1689: Volodymyr Vernadsky on Atheist Scientific Humanism, the Biosphere, and the Noosphere
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/05/09
“I left aside, as much as I could, all philosophical aspirations and tried to rest only on firmly established scientific and empiric facts and generalizations, occasionally allowing myself to resort to working scientific hypotheses.”
“Living matter is the totality of living organisms. It is but a scientific empirical generalization of empirically indisputable facts known to all, observable easily and with precision.”
“Mankind, as living matter, is inseparably connected with the material-energetic processes of a specific geological envelope of the Earth — its biosphere.”
“Mankind cannot be physically independent of the biosphere for a single minute.”
“The geological evolutionary process shows the biological unity and equality of all men, Homo sapiens and his ancestors, Sinanthropus and others; their progeny in the mixed white, red, yellow, and black races evolves ceaselessly in innumerable generations.”
“The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it, for the first time, man becomes a large-scale geological force.”
“Thought is not a form of energy. How then can it change material processes? That question has not as yet been solved.”
“Now we live in the period of a new geological evolutionary change in the biosphere. We are entering the noösphere.”
“Man, as he is observed in nature, like all living organisms, like all living matter, is a definite function of the biosphere in its definite space-time.”
“The inert matter of the biosphere is largely the creation of life.”
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