In 1957, a Dutch Quaker teacher named Kees Boeke drew the universe as a staircase. Forty steps up: a girl in a chair, a classroom, a city, a continent, the Earth, the solar system, the galactic arm, the observable cosmos. Forty steps down: skin, cell, chromosome, atom, nucleus, quark. Cosmic View became Ray and Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten, then the standard way we teach scale to children. It is still the most honest map we have.
PLANETAI stands inside that map and asks one impertinent question: at which of those jumps can an observation become a decision, and a decision become a made thing — fast enough to matter? Those are the five levels where we work. Not because decisions stop above or below them — they don’t — but because that’s where our network can close the loop, and time it.
“The mind is staggered to discover that in this vast panorama there are still scales within scales, that each magnification opens a new horizon.” Kees Boeke · Cosmic View · 1957
A companion · before the cascade
He took his readers out to the edge of the galaxy and back down into a single drop of blood, in forty steps. These are five of them — the ones where PLANETAI’s network can carry an observation all the way to a made thing.
I · The cascade
Boeke’s staircase is continuous, and decisions happen along its whole length — genes are legislated, asteroids are argued over in earthbound courtrooms. So the five levels below are not rungs of his physical ladder. They are institutions laid across it: the strata where our network — a neighbourhood, a mayor, a regional government, a bioregional council, a planetary body — can take a measurement, put a proposal in front of someone who can say yes, and fabricate the response. Light exists outside a telescope’s bands; the bands are where its detectors are sensitive.
II · Five tiers
Not five arbitrary zoom levels, and not the only places where decisions are made — they aren’t. Five institutional strata at which an observation can become a decision and a decision a made thing, inside one network, fast enough to time — through a planetary treaty, a watershed council, a regional government, a municipal budget, a neighbourhood workshop. Drop any one of these and the loop breaks somewhere between a sensor and a made thing. PLANETAI is designed to refuse that drop. (Per the Full Stack Metrics Framework [Vivanco 2024]: the five canonical scales of the Fab City Full Stack.)
Tier 1 · 107 m
The biosphere as a single unit of accounting. Earth foundation models (Aurora, GraphCast, GenCast) provide the upper bound: what the atmosphere and oceans are doing to us, at hourly-to-decadal cadence.
Who decides · planetary bodies, treaties
Tier 2 · 106 m
A watershed, foodshed, ecoregion. Defined ecologically, not administratively. Data ingress and model training happen here — crossing no other border — so that a Barcelona pilot never leaks its citizens’ sensors into a Bali server.
Who decides · bioregional councils, treaties of land
Tier 3 · 105 m
The multi-city / state / province layer. Where governance and supply-chain coordination actually live. Generalitat de Catalunya for Pilot 0; the equivalent state-level publishers for Boston, Santiago, Bali. The OpenData.cat query layer (an MCP server — Model Context Protocol) runs at this tier.
Who decides · regional governments, inter-municipal bodies
Tier 4 · 104 m
The dense metabolic knot. Imports, waste, flows, labour, permits. Where the four pillars — Environmental, Social, Economic, and Governance — first become the same conversation because the same mayor has to answer for all four.
Who decides · municipalities, councils
Tier 5 · 102 m
The fab-lab shed, the block, the school, the civic workshop. 1,000–50,000 people. Where a sensor gets calibrated, a part gets printed, a repair gets logged. The smallest stratum at which the network can still close the whole loop — sense, decide, make. Personal Knowledge Containers (Koo et al. 2023) sit adjacent as the individual antecedent that PLANETAI extends upward through architecture.
Who decides · assemblies, workshops, schools, councils
III · The seed
Five strata is the instrument’s whole operating domain, but it is not the whole story. Above the planet — orbit, heliosphere, galaxy — decisions are already being made; space law is argued in earthbound courtrooms. What’s missing is our end of the wire: no body up there that our network can put a fabricated response in front of. Satellites see hurricanes before mayors do. We treat that as a gift, not a jurisdiction.
Below the community, the mirror image. Proteins fold the way they fold, and genes are already legislated — but the making down there is not ours to do; fab labs move atoms only in the trivial sense that all machines do. DeepMind’s AlphaFold resolved the shape of nearly every known protein — 200 million structures — and gave them to the world as a public reference. That is a beautiful thing. It is also, precisely, observation without a response leg. No one is going to call a town meeting about a hydrogen bond. (Personal data — what happens at home, on the body, in the hand — lives in this band too: PKC architecture lets it contribute upward when its owner says so, but it is not a separate jurisdiction.)
PLANETAI borrows the representation lesson from that work — shared embeddings across a hierarchy of scales, the Matryoshka trick that lets a single model serve many resolutions — and refuses to import its peer-instrument status. We are not a protein database. We are the layer where measurement has to meet a mayor.
Boeke drew the cosmos to teach children scale.
We are borrowing his staircase to ask a harder question.
Not how big is the universe, but how far can an observation travel — from a sensor on a balcony in Poblenou to a decision, to a made thing, and back again, fast enough to matter. Five strata is our answer, for now. Everything else is preface.