The expansion of the human sphere beyond Earth has larger repercussions for understanding the present than is usually acknowledged. The outcome of a collaboration between a historian and a philosopher, this paper proposes Teilhard de Chardin’s 1946 notion of ‘planetization’ as a key analytical concept. Planetizing history amounts to situating it within a dynamically transforming horizon, emphasizing the significance of extra-terrestrial technology including robotic spacecraft and orbital infrastructures for the environmental, social and political histories of what is commonly theorized as globalization. To planetize history, then, is to show that the history of the globalized present cannot be written from an exclusively terrestrial point of view.