Planetary Intelligence: Space Industries,Renewable Energy,and the Technosphere

Introduction

On 6 and 26 July 2022, a NASA Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket was launched from the Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territories, Australia, carrying the SISTINE and DEUCE satellite missions. Their objective was to learn which planetary conditions give rise to life. The target was the ultraviolet light from Earth’s nearest stars, Alpha Centauri A and B – 4.367 light years away. With the right amount of ultraviolet light life’s first chemical reactions are triggered – too much, and it destroys the organic molecules that build amino acids, proteins, and living tissues. These satellites allow astrobiologists, those studying life’s origins off-Earth, to understand what planetary conditions provoke life on exoplanets – or other worlds – insights that could inform the sustaining of life on Earth.

The Arnhem Space Centre where the SISTINE and DEUCE missions took flight was built in partnership with the Gumatj Corporation and supported by several leaders of the Gumatj clan of the Yulngj people. Djawa Burrawanga of the Gumatj clan and Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation supported the Arnhem Space Centre for its potential to inspire local youths to stay in school so that ‘Yulngj can be scientists one day’ (Garrick, 2022). Not all were so sanguine. Yingiya Guyula, member of the Djambarrpuyŋu clan and the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, wanted to remind Australians that the rockets pose a serious hazard when their spent fuel tanks fall to Earth saying, ‘Arnhem Land is not empty land’ (Garrick, 2022). In this manner, the Arnhem Space Centre elicited different visions of the opportunities planetary science provided for local communities. The varying perspectives offered by Yulngj individuals are mirrored in contemporary theories of sustaining life on Earth – whether broad extensive approaches, like climate science, or deeper intensive approaches that draw from local Indigenous knowledge offer the optimal route forward.

Another Australian site from which to gather information about the origins of the universe and life – and where the tensions between local politics and planetary science interact – is the radio telescope of the Square Kilometre Array in Western Australia, on the native title lands of the Wajarri Yamatji. Wajarri-Nanda and Yamatji man Dwayne Mallard wanted the local Wajarri Aboriginal community to be integrated with the Square Kilometre Array economy, saying ‘I would like to see through the SKA [Square Kilometre Array] project . . . that the Wajarri people are truly and genuinely at all levels enmeshed in that economy, so it will create a positive legacy over many generations’ (Prendergast and Lewis, 2020). Later, he related an examination of the tensions between the local community and the universal aspirations of space science to a disquisition on whose epistemology is privileged, asking:

Is it called compromise or is it shared intention? Looking back to the origins of time there is a lot of correlation to looking back to the origins of culture or at least a current example of the oldest continuous culture on the planet. And that is us. So you can’t destroy one to say that you are making progress in another. But I do believe that they should be held in that exact same regard. (Prendergast, 2022)

These questions posed by Mallard are critical to this article. Is it possible to act on knowledge about this and other planets with intentions that are shared by both local people and planetary scientists? Is there a way to integrate both perspectives, taking learning from Indigenous people to the world?

While some Gumatj wanted the Arnhem Space Centre and some Wajarri signed an Indigenous land use agreement with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) for the Square Kilometre Array, space science infrastructure can perpetuate the land appropriation which began with European colonialism, according to several First Nations scholars in Australia (Bawaka Country et al., 2020) and Native America (Harvey, 2024; Maile, 2019; Smiles, 2020). For some Native American communities, like the Carrizo Comecrudo, indigenous to the Rio Grande region of Texas and Mexico, who oppose SpaceX’s spaceport in their tribal territories, the space industry is an extension of the environmental racism associated with the carbon fuel industry and the white supremacy of the Mexico–United States border wall – two other modes of colonialism they resist (personal communication, 2025). ¹

From rocket test sites in Australia (Gorman, 2005), Sweden (Ojani, 2024), and the USA (Langford, 2023) to telescopes in South Africa (Walker, 2019) and Hawaii (Maile, 2019), the intersection of the space sector and Indigenous communities is globally contested. According to several First Nations scholars (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2017; Shorter and Tallbear, 2021), space infrastructure can perpetuate the appropriation of land that continues under present-day capitalism. Critics deride the drive to space as ‘cosmic manifest destiny’ – the theology and imperialism that once drove covered wagons into Native American territory now launch rockets into space (Charbonneau, 2021: 75).

