Speaking at The Center for Design and Geopolitics, a think-tank directed by Benjamin Bratton at Calit2, Peter Krapp described a shift from racial tensions which existed throughout the 19th and 20th century towards a 21st century global environmental consciousness. The shift from racial tension to temperature measurements corresponds to what Bratton describes as ecologies of scale and planetary computation. Krapp states;

"..Indeed one might claim that the complex racial tensions which used to be found in every conical text during the 19th century more recently yield to climate consciousness and global politics. That of course raises the question whether we have simply overcome racial difficulties or whether we're now covering them over."

The rare earth element Thulium is named after the mythical island of Thule, a legendary Nordic region which existed in ancient antiquity. Like the mythologies which surround other antediluvian regions such as Atlantis, Hyperborea and Mu, the legends of Thule became the focus of spiritual and political upheaval during the turmoils of the 20th century.

The Thule Society was an esoteric occult group founded in 1918 by Walter Nauhaus and Rudolf von Sebottendorff - both German occultists and researchers. The society became a precursor to Nazism when it merged with the German Workers Party. The merging of these esoteric and exoteric factions then became the foundations of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. Occult and racist fantasies about the far north stemmed from an interpretation that Thule was the ethno-geographical origin of the Aryan Race. Like other legends such as the biblical Nephilim and the Mayan God Quetzalcoatl, the inhabitants of Thule were said to have celestial origins.

However, the Aryan category was fabricated through linguistic interpretations and erroneous theories of origin, not genetics. Contemporary interpretations of race have no taxonomic significance as all human beings belong to the same species - homo sapiens. Because races are not biologically valid categories within human populations, race is largely an outmoded social/anthropological system of categorization. If it can be said to be true that racial tensions are being replaced by a planetary ecological awareness then this also parallels growing tendencies across various fields which favour the networks, complex systems, computational models, diversity, quantum information, algorithms, and interfaces which take precedence over binary and outmoded systems of classification. What’s more, scientific based models allow for empirical traceability rather than biased interpretation.