The End of Earthly Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 197

Stalinist times while arguing forcefully for academic freedom with
both of these regimes. The biosphere, he said, was not just the assem-
blage of all animals and plants at the Earth's surface. It was all of these
linked together, and linked too with their rocky and watery substrate,
to store and transform the Sun's energy. The biosphere, he said, is a
system that regulates conditions on the face of the Earth.
In 1920s Paris, Vernadsky, together with the French scientists and
philosophers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Éduard le Roy, added the
concept of a noosphere, a sphere of human thought around the world
which was itself beginning to control processes at the Earth's surface.
Peter Haff has taken that idea and turned it on its head. 114 We are not
so much in control, he says: rather, the system that we have created is
now evolving according to its own dynamics.
The 7 billion humans on Earth today are kept alive only through
the continuous action of an enormous, globally interlinked system of
transport and communication, metabolized by the use of vast
amounts of energy (mainly from fossil fuels), and controlled by our
bureaucracies. It produces and distributes all the materials that we
need for food, shelter, and everything else. Without it, most of us
would not be alive—and therefore we are forced to keep it going.
Viewed from the inside, we create and control it. Viewed from the
outside however, Peter Haff argues, it has developed an existence of its
own, and we humans are entrained within it as component parts (in
that we have currently no realistic alternative). With its own novel
material character and dynamics, it may be regarded as an emergent
system—one that, like all systems, appropriates matter and energy
from its surroundings for its own existence and development.
The technosphere is developing and evolving at extraordinary
speed, and now its component parts (computers and mobile phones,
for example) are virtually unrecognizable from one generation to
another. By linking, ever more closely, its biological components