Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and his Revolutionary Theory of the Biosphere and the Noosphere

Lecture5. Biosphere and her steadiness

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was a Russian and Soviet mineralogist and

geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry,

biogeochemistry, and of radiogeology.

Vernadsky first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the

idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific

community. The word 'biosphere' was invented by Austrian geologist

Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911.

Living matter gives the biosphere an extraordinary character, unique in the universe... Cosmic energy determines the pressure of life that can be regarded as the transmission of solar energy to the Earth's surface... Activated by radiation, the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy, and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth... A new character is imparted to the planet by this powerful cosmic force. The radiations that pour upon the Earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the Earth... In its life, its death, and its decomposition an organism circulates its atoms through the biosphere over and over again.

А definite geological envelope markedly distinguished from all other geological envelopes of our planet. This is only because it is inhabited by living matter, which reveals itself as a geological force of immense proportions, completely remaking the biosphere and changing its physical, chemical, and mechanical properties, but also because the biosphere is the only envelope of the planet into which energy permeates in a notable way, changing it even more than does living matter.

In the biosphere thesis, the Earth represents itself as a small particle in a gigantic Universe, a minute oasis where under some laws the conditions for life emerged, life which the Earth protects from penetration by the Sun's ultra-violet rays. (Arbatov and Bolshakov, 1987).

Vernadsky defined the future evolutionary state of the biosphere as the Noosphere, the sphere of reason.

According to Vernadsky, the biosphere became a real geological force that is changing the face of the earth, and the biosphere is changing into the noosphere. In Vernadsky's interpretation (1945), the noosphere, is a new evolutionary stage of the biosphere, when human reason will provide further sustainable development both of humanity and the global environment:

In our century the biosphere has acquired an entirely new meaning; it is being revealed as a planetary phenomenon of cosmic character... In the twentieth century, man, for the first time in the history of earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geographic map of the planet earth, and colonized its whole surface. Mankind became a single totality in the life on earth... The noosphere is the last of many stages in the evolution of the biosphere in geological history.  

Vernadsky made an important contribution to science in general, and in ecology in particular. It is essentially Vernadsky's theory of the biosphere, expounded in his work "Biosfera" (1926) that is embodied in the global approach to ecological problems today. To solve global ecological problems that may endanger even the very existence of humanity in t5he future, a cultivation of a new worldview among people, and especially young generations, is absolutely needed. I.P.Volkov (1997) puts it this way:

The methodological rule of the global approach is to rise above the everyday occurrence, run up above the Earth, to become that astronaut who's observed the Earth from the Moon, for example, as the American astronauts have done it seven times, or to become a spaceman watching (and studying) the planet phenomena from the orbit near our Earth. Though none of the globalists has visited outer space yet, nevertheless, each of them is able to do it with the help of psyche in his imagination, in his thoughts, in his imaginary view of the planet from space. That is the noospheric outlook on the phenomena of the Earth.

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