Abstract
Throughout the 20th century, several thinkers noticed that Technology was becoming a global phenomenon. More recently, US geologist Peter Haff claimed that a Technosphere is now in place and can be conceived as a new Earth geological system. This unprecedented situation is creating enormous challenges not only for our species, since more and more of its members are now dependent on the subsistence of this man-made sphere, but also for other species and natural ecosystems that have become increasingly dependent on it. Perhaps the most crucial of these challenges is the sustainability of the Technosphere itself. In the first part of the article, I attempted a critical reconstruction of Haff’s Technosphere concept. The second part is dedicated to analyzing how the unsustainability of the Technosphere represents a global catastrophic risk and ultimately an existential risk.
Highlights
At the beginning of The Decay of Lying, in a scene set in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire, Cyril—the pro-naturalist—says to Vivian—the anti-naturalist: If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air
In the evolutionary process of our species, we have never ceased to create technologies to repair or compensate for the imperfections of Nature and yet make our existence more adapted to circumstances and more comfortable (Technology as Anthropologically Constitutive/Constituent thesis of the School of Compiègne; Steiner 2010)
There is an increasing autonomy of the Technosphere and, at the same time, a decrease in the control of it by human beings; but, on the other hand, only humans will be able to prevent the appropriation and depletion of resources, metabolic excess, and little recycling. This means that the problem of the sustainability of the Technosphere was created by human beings and can only be solved by them
Summary
At the beginning of The Decay of Lying, in a scene set in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire, Cyril—the pro-naturalist—says to Vivian—the anti-naturalist: If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. This question implies (re)thinking the design, architecture, and engineering of the Technosphere as a whole, and ways to manage and govern it that go beyond the paradigm of international relations based on the nation-state, and examining in depth the unprecedented philosophical, ethical-political, challenges that arise from it In a sense, it was only in the second decade of this century, when Peter Haff started to think of the Technosphere—literally, an artificial sphere in which the Earth is involved—in an external (or extraterrestrial) way, that is, in a global and integrated perspective, to better understand what goes on inside it, especially how it relates to the planet’s natural spheres, that this issue began to be effectively addressed
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