Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster University, UK) bron@lancaster.ac.uk DRAFT – January 2016 prepublication version of paper submitted to special ‘Technosphere’ issue of Anthropocene Review. Please do not cite this version without permission. Abstract: In this paper I argue that discussion about the technosphere and the Earth’s possible current geological transition needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage linear assumptions about the preconditions and emergence of technospheres. Exploring earlier major transitions in Earth’s evolution can shed light on the shifting distribution of metabolic and reproductive powers between the human and technological parts of the contemporary technosphere. The long-term evolution of technical objects also suggests that they have shown a tendency to pass through their own major transitions in their relation to animality. Such reflection can shed new light on the nature and likely future development of the Earth’s technosphere. Keywords: technosphere, Anthropocene, astrobiology, macroevolution, science fiction In an important series of papers published since 2010, Peter Haff (2010; 2014a; 2014b; 2014c) has started to lay out a radically new way of looking at technology, one which treats it, along with human beings and their institutions, as parts of an emergent component of the Earth system: the ‘technosphere’. There have of course been precursors of this way of thinking about human technology, notably the conception of the ‘noosphere’ as developed by Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky from an original idea by Édouard Le Roy (Vernadsky, 2002). Within the general context of the wider movement of Russian Cosmism, Vernadsky proposed that human collective reason and its practical application be regarded as a new form of biogeochemical energy that was transforming the geosphere (inanimate matter) and biosphere (animate matter) into the noosphere: matter informed by mind and intention. However, despite such early formulations, the work of Haff represents a considerable advance on how to think of technology in Earth- system terms, and has profound implications for how we think about human agency in the immediate geological future of the Earth. As well as providing general accounts of how to think of the technosphere as a quasi-autonomous emergent ‘sphere’ of the Earth system comparable to the lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere whose dynamic constrains the behaviour and possibilities for action of its human parts (Haff, 2014a; 2014c), Haff has also explored the physical principles governing the emergence and development of mass transport of solids within the geosphere, biosphere and technosphere (Haff, 2010; 2012), and how the emergence and development of the technosphere might, like other processes in living and non-living nature, be determined by the principle of Maximum Entropy Production (Haff, 2014b). 1