Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945)
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945)
Founder of scientific schools in mineralogy and geochemistry, and originator of two scientific fields — biogeochemistry and radiogeology. Academician of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and of the USSR Academy of Sciences, laureate of the first-class Stalin Prize (1943), one of the representatives of Russian cosmism.
Vernadsky maintained that, in the course of its development, humanity is increasingly becoming a new “geological force”, transforming the face of the planet through thought and labour. This means that, for the sake of its own survival, it is obliged to take responsibility for the biosphere, which is turning into the noosphere. This will require both a special social organisation and a new ethics — ecological and, at the same time, humanistic. The academician wrote of the noosphere as a predetermined reality and an inevitable future.
Vernadsky left no finished list: statements about what secures the transition to the noosphere — the sphere of reason — are scattered across his works from various years, and it was researchers of his legacy who later compiled them into a list. In summary, it looks like this.
1. The settlement of the entire planet by humankind.
2. A sharp transformation of the means of communication and exchange between countries.
3. The strengthening of ties, including political ones, among all the states of the Earth.
4. The beginning of the predominance of humanity's geological role over the other geological processes occurring in the biosphere.
5. The expansion of the boundaries of the biosphere and humanity's venture into space.
6. The discovery of new sources of energy.
7. The equality of people of all races and religions.
8. An increase in the role of the popular masses in deciding questions of domestic and foreign policy.
9. Freedom of scientific thought and scientific inquiry from the pressure of religious, philosophical, and political constructs; conditions in the social and state order favourable to the free development of science.
10. A well-thought-out system of public education and a rise in the welfare of working people; a real possibility of preventing malnutrition, hunger, and destitution, and of sharply weakening the influence of disease.
11. The rational transformation of the Earth's primordial nature — so that it is capable of satisfying all the material, aesthetic, and spiritual needs of a numerically growing population.
12. The exclusion of wars from the life of society.
The ideas of Fyodorov and Solovyov about man as an active co-creator and transformer of the world find, in Vernadsky, a natural-scientific grounding — this is how the tradition of Russian cosmism reads him. He himself did not cite Fyodorov: the kinship here lies not in inheritance but in a coincidence of trains of thought. Vernadsky regarded the transformation of the biosphere into the noosphere as an objective and entirely natural process in the evolution of life on the planet.