The space industry is criticized for supporting the illusion of growth, energy, and salvation without constraint or acknowledging the industry’s origins in warfare (Deudney, 2020; Rubenstein, 2020). Others see it as a fantasy of status-conscious Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to get rich and leave the planet for off-world mastery, fame, and safety (Tutton, 2020; Valentine, 2012). According to Indigenous scholars, the space sector is a contemporary form of ‘space colonization’ (Smiles, 2020: np; personal communication, 2025) – a process that requires space decolonization – a practice that seeks to rectify the erasure of Indigenous land, thinking, and futures by elevating Indigenous space rights, thought, and agency (Fish, 2024b).

But as was clear with some Gumatj and Wajarri Yamatji supporting the space infrastructure, opposition to space industries is not universal. Some Indigenous scholars from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Native America find it possible that the space industry could learn from First Nations knowledge about sustainable survivance while also exploring the origins of planets and life in the universe (Aganaba et al., 2025). The case study for this investigation aligns with the latter; for them, the space industries and Indigenous survivance are complementary.

The Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-owned business with a majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander membership, board, and workforce in the Northern Territories. CfAT managed the Bushlight programme, which installed renewable energy systems for and with Traditional Owners in northern Australia from 2002 to 2013. In 2020, CfAT launched Satellite Enterprises, an Earth station to communicate with satellites and ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement in the space economy. These two CfAT projects show how appropriate technology functions as cosmotechnics, a humble manifestation of planetary intelligence. As defined by philosopher of technology Yuk Hui, cosmotechnics refers to ‘the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities’ (Hui, 2016: np). Hui’s ‘cosmos’ refers to the local worlds mediated with appropriate technologies, such as CfAT’s space and energy infrastructure, creating a morality simultaneously shared between the local and the planetary (Hui, 2024).

Like the space industry, development of renewable energy poses a similar challenge – how to innovate planet-focused interventions while learning from local communities. Some Wajarri Yamaji who negotiated with CSIRO regarding the Square Kilometre Array, through their Wajarri Yamatji Aboriginal Corporation (WYAC), are also involved in renewable energy development through their Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which is one of the first successful Aboriginal-owned renewable energy companies. YMAC owns 50% of Pilbara Solar, a company that developed the 10-megawatt Junja Solar Farm to feed the regional electrical grid in Western Australia. Yet, like the protests against space industries, the siting of renewable energy infrastructure is often met with resistance. In Mexico (Avila-Calero, 2017), Cambodia (Scheidel and Work, 2018), Greece (Fish, 2024a), the United States (Fish and Zeunert, 2025), and India (Yenneti et al., 2016), activists link renewable energy projects to extractive energy colonialism (Tornel, 2023). As in the space industries, this opposition is not the rule – several Native American tribes, Māori iwi, and Canadian First Nations own and operate renewable energy systems providing them with a range of control and benefits, in addition to reducing greenhouse gases in the planet-wide atmosphere (Fish and Nehme, 2025). The CfAT personifies the complementary relationship between providing clean and reliable energy to Aboriginal communities and the rest of the human population.

The benefits and burdens of space and energy infrastructure are unevenly distributed across local, national, and global levels. This creates a fundamental conflict of interest. For example, a local community may benefit economically from coal mining employment, yet this activity harms humanity’s collective right to a stable, clean climate. Conversely, transitioning away from fossil fuels benefits global humanity ² by reducing greenhouse gases and pollutants, but directly threatens the livelihoods of local workers in carbon-reliant industries. The local and the planetary are entangled – sometimes in opposition – and in the case of CfAT this entanglement is more complex, with the potential for mutual benefit.

Investigating Australian projects in space and renewable energy development, this article reveals a key tension – that between the local and the planetary. Its methods include literature reviews of scholarly, journalistic, governmental, and industrial texts, as well as histories, ethnographies, bills, laws, legal proceedings, Indigenous land use agreements, workshop proceedings, and corporate documents to categorize and develop a synthetic spectrum of Indigenous and space and energy industrial relationships. Site visits, workshops, and interviews with key First Nations project participants with experience in space and renewable energy industries – and their opposition – were undertaken. In this project’s multi-sited and multi-textual data collecting, theory-building did not happen afterwards as commonly occurs, but through iterative dialogues of emerging concepts with project participants (Marcus, 2007). The project develops a case study and innovates theory by combining these insights from First Nations communities with a philosophy of technology – cosmotechnics (Hui, 2016) – and a theory of planetary evolution from astrobiology – planetary intelligence (Frank et al., 2022) – in order to identify the complementarities between Western and Indigenous epistemologies.

