The Toward Alien Cosmologies conceptual matrix is designed as a critical future topology visually organized as four floating spheres used to map weak signals at four different scales, but with no specific order or hierarchy. Each sphere is border-less like a cloud, interweaves and collides with the others, but still carries specific critical topics, vocabulary and perspectives.

With this blurry conceptual canvas, weak signals, information, and ideas of all kinds can be mapped in a large and open panorama, the vagueness leaving space for infinite appropriation and adaptation. From these weak signals, it becomes possible to highlight future trends, a full diversity of macro and micro trends, within and across spheres as virtual constellations to be drawn. Trends and weak signals give insights of future potentials, still leaving space for speculation and imagination. To give an example, below are presented for each sphere, key critical topics, a selection of weak signals and pivotal trends that should be continuously enriched and updated.

Then each user can design all-inclusive future cosmologies as large-scale, dynamic and open cognitive panorama where to draw a diversity of inspirational scenarios giving them texture and somehow staging them. With its four spheres, the canvas obliges users to expand from their own mindset and bubble and consider all dimensions and perspectives rather than staying in limited frames (whether the one of design, foresight or any domain).

With its title and distinctive semantic, Toward Alien Cosmologies is also meant to be thought provoking from the first instant to stimulate, liberate and empower. To feed that impulse, the four spheres are called “Mysterious machine”; “Life-Style Design”; “Multi-dimensional ecosystems”; and “Bigger Picture.”

As Ferrando suggests, “A post-humanist methodology has to be adaptable and sensitive; it has to indulge in its own semiotics, hermeneutics, pragmatics, meta-linguistics, in order to be aware of the possible consequences which they might enact on a political, social, cultural, ecological level” (Ferrando, 2012, p. 11). The blurriness should paradoxically create a new form of clarity where everyone can somehow “see” at different levels and in different ways but still keeping a shared canvas, allowing to feel, give and make sense, but also imagine, speculate and project toward the future. We are now going to take a journey into each of the spheres to apprehend their critical topology with a selection of weak signals.

As the reader of this chapter will experience it, and that should be the demonstration made live, it will give a new clarity and more sense to the complexity of the future of the Anthropocene, and to the critical topics already expressed in this chapter.

In this first cloud, we want to take full awareness and explore the current ontological uncertainty and insecurity human beings have in front of themselves and in front of new material and cognitive entities such as AIs, all reaching the status of aliens, as foreign and not fully knowable or controllable beings. Whether organic, viral, informational or technological, new families of fluid species are emerging, transforming and taking part in the extended post-human Anthropocene society.

Are we viruses? as Descola suggests or Are we humans? are asking curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley at the Istanbul Design Biennale in 2017 (Colomina & Wigley, 2019), showing how humanity has historically been shaped by design. Or else are we becoming humax, that is, humans maximizing themselves to better sustain in the future (whether augmented or not)? as design researcher Tony Fry explores in his referential book Becoming Human by Design (Fry, 2012). Even gender distinction seems to become unclear with transgender realities showing how ambiguous the genetic expression and mutable body functions can be.

Along with the augmented and bio-engineered bionic body, which tends to add capabilities to the human body (e.g., sportsman Victor Pistorius), the Cyborg foundation created by artists Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas, shows how humans can hack their own body to add sensorial aptitudes. Whether intentionally or not, and via any form of cultural influence, it is now clear that human sensorial, emotional and creative mechanisms can be manipulated, as part of the design of subjective “bubbles,” broader attention ecology (Citton, 2014) and transduction process (Simondon, 1989).

Continuing on the cognitive side, even though neurosciences now allow men to intervene on the brain and the mind, these remain mostly terra incognita. Following prominent philosopher Catherine Malabou, even the human freewill, consciousness and creative autonomy are questioned, as the brain seems to have its own automatism (Malabou, 2017), a thesis also defended by Yval-Noah Harari in his influential book Homo Deus, a Brief History of the Future (Harari, 2016).

Beyond the human live experience, similar ontological questions touch the animal and vegetal realms, raising broad ethical and legal issues (topics to be furthered in the three other spheres). Same issues arise from AIs, these “mysterious machines” as MIT Technology Review called them on its May 2017 cover page, or new generation of synthetic biology beings such as self-healing xeno-bots designed by the University of Vermont (Brown, 2020), bots or deep-fakes, these quasi-personas we interact with online. The hypothesis of the emergence of a Singularity (Kurzweil) is also on this critical topos. So is the status of viruses such as COVID-19 that humanity seems to have silently given the right to stop its planetary activity. Who or what instances are entitled to tackle or lead the Anthropocene?

