The movement to build a (live) planetary status signal
Given all our advances in data capture and visualization, it is surprising that the only globally-recognized planetary status signals are 2D, static, and updated annually (with all due respect to the Planetary Boundaries and Doomsday Clock).
But that may be changing.
There is momentum with scientists and developers to build a prototype for the planetary status signal — dynamically generated from up-to-the-moment terrestrial data feeds — for a higher-tech, more actionable version of the current formats.
Just as directors, executives and regional managers of a publicly-traded company are directly responsive to the stock price, so too will a next-generation planetary governance structure make our leadership directly responsive to the signals from a planetary status.
As it stands, the prioritization of our planetary prime directives are constantly trumped by more immediate and ‘local’ crises.
Governments change parties, economic outlooks darken, enemies transgress boundaries. Each time some categorical existential risk arises that challenges our higher-order imperatives, we buckle and fold.
That is just the nature of the system, so we need to update how we perceive and operate in the commons.
It may be happening organically.
New technology and new thinking — much of it due to the impact COVID had on our monitoring of global society through up-to-the-moment status maps and visualizations — is helping to push humanity out of its myopic death spiral.
As the global poly-crisis ramps up, it is clear that humanity needs a centralized planetary module so that we can begin to respond at a species-level to emerging threats. And this. needs to be able to receive vast flows of complex multi-contextual data and respond with AI-level intelligence.
Meaning, it can issue directives at local, regional, and global levels for human action to improve that status.
Think of it as an oracle.
But powered by a constant flow of incoming terrestrial sensor, satellite, and socio-economic indices that scientists and economists alike would recognize as legitimate and objective and actionable.
Then we can really start to simulate a new form of global governance. In which stakeholders from across the (warring) spectrum can haggle and. negotiate the +/- factor of every input (from fracking to geo-engineering, supply chain and mindfulness) and the ongoing implementation of data flows of as a world project to establish a centralized object akin to the dashboard on a spaceship Earth.
What would this planetary status symbol look like?
The ORA HALO (desktop only) is one intuitive and multi-vertex object that could do this at a starter-kit level, much like the aurora around a protostar which signals its electromagnetic activity that can be interpreted at-a-distance.
The beauty of the ORA HALO is that its nested system, which leverages the global multi-scalar framework to engineer change… at scale.
This is part of the HOAM simulation, which you can follow via updates from the project beacon, here.
