HALO (with Planetary Boundaries inset) in configuration tests for the Planetary 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).
So it’s very exciting that there is suddenly movement with scientists and developers to build the prototype for a planetary systems resilience signal and the ORA HALO is front and center as the object being tested for implementation.
A Prime Directive
Just as directors, executives and regional managers of a publicly-traded company are directly responsive to quarterly ledger results and the stock price, so too would a next-generation planetary governance structure make its 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 planetary 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’s 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.
Live action maps that signaled global pandemic statistics were a species-level POV upgrade
As the global poly-crisis ramps up, it is clear that some group will assert a centralized planetary module that we can begin to respond to at a species-level — one that is multi-contextual and moment-to-moment and intelligent.
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, socio-economic, and even warm data indices that scientists and economists alike would recognize as legitimate and objective and actionable.
These HALOs are signaling ecosystem resilience, which one would you want to inhabit?
Once we establish a focal point for systems signaling, we can start to simulate a new form of global governance. In which stakeholders from across the (increasingly warring) spectrum can haggle and negotiate the +/- factor of every input (from fracking to geo-engineering, policy implementations to supply chain to mindfulness) as a world project to establish a centralized object akin to the dashboard on a spaceship Earth.
Prototyping The Planetary Signal
The planetary HALO is a nested feedback system.
Meaning: a scalar network of nested HALOs - from the individual to the nation-states to multinationals- all of whom can influence the planetary signal by altering their own.
The net: We cannot start to make change at scale until we see ourselves as a system, at scale.
What would this planetary status symbol look like?
As a start, the group is working with the ORA HALO, which provides an intuitive and multi-vertex object, designed as a biomimic of the aurora around a protostar which signals its electromagnetic activity that can be interpreted at-a-distance.
The team is heads-down on the development of a prototype Planetary signal which will be deployed via web. We’ll update you as things progress.
Planetary Boundaries integration video is now live, here.
…
For ora.network, below are a few slides from the presentation we are giving to incoming partners (illustrating some of the rationale and system dynamics for the Planetary signal).
