envelope of the Earth – its biosphere. Not for a single moment can humankind be physically independent of its environment.
Vernadsky in his St. Petersburg office 1921
In the course of the development of Vernadsky’s notions of the biosphere as the most active part of the planet’s matter and its connection with cosmic factors, he was getting a more extensive idea about its limits – the boundaries of the integral approach within which the biosphere processes were to be studied in order to get as close as possible to an exhaustive understanding of the subject. Reading his Essays on Geochemistry and The Biosphere, it is easy to see that the author, while projecting the phenomena he considers on the whole biosphere, is constantly reminding us that the planet itself also has its external connections, its “habitat” in the cosmos. The dependence of the biosphere upon the luminous radiation of the Sun is obvious to us all, but Vernadsky had left the problem of the Earth’s cosmic connections open for further discoveries in this field, since he understood their scientific inevitability. We now know more about these connections than in Vernadsky’s time. It is enough to remember the galactic and extra-galactic cosmic radiation, the role of the magnetosphere of the Earth in preventing the destructive effects of cosmic radiation upon terrestrial life, the loss of terrestrial oxygen in the upper layers of the atmosphere, the role of the ozone screen of the Earth, and the connection of biological processes with solar activity. But all this is included in the realm embraced by Vernadsky’s scientific mind, which actually had no boundaries.
Reflecting on the structure or the macrostructure of the visible cosmos as an object of scientific study, Vernadsky clearly distinguished “three separate layers of reality,” within which the scientifically stated facts are situated. These three layers of reality, in all probability, differ distinctly from each other in properties of space and time. They penetrate into one another, but they are definitely realms unto themselves, distinctly delimited from one another both in their content and in the methods of studying their manifestations. These layers are the following: the phenomena of cosmic spaces, the planetary phenomena of our visible “nature,” so close to us, and the microscopic realm in which gravity is of secondary importance. The phenomena of life are observed only in the two latter layers of world reality.
Vernadsky embraced with his mind’s view all these layers of the world’s reality. Such scope of thinking is unprecedented in the last centuries of exact (not speculative) sciences. At the same time, one cannot but think that the scope of his ideas is directly related to philosophical and religious systems of the ancient East, India, and Tibet, although Vernadsky based his ideas strictly on empirical data from which he never digressed. In the literature “the phenomenon of Vernadsky” is often spoken of in connection with the power of his scientific thinking. Of course, there were many factors that contributed to his development as a scientist, such as his education and upbringing, his will, his character, his persistence (as noted, he read in fifteen languages), his analytical and critical mind, etc. But many other scientists possessed all these to a certain extent. What, then, is the “phenomenon of Vernadsky?”
The main features of his thinking are probably his wide range of thought and his extraordinary breadth of scientific generalization, not in some definite field but in everything with which he dealt. The scope of his scientific generalization is enormous. In order to embrace with his mind the specific role of living organisms in changing the Earth’s crust, which he had already comprehended in general, he had to abstract himself from the specific functions of millions of animal species, and see only the one common function involved in changing the surrounding non-living nature – a function that could not be seen by botanists, zoologists, nor microbiologists. He saw this in the geologically generalized property of all living organisms – in their capacity to transform the energy and matter of the upper envelopes of the planet. It was then that the new, large-scale notion of “living matter” appeared to denote this generalized bearer of the generalized function of living organisms.
Being a geologist, Vernadsky could not do without this notion of his newly realized geological power of living organisms, comparing it with the classical tectonic processes: volcanism, water and wind erosion, and other traditionally known geological causes of change of the planet’s face in its geological history. This newly discovered geological force has turned out to be much more powerful than the natural elemental forces, and it is of cosmic essence, since it is brought into action by the energy of cosmic and solar radiation.
These new notions and terms in science each have a different degree of significance. The notion of living matter has invaded the very structure of natural sciences. It has made the vast world of living organisms, the world of botanists, zoologists, and microbiologists, an object of a quite different geological science. Geology has drawn from biology a new geological factor that had never been included into its competence, and which is, as it has turned out, the crucial one among the other, traditional, geological factors changing the planet’s face. Now, botanists and zoologists as well as microbiologists are able to consider their objects from a different standpoint, that of their geochemical function in the biosphere.
Vernadsky circa 1911
Vernadsky’s work on the role of living matter in Earth’s history did not stop at this point. With his mind’s eye he managed to see the part of living matter that, though relatively small, was extremely important from the standpoint of geology: the living matter of humans. Before civilizations appeared, the human population of the Earth had not differed from the whole mass of higher organisms in its biogeochemical role. But it began to manifest itself as an essentially new natural force in Mesopotamia, Chaldea, and Athens, in the school of Plato, in the philosophy of Democritus, Aristotle, and Socrates, in the teachings of Ptolemy, and then, with an increasing crescendo, in the teachings of Copernicus, Bruno, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. I should add Vernadsky to the list, too. Of course this list is quite relative, and intended only to illustrate Vernadsky’s thought that such a small part of the biosphere generated and is still generating a qualitatively new factor in the development of the biosphere: the rapidly increasing sum of scientific knowledge about the biosphere, about the direction and volume of humans’ productive activity, which had reached the scale of a new geological force.
This empirical fact brought forth another generalization unprecedented in the history of science, but characteristic of the scope of Vernadsky’s mind. As in the case of the global notion of “living matter,” he abstracted the essence from the specific content of the countless specific scientific facts in the numerous particular scientific disciplines. In this vast multitude of scientific data he saw a certain general essence and called it “scientific thought.” All the diversity of science of all times and nations was generalized into “scientific thought,” like all the diversity of life into “living matter.” By this name he denoted this qualitatively new and, again, geologically significant product of biosphere development as a generalized and independent force on a geological scale, this time produced by an extremely small quantity of the planet’s living matter – that of humans.
In his notion of “scientific thought” or “scientific mind” he saw not an encyclopedia of science, but a generalized, average motion of human thought as part of the planet’s development – its geological history. That is why he collected his unpublished notes under the title “Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon,” which he failed to complete although he considered it his principal book. These notes were later published under the same title (Mysl, 1991).
Taking into consideration the rapid increase of human activities affecting the biosphere, and the anticipation of their further increase, Vernadsky came to a conclusion about the appearance of a new qualitative state of the biosphere, in which “scientific thought” increasingly becomes the main factor determining its further state and evolution, and is already an independent factor of the biosphere determining and