Planetary Intelligence

Missions like SISTINE and DEUCE ³ launched from Gumatj lands – complete with the range of local controversies – contribute to knowledge about the potential for exoplanet life 4.367 light years away and beyond. Astrobiologist Adam Frank, astrophysicist David Grinspoon, and physicist Sara Imari Walker’s (2022) claim that intelligence is key to the long-term sustainability of life on a planet. They present a typology of evolution of planets with and without intelligence that may or may not arrive at the status of a ‘mature technosphere’. ⁴ Of central importance is intelligent self-awareness, a planet as an open thermodynamic system, and a method for sustainably harvesting energy in a manner that does not lead to run-away greenhouse gases that over-insulate a planet’s solar radiation and end complex life. ⁵ CfAT’s contributions to understanding the technosphere and regulating heat for the benefit of the biosphere is a small expression of this self-aware and self-regulating planetarity.

The Drake Equation, not really an equation but more a Gedankenexperiment or thought experiment on the likelihood of a planet evolving extraterrestrial civilizations, is one inspiration for exploring the mature technosphere and its role in planetary sustainability. Of the seven factors of the Drake Equation, the final two require planetary intelligence: the fraction of civilizations that develop and emit radio signals and the length of time those civilizations survive to signal their existence (Shklovski and Sagan, 1966). The Drake Equation is a heuristic for identifying life and for understanding how intelligence impacts the conditions of a planet (or at least makes it recognizable to astrobiologists).

To the Drake Equation, Frank et al. (2022) add Teilhard’s and Vernadsky’s noosphere, the sphere of mattering mind, in the form ‘cultural biogeochemical energy’ that might influence the regulation of the biosphere. Cultural is italicized here because it underlines the agency of some human communities within the biosphere. The astrobiologists connect Vernadsky to Margulis and Lovelock’s Gaia theory (1974) via Kauffman (2019), wherein the noosphere – the sphere of mind – emerges from the underlying biosphere and technosphere, or what cosmologist Scharf (2021) calls the dataome. Emergence is the idea that ‘more is different’ or that novelties appear that are unprecedented and unobservable in the systems from which they are constituted (Anderson, 1972). Intelligence, thus, can emerge on a planet, making it autopoietic or capable of self-making (Maturana and Varela, 1991). This is a vision of second-order cybernetics with humans and technology as regulators of energy/heat on a non-holistic, coherent, and heterogeneous Earth – an AI Gaianism (Clarke, 2017).

As of yet, there is no critique of ‘Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process’ from critical studies. But one can imagine that commentary based on similar accusations of science (Gould, 1981; Kuhn, 1962), history (Spivak, 1990), ecology (Merchant, 1983), and philosophy (Said, 1978) as being reductive, reifying, teleological, and totalizing. It lacks a Marxist historical materialism of struggle, a Foucault-inspired theory of domination and subversion, and a Thucydian realpolitik. A mature technosphere – a planet monitored by sensing technologies, analyzed by artificial intelligence, governed by a planetary political body, and capable of unending longevity – probably sounds like a repressive and dystopian ‘globalism’ for many critical scholars. By putting faith in technology, human progress, and a political system already skewed to favour entrenched power, it might be said, such a project would exacerbate the current trajectory towards increasing income inequality, structural racism, gender inequity, neocolonialism, North/South wealth disparities, and all the ills of a Christian-capitalist-industrial-patriarchy. Several of the Indigenous scholars consulted for this project speak in these very terms, seeing the likes of Elon Musk as a colonizing technofascist (personal communication, 2025).

