Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945)
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945)
Founder of scientific schools in mineralogy and geochemistry, pioneer of two scientific disciplines—biogeochemistry and radiogeology. Academician of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, laureate of the first-class Stalin Prize (1943), one of the representatives of Russian cosmism.
Vernadsky asserted that humanity, in the course of its development, increasingly becomes a new "geological force" that transforms the face of the planet through thought and labour. This means that for its own preservation, it is obliged to take responsibility for the biosphere, which is transforming into the noosphere. This will require both a special social organisation and a new ethics—ecological and simultaneously humanitarian. The academician wrote of the noosphere as a predetermined reality and an inevitable future.
Vernadsky left no finished list: provisions on what ensures the transition to the noosphere—the sphere of reason—are scattered through his works of different years, and it was already researchers of his legacy who compiled them into a list. In general, it looks like this.
1. The peopling of the entire planet by mankind.
2. A sharp transformation of means of communication and exchange between countries.
3. The strengthening of ties, including political ones, between all states of the Earth.
4. The beginning of the dominance of man's geological role over other geological processes occurring in the biosphere.
5. The expansion of the boundaries of the biosphere and mankind's venture into space.
6. The discovery of new energy sources.
7. The equality of people of all races and religions.
8. The increase in the role of the popular masses in deciding questions of domestic and foreign policy.
9. The freedom of scientific thought and scientific inquiry from the pressure of religious, philosophical and political doctrines; conditions in the social and state structure favourable to the free development of science.
10. A well-designed system of popular education and a rise in the welfare of the working people; real possibility of preventing malnutrition, hunger and destitution and substantially weakening the influence of disease.
11. The rational transformation of the virgin nature of the Earth—so that it is capable of satisfying all the material, aesthetic and spiritual needs of the numerically growing population.
12. The exclusion of wars from social life.
The ideas of Fyodorov and Solovyov regarding man as an active co-creator and transformer of the world receive their natural-scientific foundation in Vernadsky—this is how the tradition of Russian cosmism reads him. He himself did not cite Fyodorov: the affinity here lies not in inheritance but in a coincidence of thought. Vernadsky regarded the transformation of the biosphere into the noosphere as an objective and quite natural process of the evolution of life on the planet.
