The Noosphere – literally, “mind-sphere” or Earth’s mental sheath – is a word and concept jointly coined by Édouard Le Roy, French philosopher and student of Henri Bergson, Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Russian geochemist, Vladimir Vernadsky, in Paris, 1926.

At the root of the primary definition of noosphere is a dual perception: that life on Earth is a unity constituting a whole system known as the biosphere; and that the mind or consciousness of life – the Earth’s thinking layer – constitutes a unity that is discontinuous but coextensive with the entire system of life on Earth, inclusive of its inorganic support systems. A third critical premise arising from the first two is that the noosphere defines the inevitable next stage of terrestrial evolution, which will subsume and transform the biosphere. Continue reading →