The concept of sustainability is widely acknowledged as a political guideline. Economic, ecological, social and cultural aspects of sustainability are already under discussion. Current space mining efforts demand that the discussion become a broader one about 'planetary sustainability', including the space surrounding Earth. To date, planetary sustainability has mainly been used with reference to Earth only and I will extend it here, elaborating on a similar NASA initiative. This article (1) sketches the contemporary economic-political initiatives which call for a special reflection of Earth's location in space, and then (2) discusses the meaning of the concept of sustainability in this context. Next, (3) I relate the discussion to the issue of planetary and environmental protection, before, (4) finally, presenting a philosophical and theological perspective that seems particularly able to broach the issue of the multiple dimensions of sustainability in this context. This is the concept of constructive-critical realism. My overview of the topic concludes with (5) a summarizing outlook.

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Response to 'Is Transplanetary Sustainability a Good Idea?-An Answer from the Perspective of Conceptual Engineering' The effort to analyse the concept and idea of planetary sustainability (Losch, 2018; Beisbart, 2019) from the perspective of conceptual engineering is very worthwhile. In the following response to this discussion and to Beisbart's proposal to rename the concept 'transplanetary sustainability', the questions he raised will be answered by first recalling the roots of the concept of planetary sustainability. The idea of coining the expression 'planetary sustainability' was born through working on, and drawing on, the concept of planetary protection (Losch, 2016a). In accordance with the Outer Space Treaty (Article IX), planetary protection demands measures to sterilize spacecrafts passing through the vacuum of space, to avoid contamination of other celestial bodies with Earth life or vice versa. As Meltzer (2010, 1) puts it: '[i]f we irrevocably alter the nature of other celestial bodies, we compromise all future scientific experiments on these bodies and may also damage any extant life here. By inadvertently carrying exotic organisms back to Earth on our spaceships, we risk the release of biohazardous materials into our own ecology.' Planetary protection thus has a two-way orientation: it cares about forward contamination by spacecraft (such as Mars robots) touching other planets' 'bio'spheres, and about the potential backward contamination by those spacecraft returning to Earth (like the Apollo mission, Japan's Hayabusa probe, etc.). In this context, the original idea was to aim 'at extending the concept of sustainability into our solar system and safeguarding a sustainable development of life on earth and beyond, be it of human or of other origin' (Losch, 2016b, 1). The sustainable development of humankind should be reconsidered in the context of the Solar System (Losch, 2016b, 7). Given this orientation, it made sense to connect the project to the existing NASA initiative, also called 'planetary sustainability' (Losch, 2016a, 2018), which aims at including in our planet's sustainable development the 'resources of the Solar System' (NASA, 2014). At the same time, the need for planetary protection was to be retained; the inclusion of a discussion of potential extraterrestrial life (ETL) or extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETIL) was always on the horizon of the concept, as my previous project had dealt with the anthropological, philosophical and theological implications of the potential existence of life beyond our planet (Losch, 2016c, 2017). Contrary to the focus of the previous project, the 'extraterrestrial beings' (Beisbart, 2019, 1) currently being discussed, however, are more likely to be microbes than intelligent entities. Unfortunately, I do not agree with Beisbart that it is a 'new concept of sustainability' which I would want to introduce. It is not meant to replace the current earthbound notion of sustainability, as is stated by Beisbart in his article (Beisbart, 2019, 1). Rather, the i...

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