Noösphere
A working definition written for this wiki from the notes · first appears in Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere ()
Vernadsky's term, credited in his own footnote to Édouard Le Roy (Moynihan and Infinity Mirror credit Teilhard), for the state the biosphere enters when human reason becomes its dominant geological agent. In the excerpt Antikythera republished it is matter, not spirit: the noösphere is created by Cultural Biogeochemical Energy, reason-directed free energy that now moves more matter than all other life, and its growth is social rather than neural (Reason as a Social Structure). Vernadsky treats its formation as an irreversible geological process that will end famine and war within centuries. That confidence is where the corpus divides. Bratton's Noocene adopts the noösphere as "matter becoming cognitive" but drops the guarantee; Moynihan reads that inevitabilism as the blind spot of a founder who foresaw atomic energy yet denied the noösphere could fail; the programme overview rejects "a single noosphere" as anthropomorphic.
Glossary generated 2026-09-09 · may be out of date