What are human beings from a planetary point of view? The Earth sciences tell us that humans have become a planetary presence capable of exerting geological force. This realization has physical as well as metaphysical implications: we do not yet know what it means for us to be planetary beings. For us to better understand these implications, we must engage a system-wide challenge: how to foster expansive planetary thought across, and in relationship to, more established ways of thinking about collective human identity, techno-scientific activity, and influence on more-than-human life and the Earth.

The Berggruen Institute explores this challenge of “planetary metaphysics” through three visions of planetary humankind deriving from the Earth sciences of the past century: human beings as a new planetary sphere, a “noosphere” of mind and affect; as a planetary body, participants in the life, health and homeostasis of “Gaia”; and as a planetary force, a source of impact and agency in the “Anthropocene.” We ask directly, and with the help of both scientific thought and the world’s ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions, what it means, in the fundamental sense called up by metaphysics, for humans to experience ourselves as members of a “planetary” species across our many differences.