An exposition on the normativity of ‘planetary intelligence’ comes from Shorter (2021: 29), who criticizes astrobiology for using a singular measurement to judge the intelligence of a multiplicity as ‘a form of racism, speciesism, and essentialism’. In astrobiology one can find the ‘quintessential conquistador egotism’ in a search for life on behalf of ‘humanity’ – as opposed to what he sees as the pursuit of a small group of Western scientist conquistadors (Shorter, 2021: 30). As in the opprobrium against renewable energy industries as energy colonialism (Dunlap, 2021), the local is the essential concern – ‘humanity’, ‘intelligence’, the ‘planet’ are all reductive universals that historically centre Western males and justify violent civilizing measures that are considered beneficial for ‘humanity’ (Olson and Messeri, 2015). ⁶

The theory of the mature technosphere, it might be said, is an example of ‘long-termism’, a utilitarian axiology that argues that presently living humans should care for future generations (MacAskill, 2022). Detractors say long-termism is an ideology based on unfounded eschatologies about human futurity, marinated in cryptobro solutionism, and is wilfully ignorant of immediate suffering for future salvation (Crary, 2023; Kemper, 2024). Planetary problems are here, now, and social, they argue, and need to be democratically addressed as political, not technological problems. Immodest in its tech-progressivism, teleological in its optimistic directionality, logocentric in its trust in scientific rationalism, and instrumentalist in its faith in engineering and logical positivism – the idea of the mature technosphere is no answer to the planetary polycrisis, so might think critical scholars with experience in earlier failures in global technocratic biogovernmentality like colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. ⁷

Frank et al. are aware of the fraught ethicality of their argument, noting that ‘the question of planetary intelligence is as much an ethical and moral one, as it is a scientific one’ (Frank et al., 2022: 58). Conscious of the inequities of power, they admit that ‘“civilization” is highly unequal in terms of those populations who have the greatest agency in effecting planetary change and those who are the most vulnerable to the consequences of planetary instabilities’ (Frank et al., 2022: 47). In the first footnote to the first paragraph they write the following disclaimer:

We don’t mean to imply a triumphalist narrative whereby Western capitalist technological societies represent an apex of ‘civilized’ behaviour. Far from it, part of the point of our exercise is to explore the limitations of a planetary ‘civilization’ which is, at present, largely incapable of exhibiting coherent intelligent behaviour on a planetary scale. (Frank et al., 2022: 47, fn 1)

With this appraisal accounted for, this article nonetheless follows the convergent approach of Arendt (1958), who recognized in the launch of Sputnik in 1957 feelings of both cosmopolitan unity and relative alienation. In a Hegelian spirit of embracing that paradox and synthesizing the criticism, this article integrates what is useful for understanding how technologies make possible a complementary relationship between local knowledge and planetary scope. Cosmotechnics and planetary thinking provide meaningful points of departure for an investigation into how technologies mediate local and planetary moralities.

Cosmotechnics

Hui’s cosmotechnics is constituted by a philosophical debate on the nature of technology and the cosmopolitan. Cosmotechnics is defined as ‘the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities’ (Hui, 2017). Moral here refers to local ontologies or culturally relevant and relative existential values. Cosmos refers to the wider, more normative world–nature, the universal, and possibly the universe. ⁸ Techné or craft refers to making that mediates the moral and the cosmic. Cosmotechnics is thus a ‘conceptual tool with which to overcome the conventional opposition between technics and nature and to understand the task of philosophy as that of seeking and affirming the organic unity of the two’ (Hui, 2016: 20). In this article, CfAT’s cosmotechnics of space and energy infrastructure is situated morally between the local and the planetary.

A self-described ‘universal relativist or a relative universalist’, Hui, argues:

The universal and the particular are two dimensions of existence, but they are not two substantially mutually exclusive beings that can never be reconciled. Indeed, the universal and the particular exist at the same time in different orders of magnitude and in different dimensions of existence. They can also express themselves in each other, even though the universal is not fully reflected by the proper name that we force on it, such as logos, dao, absolute nothingness, or the beautiful. (Hui, 2021: 61)

Regarding technology, Hui contrasts the anthropology of the ontological turn, scholars like Viveiros de Castro (2014) that emphasize relatively, against the universality of Heidegger (1977) and his theory of technology as a normative Gestell or enframing of nature as a Bestand or standing reserve. Hui hopes to achieve something like the syntheses of archaeologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan and technology philosopher Gilbert Simondon. Leroi-Gourhan’s (1993 [1964]) theory of technology as originary prosthetic is normative, and yet he balances this normativity with his theories of the technical tendency and technical facts. For Leroi-Gourhan, the universal technical tendency of originary prosthetics is balanced by the relativity of technical facts, that is, the local context of a universal techné. Likewise, Simondon (2017 [1958]) conducts a similar balancing of the relative and the universal with his depiction of figure and ground where the ‘ground is limited by the figure, and the figure is empowered by the ground’ (Hui, 2016: 20). These dialectics give us the conceptual background for the synthesis of cosmotechnics, creating a ‘reconciliation between the universal and the particular’ (Hui, 2017). A similar move exists in the case of cosmopolitanism.

