Technosphere   |   PT  /  ES

A few basic concepts have been constructed to describe fundamental aspects of our uniquely complex living planet. One is the Earth System, to denote the central significance of the interconnections between its different components. Others convey, in a single word, major planetary components, such as “lithosphere”, “hydrosphere”, “atmosphere” and “biosphere. Though briefly expressed, these concepts are not simple, but encapsulate the complex processes and inter-connections involved. The biosphere concept, for instance, is much more than the sum total of all living organisms: it also captures the complex cycling of matter and energy within them, and intersections with other “spheres”, such as the production and maintenance within the atmosphere of more than a million billion tons of oxygen: a mass about a thousand times greater than current global biomass. These major classical spheres have existed on Earth for at least three billion years. Much more recently, they have been joined by a newcomer that is already a major part of — and simultaneously a perturbing agent within — the Earth System itself: the technosphere*.

The technosphere as now widely understood was developed conceptually by the late Peter Haff (2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2019, 2023). It does not simply mark the emergence of technology on Earth, because animals such as crows and octopi are known tool users, and this behaviour must extend back many millions of years, while prehistoric human use of stone and bone tools was culturally and environmentally significant, but did not constitute a global entity with major impact on the Earth System.  Today’s technological systems are of wholly different magnitude and scale. The growing mass of technological objects in use today – buildings, roads, tools and so on – now exceeds a trillion tons (and recently exceeded the mass of all life on Earth). The mass of waste and discards is at least an order of magnitude greater still. The technosphere has grown exponentially in the 20th and 21st century, attributed to an autocatalytic process by which the products of the technosphere accelerate its growth. 

This technology was built by humans, clearly, but in Haff’s concept humans are not as much creators of the technosphere, as an integral component of it, including through the roles played by human institutions such as governments, industries, universities, armies and so on. Our domesticated animals also form part of the technosphere, most clearly symbolized by the broiler chicken, a technological construct living in artificial surroundings and unable to survive in the wild. 

Virtually all humans on Earth are now utterly dependent on the technosphere for food, shelter, employment and myriad other services. But, collectively they have no overall control over it, not least because humanity is divided into many mutually competing, and all too often warring, factions. 

Rather, humans and their institutions are caught up within the dynamics of the rapidly evolving technosphere that is, in Haff’s memorable analogy, ‘racing ahead like a forest fire’, human planning within it being piecemeal and mostly responsive to local pressures; Haff saw the technosphere as autonomous, and so beyond overall human control, and possessing agency – though not the same as human agency. Like the biosphere, thus, the technosphere is greater – and more complex – than the sum of its parts. It is also growing and evolving extremely rapidly, having doubled its functional physical mass in the last quarter-century, and also developing new components and processes, such as recent proliferation of AI, a development that further compromises the role of human agency.   

Of wider significance, the technosphere is increasingly impacting the rest of the Earth System, beyond its burgeoning physical presence. Most of the energy driving it comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. The resulting changed abundances of trace greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are causing a buildup of heat energy in the ocean/atmosphere system that is an order of magnitude, or more, greater than the useful energy that humans obtained from this combustion. These greenhouse gases are just one part of the technosphere’s waste products that also include novel pollutants such as pesticides, the “forever chemicals”, waste plastics and myriad others, many being biologically harmful. While the biosphere has coevolved with the other “spheres” for more than three billion years and recycles most of its components while powered mostly by solar energy, the technosphere is an entirely new phenomenon, currently largely powered by the ‘one-off’ burning of buried hydrocarbons, and recycling relatively little of its component materials. 

Essentially an offshoot of the biosphere, the technosphere is now parasitizing and diminishing the biosphere, while having wider impacts across the Earth System that even now are transformative, to the extent of taking it out of the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene Epoch into the different, still evolving conditions of the Anthropocene. Considering the technosphere, and not simply ‘human impacts’, as a driving agent in this transformation may help us better understand the processes taking place, and the degrees of freedom we have to steer towards more stable and sustainable planetary conditions.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams

* We address this question in A disharmony of spheres in the Anthropocene?, the first chapter of the volume Planetary Metaphysics: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Perspectives on the Human-Earth Relationship, edited by Boris Shoshitaishvili, forthcoming from Indiana University Press.