To redefine the diversity of modes of existence on earth and beyond, we suggest, from the perspective of this first sphere, to revisit this extended family of being and agents under the fundamental prism of the bodily and cognitive diversity to help us create a sense of ontological order. The implicit anthropological core-trend in this sphere is the convergence between the organic, the cognitive and technological species. Another one is the declining possibility of a clear “discontinuity” (cognitive and/or bodily separation) among this diversity, only degrees and potentials for differentiation, versatility, ubiquity, autonomy, agency and resilience.

In this second sphere of future critical topics, we want to zoom in on the design of uses, and how they transform and shape the lifestyles of tomorrow: food, agriculture, production, work, business, innovation, education, art, culture, sport, leisure, care, health, sexuality, love, religion, dating, hospitality, mobility, urbanity, and so on are the domains of uses that we want to analyze without separating them in silos as we see how again, the historical anthropological categories are evolving and hybridizing.

What is work when a passive leisure practice of watching a film for free generates value in a firm? What are equitable co-working conditions between humans and AIs? is another question already and seriously raised by the workers syndicate TCO in Sweden.

What new form of relation, collaboration and sentiment do we develop with caring smart co-bots as with animals? How is it that people fall in love with sexbots? Can a supposedly “useless” art experiment be a resilient production for the Anthropocene?

What is the permaeconomics (Bidault-Waddington, 2018) of third places where expenses simultaneously become productive in another repertoire of use?

Many shifts among these repertoires are in progress, such as, to give a very concrete example, the current massive repositioning of hotel rooms into day-work spaces. In this regard, design, anthropology and innovation are pivotal disciplines to capture the weak signals and pragmatic prototypes of possible futures.

Instead of a simple focus on uses, this sphere offers the possibility of experiencing how cultural lifestyles are transforming with and for the Anthropocene, and of (mentally) staging them in digital and physical space as live pictures including characters.

The transformation of social uses goes along a transformation of related value(s) and utility, a concept at the heart of the whole societal organization and economy. How relevant is it to travel when the associated emotion is not pleasure or efficiency anymore but a sense of pollution? Where and what are the new forms of value creation around resilient uses and impacts? What are the new loops of local uses and circular economies? The Anthropocene includes new value(s) systems and symbolic economies that will guide the transformation of capitalism in the future, as we see for instance with the Tech For Good innovation movement.

At the heart of these social uses’ transformation, we want to capture via weak signals how innovative cultural uses can be absorbed, such as via educational processes and co-learning mechanisms, whether happening in schools, online, in cultural places, incubators, community centers, or any peer-to-peer interface. The learning dynamics are going to be leading the shift toward resilient lifestyles.

Behind this pragmatic focus on societal uses, utility and resilience, we should also apprehend in this sphere, the explicit and implicit hierarchies and subordination mechanisms operating in concrete uses and lifestyles.

AI research, post-colonial studies and feminism are useful filters to debunk power structures encrypted in inherited anthropological frames and categories (e.g., the economy of educational, domestic and care work) to restore equity in the future.

As said in the introduction, resilient innovation for the post-human Anthropocene cannot be approached solely with a focus on experiential social uses and lifestyles. It should include systemic and eco-systemic perspectives to acknowledge chains of positive and negative impacts at a planetary level.

Since these chains are borderless and so is the realm of information, there is no point in choosing intermediary scales as frames of analysis. This does not prevent from programming systemic change at a narrower scale such as the one of cities or bioregions, but it has to be with full concern for extended planetary impact chains. So, in this third critical sphere, the tool should help to capture the large scales and systemic transformations (agriculture and natural resources, mobility, energy, economy, academia, cultural soft-power, public bodies, legal frames), and, as for the sphere of uses, keep them entangled, as hybridization is also a key movement of transformation.

Global resilience will come from a smart adaptation of the material, social and informational ecosystems, and, as the Green New Deal (Rifkins, 2019) prescribes it, infrastructures will be pivotal to implement an Anthropocene sustainable ecology. A core future trend is (again) in the hybridization of infrastructures and especially energy, mobility and data infrastructures.

Then the question is: what level of man-made geo-engineering and space occupancy is acceptable and truly resilient? Emerging digital infrastructures such as the Gaia X recently launched by the EU, or the OneWeb satellite infrastructure carried by SpaceX, show how the data-ecosystems are at the center of the global equation with attempts to recreate autonomous continents to protect sovereignty. They even take a lead on energy and transportation infrastructures, as they tend to capture users’ interfaces. The polemic around TikTok and Huawei is at the heart of this new global equation.