Regarding cosmopolitanism, Hui’s theory comes from contrasting Hegel (1970 [1817]), Kant (1824 [1784]), and Schmitt (2015) with Appiah (2006) and Viveiros de Castro (2014). Hegel’s sacred naturalization of the state and Kant’s teleology towards world citizenship are moderated by Schmitt’s state that is constrained and enabled by the planet’s elements of Earth, sea, and air. Republicanism, perpetual peace, commerce, and the interdependence of states – these for Kant were natural unfoldings of rationality that destined humanity for a cosmopolitanism that was both subjective and intersubjective. Hegel, Schmitt, and Kant’s states must be transcended in a move towards something cosmopolitan, according to Hui, but not universal, something worldly but not hegemonic, something planetary but not global, something material but not fundamentally so.

Hui contrasts theories of universal cosmopolitanism with the multinaturalism of the ontological turn. Appiah’s ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (2006) is localized in communities and is allied to ‘ontological self-determination’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2014). Viveiros de Castro’s (1998: 472) statement, that ‘Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multinaturalism as cosmic politics’ personifies a rooted cosmopolitanism where the relational cosmos is populated with kin and the politics of multispecies justice. Hui’s project is a move towards advocacy for ‘indigenous ontologies’ that is performed, according to one co-investigator of cosmotechnics, ‘without falling prey to an ethnocentrism’ (Hamilton, 2020: 115) which privileges the local to the neglect of the planetary. What Hui is trying to achieve is the synthesis best expressed in the theories of technology of Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon – the recognition of local practices (with universal origins) within a planetary context. The following case study of space and energy infrastructure is an example of local diversification and its cosmotechnical mediation of and to the planet.

Appropriate Technology

The Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) was founded in 1980 to oppose ‘technological imperialism’ (Mayne, 2014: 49). CfAT co-develops technologies with local communities, resulting in appropriate technology designed in and for the contingencies of hot, dry, windy, and rural life with inconsistent access to expert repair and electricity in the Outback of Australia. Despite this insistent focus on the local, the efforts of CfAT mediate the planetary. Bushlight, the renewable energy network that operated from 2002 to 2013, and Satellite Enterprises, a Earth station that began in 2020 and communicates to Earth-focused satellites, are two examples of CfAT’s projects that manifest cosmotechnics, transducing technologies with planetary consequences that are appropriately grounded in the specifics of rural localities.

The aim of Bushlight – to decarbonize the Aboriginal homelands through solar microgrids – is a cosmotechnics that mediates Australia’s local solar resources and energy justice with the nation’s aspirations of contributing to a planetary energy transition. Bushlight was a direct result of Australia’s climate planetarity, which was driven by international agreements which influenced national policies and funding for Bushlight. Australia’s climate planetarity began with their signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. With significant coal and gas resources, Australia has been a reluctant participant in planetary climate governance. Being one of several countries that required an 8% increase allowed on 1990 emissions, they eventually ratified the Kyoto Protocol only after a change of government from the more conservative Liberal Party to the more progressive Labor Party. ⁹ Not as quickly and holistically as many would like, Australia has responded to local and planetary pressure to fund programmes designed for domestic decarbonization, such as Bushlight.

Under the motto ‘light and life in the bush’, the Bushlight teams consulted with Aboriginal communities and developed and deployed 265 solar power systems in 220 communities, with the goal of contributing to planetary and local decarbonization as well as community empowerment. Bushlight worked, providing 24-hour electricity so that First Nations communities could have healthier and dignified lives. One resident reported, ‘Now I only have to get two jerry cans of diesel a week ($40). I used to spend $350 on a 44-gallon drum every fortnight. I don’t need to go to town as much because I buy less’ (Cain, 2025: 10). ‘The accountability of the project extended beyond just electricity supply to its social impact’ (Cain, 2024: 9) for local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other citizens of Australia, and indeed the planet.

