Dmitry Orlov:

The Technosphere and the Noosphere of the Earth
In my 2016 book Shrinking the Technosphere I described the technosphere as a nonhuman global emergent intelligence driven by an abstract teleology of total control, a networked machine with some human moving parts (fewer and fewer every day), utterly devoid of any moral or ethical sense (but skilled in using morality and ethics for manipulative purposes). The technosphere can keep you alive and comfortable if it finds you useful but can just as easily kill you, its killing technologies being some of the most advanced. I made the case that we ought to work diligently on shrinking the technosphere; not eliminating technology altogether, mind you, since that would spell the death of billions, but reigning it in and becoming the master of it rather than it being the master of us.

My book did define half the problem but, concentrating as it did on technology alone, it ignored the other half by placing an important question—What drives the totality of the human endeavor?—out of scope. Yes, the technosphere doesn't particularly care whether we live or die. If we must shrink the technosphere, then to what purpose? The technosphere is powerful, and to wage battle against it requires some measure of heroism and wild abandon. But what is to motivate us to become heroes—fear of death? Well, fear has never produced a hero. Why try to be a hero if mere cowardice can produce similar results?

What can control and shrink the technosphere is not you or me and our puny and pathetic efforts but cultural and civilizational forces beyond our control. In order to understand them, we first have to admit that nothing is out of scope. We need to start by examining the variety of religious mythologies that serve as the basis for most human motivations. Some of them constrain the technosphere in purposeful ways while others allow it to run rampant. These mythologies, along with everything that is built up on top of them, comprise the noosphere of the Earth, which I will attempt to describe.

The world has changed appreciably in the intervening years since I published this book, specifically in the direction of total control of the technosphere over our lives. Much of the world's population is now being ordered about, often seemingly at random, injected with experimental concoctions with unknown long-term consequences, forced to self-isolate and wear face masks. A certain not particularly lethal, quite possibly artificial respiratory virus has provided a convenient excuse—all to mask dire developments in the availability and affordability of fossil fuels. In many parts of the world basic human freedoms have all but evaporated: people now live in a panopticon, continuously observed and monitored for signs of disobedience by their computers and smartphones, ubiquitous security cameras, their public speech censored by artificial intelligence algorithms. It would seem that we now live in a technological anti-utopia that would surprise both Orwell and Huxley. The technosphere appears to have won; as of 2021, little stands in its way of sidelining the wise and old, brainwashing the young and foolish and replacing humans with widgets.

What I proposed in that book didn't work, but I have since learned enough to try to fix the problem, at least from the point of view of understanding it better. To do this, we first have to zoom out and place the concept of the technosphere within its proper context. The technosphere is but one aspect of a larger intellectual scheme created by the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, a luminary of 20th century science who founded entire new scientific disciplines—biochemistry and radiogeology—and was one of the founders of genetic mineralogy and geochemistry. None of the other 20th-cenury scientists could compare with him in his breadth of knowledge. The pinnacle of his creativity was his teaching about the biosphere—a result of synthesis of ideas and facts from tens of different branches of natural science. Vernadsky was a student of Dmitry Mendeleev, who, with his invention of the Mendeleev Table, founded modern chemistry. Vernadsky was, in turn, the teacher of Igor Kurchatov, the nuclear scientist who, among others, provided the USSR with the nuclear deterrent that saved it from annihilation by the USA, which it planned to carry out in the years following its successful atomic bombing of Japan.

These shining beacons of world science have been steadfastly ignored in the West. Mendeleev's contribution is impossible to ignore, and so Mendeleev's Table has been coyly renamed "The Periodic Table of Elements" while Vernadsky is hardly mentioned at all. And yet it is Vernadsky who provided the best conceptual framework for understanding life on Earth and humanity's place within it—much better than James Lovelock's amateur theologizing of an entirely imaginary and in its latest iteration supposedly vengeful Gaia. But Gaia is politically useful in threatening to unleash its sweet vengeance on anyone who dares to track carbon footprints across her sitting room rug.

