The internet as the noosphere
The noosphere is the mental part of the universe. I like to remember the noosphere by using an example. Let us say, for instance, that every Bible on the face of the planet was to magically vanish. Not a single Bible in a church, house, museum, library, etc… There are people who have studied the Bible enough to where, if they were to all vanish, those people could come together and from memory be able to recreate the Bible. Another example? Let us say that the Mona Lisa painting was to burn up in a fire. The recreations of the paintings would disappear. Even though we physically don’t have a copy of the real Mona Lisa, we all have the image burned and installed in our mind and we know what it looks like.
Al Gore has attempted to take credit for creating the Internet, and people laugh it off. Many people believe it was a group of professors and scientists; they wanted to share information through the computer. But some people believe that Teilhard da Chardin is the person who deserves the credit of creating the Internet in 1925. Teilhard de Chardin refers to the noosphere as a concept of the Internet as an evolution of thought and consciousness. The Internet alone can be used as a form of the noosphere. This quote by John Perry Barlow should further explain. "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”