. This region acknowledges the crucial link between planetary bodies and their immediate surroundings, recognizing that terrestrial and lunar environments are not just surfaces but three-dimensional volumes with operational significance.
Near-Body Space: This is the immediate orbital neighborhood, extending from a celestial body’s minorbit sphere to its furthest Keplerian orbit. For Earth, this spans from 100 km to 50,000 km above mean sea level, including all demonstrated Keplerian orbital regimes. For the Moon, it is from 100 km to 60,000 km above the lunar surface. This region is where most current satellite operations take place and is increasingly becoming a crowded domain. A clear definition here is essential for managing space traffic, preventing catastrophic collisions, and ensuring the safety of assets.
Celestial Neighborhood: This is the volume of primary gravitational influence by the constituent bodies of a system, minus the near-body space of those bodies. The Cislunar example is the volume of space within Earth’s Hill sphere (1.5 million km from the center of Earth), but excluding Near-Earth and Near-Lunar Space. This region is the new frontier of competition and cooperation, attracting investments from nations and private companies for ventures like space tourism and resource extraction. It is a complex region, where the gravity of multiple bodies (Earth and Moon) must be considered, a concept the report explores as a future enhancement to the framework.
Deep Space: This is the remainder of the known universe outside the boundaries of a given celestial neighborhood. Its definition is subjective, depending on the perspective of the system in question. From a Cislunar perspective, it includes all celestial bodies beyond the Earth-Moon system, such as the Sun and other planets. The report emphasizes that this is where the framework’s generalizability is most critical, allowing for a consistent approach to mapping and operating in other gravitational systems.
Because these regions are defined by “durable physical thresholds” and gravitational influences, their relevance is not tied to a specific technology or geopolitical fashions.
What RAND is engaged in here is an effort in epistemic entrepreneurship: it aims to create a shared reality, a common language that can bridge the actions of disparate actors. Just as terrestrial cartography enabled global trade and diplomacy by creating a unified understanding of geographic space, a standardized astrographic framework aims to do the same for the cosmos. It is a pragmatic attempt to impose cognitive order on a rapidly developing but largely ungoverned frontier.
The Technosphere's Existential Immaturity
To fully appreciate the significance of this standardization, the normative concept of the “mature technosphere” is particularly helpful. As outlined by Walker, Grinspoon, and Frank, a planet’s evolution can be understood through a series of stages. Earth, they argue, first moved from an immature biosphere to a mature biosphere — a period where life, through complex cybernetic loops, became a self-regulating homeostatic system. The posit that we are currently in a third stage: the immature technosphere. This is the era of the Anthropocene, where humanity’s technological systems — our industry, communications, transportation, and infrastructure — have begun to exert a powerful, but at present destructive, influence on the planet.
The currently immature technosphere is characterized by a core contradiction: it is a system that consumes planetary resources and generates waste in ways that actively undermine its own long-term viability. It’s akin to a parasitic organism that, by design, will eventually kill its host and, by extension, itself. Our current technological civilization is not stably integrated with the Earth’s natural systems; it is working against them. The authors posit that for humanity to survive, we must transition to a mature technosphere, a hypothetical fourth stage where technology and the biosphere co-evolve to create a sustainable, self-maintaining system. This will necessarily involve the intentional modification of technological processes to benefit the entire planet, such as by globally harvesting clean energy and managing resources in a way that ensures the stability of the full system.
The RAND report’s framework directly addresses some of the operational and cognitive deficit of our immature technosphere. A key feature of an immature system is a lack of coordinated, systemic action. Our current space efforts are a perfect example: a cacophony of voices, all speaking different languages, with no shared map. This disunity prevents the kind of collective action required to transition to a mature technosphere. How can we possibly hope to manage planetary-scale systems — like climate, resource allocation, and orbital space — if we cannot even agree on a basic terminology for the domain we are inhabiting? The astrographic framework, therefore, is not just for space; it is a critical tool for the terrestrial problem of planetary governance. It is a stepping stone from the haphazard, self-interested chaos of an immature technosphere to the coordinated, system-level intelligence of a mature one.
The Rise of Planetary Sapience
This brings us to the third layer of this argument: my colleague Benjamin Bratton’s concept of planetary sapience. Bratton argues that the global-scale computation we have developed — the internet, satellite networks, and vast data processing systems — is not just a tool, but a new form of emergent intelligence. He calls this a “smart exoskeleton” for the Earth, a distributed sensory and cognitive layer that allows us to perceive and understand the planet as a single, complex system. Planetary Sapience is a synthesis of human and machine intelligence, capable of processing the intricate, interconnected conditions of the planet in a way that no single human mind, corporation, or even national government ever could.
The RAND report’s astrographic framework provides a crucial element for the functioning of this planetary-scale intelligence. To have a sapient system, you must first have a way to define its “body” or its operational boundaries. RAND’s framework does precisely this by giving a shared, three-dimensional structure to the cosmos, moving beyond the static, two-dimensional maps of the past. It is the anatomical atlas for a planetary intelligence that must navigate a dynamic, four-dimensional space-time.
Following the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bratton differentiates “the planetary” from “the global,” arguing that the former implicates deep time and space, while the latter is a more static, flattened, and anthropocentric view. The RAND report’s emphasis on a durable and generalizable framework resonates with this distinction. By designing a system that can be applied to any gravitational body — from the Earth-Moon system to a future Mars-and-moons system — the report is thinking on a truly planetary and indeed extra-planetary scale. Beyond mapping our current activities, it is also building a cognitive infrastructure that can support humanity as it ventures beyond the Earth. This foresight is a hallmark of a sapient civilization, one that is capable of thinking not just in terms of years or decades, but in epochs.
A Call for a Coherent Cosmos
In short, the RAND Corporation’s proposal for astrographic standardization is far more than a mere technical recommendation. It is a strategic and even philosophical intervention that addresses the very core of humanity’s existential challenges. The current state of our technological civilization — the immature technosphere — is unsustainable, characterized by a lack of coordinated, system-level intelligence. The chaos of our space operations is an index of this immaturity.
RAND’s proposed astrographic framework offers a path forward. By creating a shared language for the cosmos, it enables planetary sapience. This new, emergent form of cognition is essential for managing the planet’s systems in a way that ensures long-term sustainability. The standardization of space mapping is a crucial step toward providing this intelligence with the cognitive tools it needs to operate. It is the blueprint for a coordinated, habitable, and sapient planetary civilization. By moving from a fragmented collection of competing interests toward a unified planetary system, we begin the transition from an immature technosphere to a mature one, securing not just our place in the cosmos, but more importantly, the stability of our existence on Earth.