"The postulation of a noosphere was appealing in its simplicity,
but in those pre-networked days (de Chardin died in 1955) it was
without much practical application. Even as knowledge continued to
expand, information remained sequestered in hundreds of disparate
languages, and archived in millions of globally distributed
libraries. De Chardin's concept could therefore at best be
considered a philosopher's abstraction — an interesting
paradigm to be bandied about in conceptual discussions.
"With the advent of the Internet and the Web, though, de
Chardin's noosphere seemed to have become real rather than
abstract. With so much accessible so easily to so many, the
philosopher's vision of the noosphere as the foundation for the
next evolutionary step of the cosmos seemed plausible, or at least
a jumping off point for the next major advancement in humanity's
own developmental path. Indeed, the emergence of language allowed
the first humans to share individual discoveries, and the
development of writing permitted knowledge to be more widely shared
and more reliably passed on to future generations. Each of these
major advances had unquestionably provided the basis for new and
dramatic advances in the development of human society. Must not the
ability to synthesize and share all of the world's information in
real time lead to another great leap forward?"
