Noosphere - Instances in Popular Culture

Instances in Popular Culture

• American integral theorist Ken Wilber deals with this third evolution of the noosphere. In his work, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995), he builds many of his arguments on the emergence of the noosphere and the continued emergence of further evolutionary structures.

• The term Noöcene epoch refers to "how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we’ve created."

• The noosphere concept of 'unification' was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series. It is also the reason Teilhard is often called the patron saint of the Internet.

• Brian Stableford references human culture as a possible delirium or fever dream of the noösphere in his novella Mortimer Gray's History of Death, first published in 1995.

• Greg Bear used the concept of the Noösphere as the interaction space of his 'noöcytes' when he expanded his short story Blood Music to a full length novel in 1985.

• Ambient dance group The Orb, in the track "O.O.B.E." from the album U.F.Orb', use a sample from the reading of New Pathways in Psychology by Colin Wilson, who discusses the concept of the Noösphere.

• In The Gone-Away World, a novel by Nick Harkaway, Earth is devastated in a war fought with "Go-Away Bombs"—weapons which erase the information content of matter, causing it to disappear from reality. The fallout of these bombs, called "Stuff", subsequently draws information from the noosphere, "reifying" human ideas and thoughts into physical form and creating a fantasy landscape of monsters and horrors.

• In the essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", programmer and advocate Eric S. Raymond uses the concept in discussing the social workings of open-source software development.

• In the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Human Instrumentality Project has the goal of achieving the state of a Noosphere.

• In the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant is being used for scientific experiments involving adjusting the Noosphere to remove aggression from humans. As a failed attempt at doing this, the "Zone" was created.

• Progressive Death Metal band Obscura have a song called "Noosphere" on their album Cosmogenesis.

• In the 2008 video game LittleBigPlanet, the titular planet is described in terms similar to a noosphere—that is, it is the physical manifestation of idle human thoughts. Users can further expand on this idea by creating levels and uploading them to the servers for other players to experience.

• In F. Paul Wilson's 2009 Repairman Jack novel Ground Zero, the recurring character of The Lady is revealed to be a manifestation of the Noosphere whose function is that of a "beacon" which informs a higher intelligence ("the Ally") that sentient life exists in the area where she appears.

• In the 2009 Warhammer 40,000 novel Mechanicum by Graham McNeill, the noosphere is an experimental communication infrastructure that empowers the user by harnessing the power of the collective mind.

• In the book Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky the Noosphere is mentioned as being destroyed during the last war, and with it also destroying paradise and hell.

• Dan Simmons's Ilium/Olympos novels use the Noosphere as a way to explain the origins of powerful entities such as Ariel and Prospero, the former arising from a network of datalogging mote machines, and the latter of whom derives from a post-Internet logosphere.

• Cory Doctorow's short story "I, Rowboat" refers to noosphere as a cyberspace inhabited by digitised minds of humans who have chosen to leave their bodies.