A growing Noosphere discourse proposes a meaningful narrative and vision for the future, where the geosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere—including humans and machines—could work in concert to unleash a new level in evolution.
The noosphere as a superorganism can be much better articulated thanks to Living Systems Theory, a theory of the living that has been applied from cells and organs to society and supranational levels. The main proposition is that every living system has 20 critical subsystems (or functions) processing either matter–energy or information .
Intentionally developing the global superorganism is very challenging, and traditional centralized design, planning and control are unlikely to be appropriate and effective.
The boundary of the noosphere should aim to become a planetary superorganism, that is, not only a human superorganism but also the planet as a whole, including the geosphere, the biosphere, humanity, and the technosphere. This implies, for example, that fossil fuels are no longer a free supply of energy from the environment but simply a limited reserve inside the planet’s storage subsystem.
Looking at Earth from space at a very coarse level, the noosphere as a planetary superorganism is likely to become more and more an integrated living system once it takes as energy input the Sun and rejects waste out of its gravitational bound into space—space junk in orbit is still an issue! In this way, our planet would become more and more an efficient open system thermodynamically speaking—another common denominator of all living things.
The noosphere is first and foremost a major evolutionary transition.
Major evolutionary transitions depict the few moments in the history of life where radical novelty and change has happened. These include the origin of life itself, eukaryote cells, multicellular organisms, sexual reproduction, cultural transmission, mental modelling and, as a growing number of evolutionary scientists are recognizing and debating, the emergence of a kind of planetary superorganism.
One other way that may help unleash international cooperation more systematically would be to apply core design principles at multiple human scales, up to nation-states, to progressively transform planet Earth into a cooperative unit with a functional global governance.
It is worth reminding ourselves that we do not even have the equivalent of thermoregulation for planet Earth—i.e., we are still unable to stabilize global warming and climate change. By contrast, in all warm-blooded animals, thermoregulation is a basic and fundamental control mechanism. My point is that we should attempt to develop and secure the analogue of an autonomous nervous system before hoping to jump to complex and advanced planetary cognitive functions. Of course, some functions may be developed in parallel, but survival ones should take priority.
The noosphere as a planetary superorganism would become a truly living system when it could be observed as such from space. This emergence of the noosphere in the galaxy might arise when Earth becomes whole, an entity with its own individuality.