40,000 years ago, humans invented creative cultures: the Creative Culture Revolution. 10,000 years ago, humans developed agriculture and animal herding: the Agricultural Revolution. 250 years ago, humans devised machines to utilize stored chemical energy from coal and oil and the techniques of mass production. This Industrial Revolution snowballed to huge population increase, more and bigger machines, invention of new materials and techniques until humans impacted the Biosphere as a new Kingdom of Life.  The Biospheric crisis from this runaway train of technology demands the Noospherian Revolution.

What is a Noosphere (pronounced like “no-us-fear”)? Imagine a gigantic brain spread around the entire planet, with each human a neuron. A brain contains billions of neurons and each neuron connects to thousands of others. The brain learns by establishing and strengthening these connections.

If humans are to survive, at least to survive with advanced civilization, they must manage the Earth as a whole. Complex systems science and information technics aided by computer systems makes this at least theoretically feasible. The main difficulty is social: how to get humans to cooperate?

Will today’s nations somehow join together into a “United States of the World,” or a “Planetary Union?” Will a “Green Party” or “Gaia Party” become strong enough to govern the globe as a super-nation?

These are all adaptations of the old paradigm from the invention of the State about 6,000 years ago. The State began as the city-state, expanded to city-state empires, the largest and most famous being the Roman Empire, then the nation-state and nation-state empires. All these are based on war and top-down hierarchical structures.

Each state maintains a standing military to protect itself against (and sometimes to dominate) other states which also have militaries. No land on Earth, except Antarctica, remains unclaimed by some Nation-state.

How did military and class structures begin? Humans developed weapons to hunt animals, and hunted a number of species to extinction. About 10,000 years ago, some humans developed herding and agriculture.

When humans hunted and gathered, they never accumulated much. Perhaps they dried some meat and preserved some vegetables to make it through the winter.

Here is a peaceful farming community. They have harvested their grain and will rely on that as their basic food supply until the next harvest. Now comes a gang of hungry hunters brandishing deadly weapons. “Your grain or your lives!”

Like many parasites, the gangster-hunters eventually reached a symbiosis with the hosts. Take some of the food and leave them the rest so they will grow more the next year. The gangs ruled their territory with their subject farmers and defended it against rival gangs. They gradually developed the class structure, calling themselves “kings” and “nobles” and drafting soldiers to help defend their territory, supporting themselves and their armies by the taxes on the farmers. Voila! The first states.

This situation has continued, with some morphing of forms, to the present day. Occasionally some of the subjects would stage a successful “revolution” and supplant the rulers, becoming the new ruling gang.

After the Industrial Revolution, instead of dominating farmers and taking (taxing) their grain, the gangs used factory workers and took the profits, as well as taxing their wages.

Most of the ruling classes tried to have their descendants inherit their status. Modern “democracies” allow more flexibility so that those not directly blood related can join the gangs if they prove themselves ruthless and hypocritical enough. Some of the most successful and long lasting gangs have been based on ideology instead of family ties. For instance, the Catholic Church has lasted many centuries.

Euphemisms and buzz-words snow most people. For example, “patriotism.” “Pledge allegiance to the flag…” To a flag? A piece of cloth? Do kings, presidents, generals die in wars? No. They send their soldiers out to die. So what is patriotism? A way of persuading young men to die for “their” country and women to support that, while the gangs in their comfortable armchairs smoke cigars and sip liqueurs and move the “chess pieces” around, exhorting their subjects to breed more cannon and factory fodder.

If it works why change it? The venerable “Protection Racket” survives the millennia. You better give us power because we will protect you from those evil gangs out there. The bogeyman changes from time to time but the gang always needs one or more. During the Cold War the Communists served for the US gang and the Capitalists for the Soviet gang. Simple.

G. W. Bush proclaimed his “Axis of Evil.” Donald Trump demands his wall.

Nixon cleverly invented the “War on Drugs,” an illusory, inanimate enemy that can never be defeated. Both the “legal” and “illegal” gangs rake in huge profits.

Daddy, there’s a monster in the closet! Terrorism. Boo! Sends shivers down your spine. All the gangs, legal and illegal, use terror as their modus operandi, but euphemisms disguise that.

Anyone who points out the truth (the Emperor has no clothes) risks censure as a heretic or traitor. “Whose side are you on?”

States base power on the implicit (sometimes explicit) threat of bodily harm, including the harm of involuntary confinement. States control people by the “carrot and stick” of money and prison, and occasional murder (euphemism: execution). The State punishes those who murder without its permission and rewards sponsored murderers (war heroes.)

The current system – States ruled by gangs supported by weapon wielding armies opposed to other States – points towards quick destruction of civilization by violence, nuclear weapons and so on, or slower destruction by degrading the Biosphere.

Then what will replace it?

Here’s a hint: who controls the Internet? Those stuck in the old paradigm don’t understand such a system; they think it must inevitably lead to disaster. Your own body works that way: fifty trillion cells with no king cell or ruling class of cells. Each cell does its work and yet the whole body functions.

If soldiers refused to fight, wars would die, no matter how Kings, Presidents, Mullahs, Party Chairmen, Prime Ministers, and other bosses blustered. Check out the Christmas Day Truce during World War 1. The perennial motto of Power: “Divide and Conquer.”

Similarly, if consumers did not buy their products, corporations would die. Consumers control corporations, despite brainwashing (advertising) to the contrary. If people did not eat its hamburgers, McDonald’s would not cut down the Amazon rain forest to raise cows for meat.

Some envision the future as a network of large cities, each controlling some of the surrounding area, somewhat like the ancient Greek Polis. Balancing that, large areas would remain wild, lightly populated by people who prefer a traditional tribal way of life. Each city could have a “green belt” as well as rooftop and vertical agriculture. Solar and wind farms could produce much of the needed power. Eliminating commuting for work would reduce energy consumption and pollution while long range transport shifts mostly to sailing ships and dirigibles.

Synergy: keyword of the Aquarian epoch, now beginning. An epoch is one twelfth of the Great, or Platonic year of 25,800 years, the time it takes for the earth to complete one “wobble” of its axis.

The Noosphere requires 2 other “spheres.” The Cybersphere (cyber from cybernetics from Greek kybernetes “helmsman”), a planetary system of informational feedback, is much facilitated by the internet. Anything anyone does anywhere on the planet affects the whole planet. “A butterfly flapping its wings in China…” There is no such thing as a decision affecting just one community or one nation.

Equally important, the Ethnosphere is the network of all cultures on the Earth (and eventually, in the Solar System.) The Internet, air travel, mobile phone systems, multinational corporations, supranational political, military, and economic organizations, NGO’s, immigrants, refugees, and various types of cultural exchange such as arts, trade in handicrafts, and translations, spread memes from one culture to others. Cultures, like individual organisms, continuously change while retaining a recognizable identity. The Ethnosphere considered as a super-culture comprises all of the cultures as branches and sub-branches.

Some bemoan the absorption of memes from other cultures, foreseeing all cultures eventually becoming an indistinguishable mash. But cultures do retain their “personalities.” As people recognize the beauty of the diversity of cultures, more will strive to protect the less powerful ones, just as today they strive to protect endangered animal and plant species. In fact, cultures are analogous to species in the human Kingdom of Symbolia.

The Noospherian Revolution, like a tide, advances almost imperceptibly, steadily and unstoppably. The outmoded structures of nationalism will gradually wither away, like limbs without blood supply. Their shells may linger on for a few centuries…