The post-truth paradigm, democracy and science crisis are also part of this eco-systemic vulnerability. Another eco-systemic future trend is around the legal and accounting frames’ transformations for the Anthropocene, which will impact political, economic and academic systems, and large parts of human activity on Earth. The World Economic Forum is now calling for a Great Reset of global capitalism and a deep metamorphosis is on its way, with new value, purpose and truth regimes to be designed for an Anthropocene oriented global equity (both as equitable and as shared capital).

How can we design and operate the material and immaterial global commons? How to mobilize global collective intelligence to redefine our shared life conditions on the planet? How to design relevant instances to represent all stakeholders (humans, non-humans, organizations) properly?

Or can we imagine a fair post-human algorithmic democracy? These matters touch on our core societal, existential and cosmological value-systems and the fourth sphere will allow us to open a more in-depth critical space for this purpose. But in this sphere, we want to remain close to change and adaptation capacities, and foresight research will still be very relevant here.

Finally, another strong future trend to be highlighted in this eco-systemic and entangled sphere is around de-mobility, a concept becoming a solid reality and an accelerated transformation mechanism with the COVID-19 crisis. How to pragmatically reshape our global ecosystem around that pivotal idea of a dramatic reduction of mobility? What are our urbanities, community cultures and territorial integration when most activities go online? What has become the Global Village, when business, leisure and educational tourism stop or go virtual?

In this last sphere that will also serve as a conclusion toward alien cosmologies, we want to take another more holistic perspective and explore the richness of anthropological and future meta-narratives that help human beings to give meaning to the life experience on Earth. Behind any rationale lie belief and value systems but also stories and emotional drives (such as fear and hope) that shape mankind’s relation to existence and to the world (cosmologies).

If historically religions have been the holistic frames to give meaning to life or if western science has tried to rationalize it, many other meta-narratives are emerging, such as the Anthropocene itself. This last sphere allows analyzing the mechanisms and cultural superstructures behind the new meta-narratives such as Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity messianic scenario, or James Lovelock’s Novocene (Lovelock, 2019), which furthers his Gaia theory and stages algorithmic beings.

Then, why do creative theories, such as Afro futurism seem to address so well the hopes of new generations? What could be new cosmovisions and pluriverse inspired by native American holistic cosmologies (Escobar, 2017), or speculative extro-science fiction (Meillassoux, 2015), that is, structured but borderless meta-narratives that include what science has not rationalized in its frame? With a focus on possible bigger pictures, this sphere is meant to feed the more pragmatic rationale of the two previous spheres, expand them to non-earthly and more paradoxical or invisible realities, whether in their imaginary, philosophical or quantic dimensions. Ultimately, this last sphere rebuilds a bridge with the first ontological sphere.

As Ferrando recommends (2012, p. 11), we want to indulge in creativity and hermeneutic potentials, to oblige us to a proper critical thinking and as a safety-gate to keep the Anthropocene and the future open, diverse and impossible to fully master.

The future belongs to everyone and the critical topology here presented is meant to design multiple future perspectives and empower everyone to resist to the way the future (and the Anthropocene) is also becoming an instrument of power. The ecology and economy of fear, is a key emotion driving the future, currently challenging the ecology of free desire (libidinal economy), which has prevailed in liberal times. Fear is a biological process deeply nested in the human body, mind and life condition. In 1929, Heidegger marked a turn toward modern existential philosophy by introducing the limit and fear of death in metaphysics heritage. The Anthropocene turn is marked by the fear of the planet’s destruction and more generally of the future, as pivotal life reconditioning forces. The Anthropocene is shifting our minds toward the future and obliges us to be future-conscious, as a new form of consciousness not centered on the bubble of the ego, but on multiple spheres.

With this in mind, Toward Alien Cosmologies stands as a cognitive and pedagogical tool to support humanity’s Futures Literacy (Miller, 2018), an emerging bottom-up foresight approach promoted by UNESCO, as much as a contribution to the resetting of the anthropology discipline toward the future.

Whatever foresight methodology or predictive technologies we might have, the future is not written and will remain a fiction. But addressing and cultivating a creative relation to the future at all scales, is what can bring meaning and help overcome fear. It provides a paradoxical sense of clarity and a form of emancipatory inner trust rather than certitude, something we generally call hope, ultimately comforting mankind in its most singular, intelligent and imaginative capacity.

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