Emperors and generals believe that it is they who make historical decisions. Meanwhile, the course of history is made up of the sum of the aspirations and efforts of all people. In this, the conclusions of the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky are close to the conclusions of the writer Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy, defining the course of history as the resultant of many human wills, relied on artistic intuition, while Vernadsky came to this idea on the basis of scientific data. Under the influence of human thought and labor, the biosphere – the totality of all living and non-living things on Earth – eventually transforms into the noosphere, and the mind (“noos” in Greek) becomes the dominant principle in it. There are many examples of this. “The discovery of fire was the first time that a living organism mastered … one of the forces of nature.” This discovery saved the life of an ancient man – he would hardly have survived the Ice Age without fires. What we eat directly affects what (and whom) we grow, and, therefore, how we influence the world. The discovery of radioactivity means that we have mastered a gigantic energy that can change the face of the planet. So in different ways, a person actively transforms the biosphere and leads it (through his mistakes and delusions) to a new, more perfect state. Vernadsky deeply believed in the laws he formulated: in October 1941, when German troops were near Moscow, he wrote in his diary: “… The position of Germany is hopeless. The victory of the fascists is impossible, because it contradicts the laws of the biosphere.”
ITS DATES
- 1863 Born in St. Petersburg.
- 1881–1885 Studied at St. Petersburg University under Mendeleev, Sechenov, Butlerov.
- 1886 Marries Natalya Staritskaya, with whom he lived for 56 years.
- 1898–1911 Professor at Moscow University.
- 1903 Monograph “Fundamentals of Crystallography”.
- 1908 “Experience in descriptive mineralogy”.
- 1914–1921 Creates a commission to study the natural productive forces of Russia.
- 1917 Leaves Russia due to tuberculosis and establishes the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
- 1926 Publication of “Biosphere”.
- 1928–1938 Research on the circulation of substances and gases of the Earth, on cosmic dust.
- 1943 Stalin Prize of the 80st degree for the XNUMXth anniversary.
- January 6, 1945 Died in Moscow.
Vernadsky lived an unusually intense life not only in science. Until 1917, he was involved in many social movements, was engaged in public education, was the founder and member of the Central Committee of the Kadet Party, a member of the State Council, advocated agrarian reform and the abolition of the death penalty. And although in 1926 Vernadsky returned from France, where he lectured, to Soviet Russia, he had no illusions about the system under which he spent his mature years: “Bolshevism is kept by the disorder of life. This is a form of a lower order, even in comparison with the capitalist system, since it is based on the enslavement of the human personality … It is clear that the communists failed to create anything and they suffered a complete fiasco.
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Vernadsky’s personality was shaped by the nineteenth century, he created the science of the twentieth, and as a thinker he is close to us. He read the first editions of Dostoevsky’s novels, together with Tolstoy he helped the starving and collaborated in the Posrednik publishing house, along with Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Fedorov developed the ideas of Russian cosmism. Summarizing the results of more than a hundred disciplines, he founded a new field of knowledge – biogeochemistry, which studies the activity of the totality of all organisms in outer space – “living matter”. Working at the intersection of sciences, he constantly thought about how man and human history are inscribed in the history of nature. Already at the beginning of the process that we today call globalization, Vernadsky foresaw that humanity would become a single entity in which each of us creates both nature and history.
HIS VIEW ON THE WORLD
“Life arises only from life, and nothing else. And this means that each of us has a history going back to the moment of the emergence of life. We are a living memory.”
“Man is so deeply rooted in the earth that a single, all-encompassing, totality is created – not man and nature as separate phenomena, but a single organic whole.”
“The only thing that will not perish in this world is spiritual effort.” Our private relationships, words and deeds affect world harmony and the future of the Universe.
Solidarity of mankind
“… For the first time in the history of mankind, we are in the conditions of a single historical process that has engulfed the entire biosphere of the planet. The complex historical processes that, in part over a number of generations, proceeded independently and closed, have just ended, which in the end in our twentieth century created a single, inextricably linked whole. An event which took place in the depths of India or Australia may be sharply and profoundly reflected in Europe or America, and produce there consequences of incalculable significance for human history. And perhaps the main thing – the material, really continuous connectedness of mankind, its culture – is steadily and rapidly deepening and intensifying. Communication is becoming more intense and varied and constant.
The history of the past mental culture of mankind is so little known to us now that we cannot clearly imagine those stages of the past that led to the modern universality of the life of people, embraced by it – its unity – no matter in which corner of the biosphere they may live. Now they cannot hide from it anywhere – neither in the field of spiritual life, nor in the field of everyday life. And the pace of consolidation of universality is so great that its realization for now living generations is quite real, there is no need to argue about it.
The increase in the universality, the solidarity of all human societies is constantly growing and becomes noticeable in a few years, almost every year. Scientific thought is the same for everyone, and the same scientific methodology, the same for everyone, has now embraced all of humanity, spread throughout the biosphere, turning it into a noosphere … “
V. Vernadsky “Scientific thought as a planetary phenomenon” (Nauka, 1991).