Aside from its high maintenance cost, limited political support resulted in the demise of Bushlight, which was shut down in the transition from the more progressive Labor Party to the more conservative Liberal-National coalition in 2013. Its ‘self-determination-era philosophy for working with communities increasingly placed it out of step with prevailing policy trends’ (Cain, 2024: 10). However, Bushlight showed how ‘different futures for both the planet and for Indigenous people’s lives on Country’ can be mediated by renewable energy (Cain, 2025: 6). There are multiple ways that ‘renewable energy can inspire future-orientated care – here environmentally-oriented care for the planet and for Indigenous futures on Country’ (Cain, 2025: 2). Bushlight not only extended care to the local – and from the local to the planetary – but represented a local morality about technology as workers and users cared for the Bushlight system.

Bushlight was not perfect. Compromises occurred because the ‘global idea of care for the planet’ was legitimized by ‘Western forms of governance’ instead of Indigenous notions of care, relationality, and Indigenous law (Cain, 2025: 12). Here an Indigenous ontology of care was merely accommodated rather than fundamental. So while Indigenous energy justice was not secured in perpetuity, Bushlight’s existence marks a stage of planetary appropriate technology within the technosphere where systems for harvesting electricity and controlling heat – for the electrification of air conditioners, refrigerators, and other existential methods of thermal regulation necessary in the hot Outback – are developed in response to local constraints and in synchronicity with carbon dioxide mitigation. This intertwined localism and planetarity continued with CfAT’s Satellite Enterprises.

Its Southern Hemisphere aspect and the usually clear skies around CfAT’s Alice Springs headquarters are ideal qualities for effective satellite communication. In 2020, CfAT launched Satellite Enterprises, an Earth station to communicate with satellites and make possible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement in the space sector. From Geoscience Australia and CSIRO, CfAT bought a satellite field and developed it with Viasat, an American communication company, which retails access to energy, environmental, and logistical data derived from Earth-monitoring satellites. CfAT’s ground station is networked with other Viasat assets in Ghana, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Africa, and Alaska and Georgia in the United States. Satellite Enterprises enables local communities to enter a scientific and industrial field with a planetary extent – while making a living and remaining on Country.

Satellite Enterprises has surprising linkages with local ontologies. CfAT’s CEO and Arrernte man Peter Renehan sees a simultaneity between local and planetary ways of seeing shared between satellites and Aboriginal art, saying, ‘if I look at the way Aboriginal people manage their land, it’s generally about tracking land or telling a story about the land they belong to’. He continued, ‘similarly, the work on a satellite being done from above looking down on the ground, providing information around monitoring and land management – it’s quite easy for Aboriginal people to understand that because a lot of that technology is made up in the DNA of Aboriginal people’ (Chanthadavong, 2020). Renehan continues, ‘We can develop programs that can help and assist land management and ranger programs, carbon farming, monitoring of fires and all sorts of things’ by assisting the space industry (Indigenous Business Australia, 2020). The synergism of these cosmotechnics of perception mediate local care for planetary problems. ¹⁰

In early 2025, in a move towards increasing privatization, NASA began using Satellite Enterprises in their contract with Viasat, for multi-gigabit per second satellite downlinks as well as ground station artificial intelligence and machine learning for its scientific satellite missions. These services, ‘ensure Aboriginal Australians . . . realise the benefits of space-enabled and technology services’ (Penetration Testing, n.d). During this time, Satellite Enterprises also established a business in ethical hacking, offering benevolent cyberattacks for firms looking to test network security. Their aim is to ‘propel Aboriginal people to the forefront of emerging industries by combining emerging technology with deep cultural knowledge of Central Australia’s unique environment’ (Penetration Testing, nd). CfAT’s appropriate technology is thus adaptive to other planetary intelligences – artificial intelligence and its use in Earth-focused satellite systems and potential use in ethical hacking. Not entirely constrained by their local conditions, CfAT is finding application in planetary networked information systems – while still dependent upon and benefitting local cultures. Here is another dissolution of the boundary between the local and the planetary made possible by cosmotechnics. The following discussion emphasizes the implications of this study on the theories of the mature technosphere and cosmotechnics.

