In the first talk, The Long L: Habitability in Substrate-Agnostic Ecologies, Lukáš Likavčan takes Frank Drake's famous equation as a philosophical point of departure. Originally proposed to estimate the number of radio-communicating extraterrestrial civilisations in the galaxy, the Drake Equation is better known for its earlier parameters — star formation rates, planetary conditions, the emergence of life. Likavčan's intervention focuses instead on L: the average communicative lifetime of a technological civilisation. This final parameter is not merely a probabilistic variable but a philosophical hinge, linking the trajectory of technological evolution to the conditions of planetary habitability. It asks, in other words, how long civilisations tend to last — and why.
From this vantage point, Likavčan develops the concept of substrate-agnostic ecology (SAE): a framework for planetary environmental thinking systematically freed from Earth-centric and biocentric assumptions. Where standard ecological discourse takes the Earth's biosphere as its implicit horizon, SAE attends to the generic conditions under which agents — biological, technological, or otherwise — can populate a wide variety of planetary environments hospitable to distinct genres of biospheres and intelligences. The claim is unapologetically cosmological in scope: there is no planetary thinking adequate to the present without the extra-planetary horizon it has so far tended to suppress.
In the second talk, Solarpunk: A Short Guide to the Decolonization of the Sun, Alessandro Sbordoni traces the political economy of solar energy through the overlapping lenses of decolonial theory, philosophy of technology, and post-capitalist ecology. The talk opens with an anecdote drawn from Ailton Krenak's Ancestral Future: a five-metre tree planted in the interior garden of a wealthy Milanese home, whose owner does not even know its name. For Krenak, an indigenous philosopher and activist of the Krenak people, the scene crystallises the savagery of a Western culture that uproots forests without learning their names — a culture that relates to the nonhuman world exclusively as an inventory of available resources.
This extractive logic, Sbordoni argues, is not confined to the Earth's surface. Drawing on Oxana Timofeeva's Solar Politics, he shows how the Sun itself has been absorbed into a capitalist cosmo-logic: no longer a free-giving force but another nuclear fusion reactor, another site of economic valorisation. Green capitalism, on this reading, extends rather than ruptures the colonial relation, now projected onto a cosmological scale.
Against this, Sbordoni mobilises a distinction developed by André Gorz and recently elaborated by Kohei Saito between locking and open technologies. Locking technologies — paradigmatically, nuclear power plants — require specialised labour, expensive infrastructure, and concentrated ownership; they reproduce capitalist relations of production even when their outputs appear sustainable. Open technologies, paradigmatically, solar panels and wind power, can be managed as commons: decentralised, freely accessible, communally owned. Their abundance, Saito notes, is structurally incompatible with capitalist accumulation. But the distinction is not merely economic. Every technology is also, in a Foucauldian register, an apparatus of subjectification, for it produces particular kinds of subjects. Where locking technologies reproduce the worker of the capitalist economy, open technologies open the possibility of a post-capitalist subjectivity, one no longer organised around the regime of value extraction.
The talk concludes by returning to Krenak: solarpunk, Sbordoni argues, must be understood not only as an energy politics but as a cosmo-ontological project. Technology is always already a relationship with the world — an ontology as much as an apparatus. A genuine break with the extractive logic of capital requires not only a transition in the mode of production, but a transformation in the mode of existence it sustains.
Lukáš Likavčan is a philosopher working on emerging technologies, ecology, and outer space. His research traces the entangled histories of scientific infrastructures, ideas, and cultures mobilised in efforts to sustain planetary habitability. He is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and co-founder of the outer space consultancy ⠿ Substrate. He teaches at the MA Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and at the MA Narrative Environments at UAL Central Saint Martins, where he co-curates the R&D platform Earthsuits.
Alessandro Sbordoni is the author of Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Set Margins', 2025), Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023; Becoming Press, 2024), and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca, and works for the open access publisher Frontiers.
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