Let's look at Vernadsky's model, which encompasses pretty much all that should ever concern us. Omitting some details, Earth is a ball with a solid iron core surrounded by molten or semi-molten mantle of silicate rock upon which floats a thin crust made up of lighter stuff that makes up the ocean floor and the islands and continents we inhabit. Nuclear fission reactions within Earth generate heat which is dissipated through volcanism, tectonic plate movement and the warming of the oceans from the bottom up. Amusingly, the agenda-driven scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have consistently flubbed even the simplest Earth science quiz, claiming that melting glaciers will cause sea levels to rise, neglecting to notice that both the land on which the glaciers rest and the ocean floor which their meltwater would push down are afloat. If the land ice melts and runs off into the oceans (a process that would take up to a million years) earthquakes would cause the land would rise and the sea floor to fall, negating the effect.

The biosphere (a term coined by Vernadsky) is a sphere located between the uppermost layers of Earth's crust and the lower reaches of the stratosphere where all the living things are, while areas both above and below are entirely bereft of life. But that's not all that's going on. Since Homo sapiens evolved, the biosphere has been increasingly transformed by the effects of two more spherical entities: the noosphere (from the Greek nöos, knowledge or wisdom)—a sphere of human knowledge. The noosphere is what makes Homo sapiens sapient. There is also the technosphere (also a Vernadsky coinage) which encompasses the ever-growing grab-bag of technical tricks available to all Homo sapiens regardless of their noospheric differences and which has increasingly developed a primitive mind and an agenda of its own.

For both the biosphere and the noosphere, diversity is key. Bombard Earth with asteroids or nuclear bombs, cover it with volcanic ash from nuclear eruptions, subtly alter its atmospheric chemistry by burning every bit of fossil fuel you can get your hands on—and it will bounce back, eventually, because once the dust settles some organisms that were previously lurking in the shadows will float up from the depths of the ocean or crawl out of some crevice and evolve to fill every newly available niche. Similarly with the noosphere: a certain set of myths (capitalism, communism, socialism, democracy, progress, climate catastrophism, universal human values, etc.) may flourish for a time, then perish, and other, perhaps newer, but most likely older myths will step out of the shadows and take their place.

If you imagined that the noosphere encompasses what you know or consider to be common knowledge in some officially, internationally recognized sense, you would probably be wrong. The noosphere is a stack that includes social relationships, political traditions, history, language, local custom and law, traditions, religious observances and at its foundation lie religious myths that give life meaning. Walk up to a random person and ask: "What is your life's purpose?" If the answer is along the lines of "Work and play well with others" or "Get rich and have sex with lots of strangers" or "Make enough to feed my family" than the Homo sapiensyou are talking to may not be particularly sapient, since the same motivations might drive an ape, an elephant, a penguin or even a termite. A more interesting answer would be more along the lines of "Become one with my spirit animal" or "Enter into the Kingdom of Heaven" or "Break the cycle of death and resurrection by reaching nirvana."

In spite of their great diversity, the myths that serve as the foundational elements of the noosphere can all be sorted into categories identified by a member of the following set: {NULL, 0, 1, 2, 3}. These identifiers indicate atheistic, polytheistic, monistic, dualistic and trinitarian mythologies. These numbers do not obey the laws of arithmetic but behave in the following counterintuitive and non-obvious ways:

Atheistic: NULL is NULL

Polytheistic: 0 = ∞

Monistic: 1≠1

Dualistic: 1+1=1

Trinitarian: 1+1+1=1

Next week, we shall look at each one of these.

RIVA: celkem nic novýho pod sluncem ... to že se tahle technologie dá použít, teda spíše zneužít je jasný... ale popravdě jim to moc nebude fungovat... každej kdo má děti mi jistě dá zapraavdu :D

GORG: ne, tím chce říct, že sebelepší formální vzdělání nezaručí, že se z tebe nevyklube fachidiot.

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