Intensive Cosmotechnics

CfAT challenges critical scholarship. It falls outside the pre-determined categories which Indigenous organizations are thought to assume as either anti-capitalist or strategically traditional. Consider Kapoor (2024: 153), for whom ‘indigenous localism’ is not an avenue to liberation because ‘global capitalism would require a transnational, and precisely not a decentralized/localist, riposte’. Indigenous projects that do not oppose capitalism are part of the problem, according to this ‘psychoanalytic-Marxist’ perspective. As a not-for-profit organization that receives grants and contracts to do their work, they must be legible and therefore deemed legitimate within the current political order and market system. CfAT’s adjacency with capital and distance from traditionalism doesn’t mean its projects are meaningless interventions in the global climate crisis. Slippages in the supposed isometric overlay of the climate crisis and capitalism are openings for CfAT’s experiments. An ontology of energy or space situated in pre-colonial cultural practices is beyond the scope of this project. Instead, the focus in this article is on ‘two-way seeing’ (Redvers et al., 2022), where connections to Country are integrated with planetary science.

CfAT’s solar and satellite systems are intensive systems rooted in place and culture while also harbouring planetary consequences. Indigenous ontologies emphasize relationality, which is mirrored not in the discreteness of mereology nor the holism of monism but in a spectrum of intensivity which is characteristic of cosmotechnics (Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 2014). Both intensive and extensive systems involve interactions, feedback, and response. Extensive systems are top-down, ahistorical, abstract, and coarse-grained. They offer simpler models and the seduction of totalizing control, while intensive approaches are historically deep, materially concrete, bottom-up, and fine-grained. Intensive approaches are not multiplicities, in the Deleuzian sense, for they cannot be reduced to the Parmenidean one (Deleuze, 1994). Rather, they constitute a dynamic and gradient planetarity of fluid relations.

For humans, intensive planetarity exists in instances of planetary action based on the entanglement of alterity and the socio-seismic dynamics of the Earth. Spivak contrasts intensive planetarity to the extensive globe, writing about the abstract ‘. . . “global” notion [which] allows us to think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan’ (Spivak, 2015: 291). On loan in an immature technosphere, life exhibits a ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit), or the arbitrary nature of circumstances. In an intensive cosmotechnics, however, being is a kind of planetary ‘dwelling’ (Wohnen) committed to authentic ‘sparing and preserving’ life with the biosphere and atmosphere – Heidegger’s earth and sky – forming a mature technosphere (Heidegger, 1962, 1971). Intensive planetarity is a dwelling, inhabiting, or being ‘at home’ within and contributing to the planet, here and there, within and without. Linking the hut (die Hütte) that features in Heidegger’s dwelling essay to Arrernte country is a kind of conceptual cosmotechnics connecting intercontinental particularities.

Indigenous dwelling at CfAT is an example of intensive cosmotechnics. Indigenous astronomical understanding of planets, like the knowledge of Sky Country of the Wardaman people, for instance, illustrates the fluid interconnectivity of land, sea, sky, and planets as a single identity (Country) rather than multiple separate entities (Hamacher, 2022). Knowledge about the weather – winds that originate off Country, for instance – are not aer nullius but entangled with Gumbaynggirr meaning and purpose (Todd, 2016). Another example of cosmotechnical intensities is Indigenous geoengineering – like the ocean fertilization experiment by the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation in British Columbia – which has both intensive components in Indigenous localities as well as extensive expressions for Earth formatting (Gannon and Buck, 2020). Ambitious Indigenous futurities such as these begin with cognitive and material decolonization – the return of Indigenous ideas, land, and life – and can inform intensive cosmotechnics (Smith, 1999; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Accordingly, Tyson Yunkaporta (2019) envisions humans as agents of planetary intelligence or custodial species who embark on a ‘thousand year clean-up’ – an Indigenous version of long-termism. These scholars remind us that the distance between Gaia and Ground (2021), to use the title of Povinelli’s book, or the planetary and the human, is knotted together. In this manner, intensive Indigenous practice does not merely contribute to the Western technosphere through adopting energy and space industries. Rather, these longstanding ecological practices grounded in relations and responsibilities are intensive efforts with under-realized planetary consequences. These may be practices with more linear connections to ancient pursuits – the ancestral and modern use of fire, for instance, to regulate the fecundity of the Australian bush (Yibarbuk et al., 2001). They may also manifest in CfAT’s work with a more expansive intermingling of older and newer cultural lifeways surrounding energy and ecological observation.

