Earth System Science Discovery of the Technosphere
January 5, 2020/David P. Turner
The field of Earth System Science is a relatively young and is still working out how best to characterize Earth’s parts. A key difficulty is with including the human dimension in a comprehensive description of the contemporary Earth system. Earth scientists like to think in terms of the Earthly spheres and their interactions, e.g. the geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. By way of its industrial might, the global human enterprise recently has begun to exert an influence on the Earth system that is the equivalent to one of these spheres – effectively we have become a “geologic force”. One proposal for characterizing this newly evolved global scale presence is to call it the “technosphere”.
To gain an appreciation for the meaning of technosphere, it helps to draw an analogy to the term biosphere. We consider the biosphere to consist of all life on Earth. It lives on energy, mostly in the form of solar radiation that is converted to biomass by photosynthesis, and it has a throughput or cycling of mass, mostly in the form of carbon and essential nutrients.
The Earth system existed before the origin of life and the evolution of the biosphere. But once in place, the biosphere began exerting a strong influence on the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean, as well as on the global climate.
Likewise, the technosphere is a globe-girdling network of artifacts −including all machines, buildings, and electronic devices – that lives on energy, mostly derived from fossil fuels, and has a throughput of mass (food, fiber, minerals). The technosphere is growing rather irrepressibly, and like the biosphere before it, has begun to alter the global climate.
In a systems-oriented worldview, we try to differentiate parts and wholes, and to understand their relationship. Generally, a part does not control the whole. Thus, a critical feature of the technosphere is that humans are only a part of it, and correspondingly humanity cannot fully control it. The technosphere is said to have agency, its own agenda. It thrives on ever greater flows of energy and mass, which is not surprising when you realize that capitalism is its operating system.
Now that Earth system science has “discovered” the technosphere, we can study its structure, properties, dynamics, and how it interacts with the rest of the Earth system. An awareness that we serve the technosphere as much as it serves us may help us redesign and rebuild it in a way that makes a human-occupied Earth system more sustainable.
Recommended Reading
Earth’s ‘technosphere’ now weighs 30 trillion tons
Zalasiewicz, J., et al. 2017. Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. Anthropocene Review. 4:9-22.
Will Steffen , Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Opha Pauline Dube, Sébastien Dutreuil, Timothy M. Lenton and Jane Lubchenco. 2020. The emergence and evolution of Earth System Science. Nature Reviews, Earth and Environment, January 2020).
Haff, P. 2014. Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: Six rules. Anthropocene Review. 1:126-136.
Recommended Video
Daily world air traffic
Recommended Audio/Video
Bruce Cockburn, If a Tree Falls