CfAT provides evidence of intensive cosmotechnics with an inkling of an emergent mature technosphere. CfAT offers an imperfect complementarity of the local and the planetary, illustrating the transductions that occur in mediations at the permeable boundary between the local and the planetary. CfAT provides one planetary model achievable only through political pressure for the expansion of intensive approaches – and one necessarily paired with energy and space justice. In progress towards this intensive planetarity, some resolution will be lost, and more conceptual and political compromise on both ends of the political spectrum – Indigenous lands may be sacrificed and planetary thinking may be colonized by Indigenous thought – will be necessary than is currently popular in critical scholarship and advocacy. Whether this is sufficient for the emergence of a mature technosphere is a topic worthy of pondering.

The intensivity of the CfAT expands the notion of how a mature technosphere might evolve. The hypothesis is that cosmotechnics works through technospheric apparatuses such as space and energy infrastructures contributing to the development of planetary intelligence and a mature technosphere. Planetary intelligence includes: 1) emergence where the whole is greater than the parts, 2) information flows across the planet, 3) semantic or meaning-rich information, 4) boundaries and signals constituting a complex adaptive system, and 5) autopoiesis or self-production (Frank et al., 2022). CfAT personifies these properties of planetary intelligence to varying degrees.

In terms of emergence (1), CfAT’s space and energy infrastructure are instruments of a mature technosphere that couple Earth’s biosphere and the technosphere, contributing to a system of planetary self-regulation. CfAT’s Satellite Enterprises uplinks and downloads information from satellites monitoring the Earth below. As such, it signifies a planet with (2) information flows as well as (3) semantically rich information that can be actioned as (4) signals for climate-related regulations, including incentivizing energy harvesting systems like solar microgrids such as Bushlight that limit greenhouse gas emissions. With a technosphere consisting of Earth-monitoring satellites and climate-maintaining renewable energy systems, (5) an autopoietic or self-producing planet has the ‘processes and products that are themselves necessary for maintaining those processes and products, thus allowing the system to persist’ (Frank et al., 2022: 55). With aspects of these five properties expressed, it can be optimistically surmised that CfAT is an aspect of Earth’s evolution towards becoming an autopoietic and mature technosphere mediated by information and energy moderated between the local and planetary.

CfAT examples energy and space justice where local communities are not mere tokens for top-down planetary politics but contribute towards bottom-up local empowerment. The top-down procedures – e.g. the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement – remain ineffective in moving the planet forcefully towards a mature technosphere. Likewise, international treaties for Indigenous involvement in the space industries are equally without constructive enforcement. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty does not explicitly include Indigenous rights and the 2020 Artemis Accords may be an avenue to increase Indigenous involvement in space by enhancing transparency, strengthening international collaboration, and preserving outer space history, but only if participating nations act to support Indigenous rights (Aganaba et al., 2025). CfAT is an intensive cosmotechnics with the seeds of a mature technosphere.

Conclusion

Knowledge about climate change and transition to renewable energy requires information from and about the planet. Astrobiologists claim that such planetary intelligence can lead to a mature technosphere, a planet capable of actionable self-observation and self-regulation of its energy budget. Earth stations for communication with satellites and solar energy farms are infrastructures associated with the development of a mature technosphere. These infrastructures are not without problems. Many activists and critical theorists argue that the industrial development of space technologies and renewable energy perpetuate the land dispossession and resource extraction of colonialism and capitalism (Maile, 2019; Smiles, 2020). Planetary thinking, however, can be an endeavour for cultural diversity (Schwartz and Milligan, 2016) and an expression of shared appreciation of flourishing (Kearnes and van Dooren, 2017) and the cosmic sublime (Harvey, 2024). Renewable energy industry too can be a site for local empowerment, diversity, eudaimonia, and upliftment (O’Neill et al., 2021). Energy and space justice can co-occur along with these nascent steps towards a mature technosphere.

This article has examined Wajarri-Nanda and Yamatji man Dwayne Mallard’s question of whether these projects must be executed with ‘compromise’ or can occur with ‘shared intention’. The space and energy infrastructure of the CfAT reveals affirmative potentials for both the local and planetary. CfAT is an example of a small but conceptually consequential component of the infrastructures of planetary seeing and energy harvesting necessary for the emergence of a mature technosphere. With local and planetary leadership, such iterations of energy and space justice could be replicated, leading to a more sustainable planet.