Although Earth system sciences have embraced the term “technosphere” to conceptualize planetary processes, its use is not universal, and there are many sceptics. One might ask, “Does the technosphere actually exist?” There is a more cautious interpretation of the term, viewing it merely as a concept that serves specific modelling purposes without making any realistic or ontological claims. In this sense, the term would not imply the existence of a technosphere as a concrete entity. Many scientific concepts exist in this manner. For example, the entire discipline of sociology is based on the notion of “society,” yet we can question the ontological significance of that term.
On the one hand, we can certainly insist on technology’s materiality. After all, technological artifacts are everywhere and have a literal weight on the planet. But does that justify assigning them the status of a “sphere”? Let us compare the term with another well-recognized one: the cryosphere, which refers to all parts of the Earth’s surface where we find water in its frozen state. For something to be considered a “sphere,” permanence is essential; otherwise, during winter, my courtyard would sometimes be part of the cryosphere and would move out again days later. We refer to the cryosphere because these areas of the Earth’s surface have a significant and systematic impact on the Earth’s climate. However, calling it a “sphere” is somewhat misleading because we cannot say that the regions of the cryosphere are globally connected. In fact, this lack of connection may be a critical cause of many of its distinct impacts in creating gradients of climatic flows.
In this sense, there is an important difference compared to the concept of the biosphere, which implies a global scope and connectivity. Many uses of the term “technosphere” take the biosphere as a reference rather than the cryosphere. If used similarly to the latter, the technosphere would indeed exist in a material sense, but it would not compare to the biosphere in terms of systematic closure and global scope.
The difference between the biosphere and the cryosphere lies in their fundamental characteristics and processes. The biosphere is distinguished by its evolutionary processes and creativity, introducing new elements into the Earth’s system. In contrast, the cryosphere is ontologically static, changing only with alterations in the physical states of the Earth, such as melting glaciers and their movements. It does not generate these changes endogenously. The term “autopoietic” is often applied in this context: the biosphere is the sphere of autopoietic life. Erwin Schrödinger famously provided a physical interpretation of this phenomenon, noting that life maintains physical states that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The cryosphere adheres to these thermodynamic laws, while life creates ontological pockets where it appears to stall or even counteract these laws. However, it would be erroneous to view life as simply resisting these processes; it actually serves as a physical means to further accelerate the dissipation of energy within the Earth system. The marvels of life arise from its capacity to develop increasingly complex forms of order while concurrently driving the planet’s thermodynamic processes. This mechanism involves absorbing radiation from the sun and emitting ‘waste’ radiation into outer space.
Is the technosphere more similar to the cryosphere or the biosphere? In both cases, we would acknowledge its existence. The question is which fundamental models we use to describe and explain changes in these spheres. The technosphere would resemble the biosphere only if it exhibits the same fundamental features of autopoiesis, novelty, and the ability to maintain thermodynamic disequilibrium endogenously. This perspective is often contested, as critics point to the critical role of humans in driving the evolution of the technosphere. I have always maintained that the technosphere is autonomous and that the impression of human control is a pre-scientific delusion.
There is no dispute that the technosphere shares the feature of creativity with the biosphere. The technosphere creates entirely new substances on Earth, new kinds of objects, and even entirely new physical phenomena, such as lasers. Evolutionary economists often do not endorse the view that this creativity stems solely from humans; instead, they draw a direct formal analogy to biological evolution. In this perspective, humans act merely as generators of mutations and other impacts in what fundamentally remains a process of variation, selection, and retention, sustained by energy flow. This view aligns with Schrödinger’s definition of life. Indeed, Lovelock’s original vision of the planet as Gaia considers technology to be just another aspect of life. However, viewing it this way would imply that there is no distinct technosphere at all, but rather an integrated process of Gaian evolution that manifests the emergence of novelties, now also including artifacts.
We can only resolve these issues by recognizing that “technology” is not just the realm of artefacts as objects separate from humans. There is a long tradition of viewing tools as extensions of the body. We can reverse this Necker cube and regard humans as extensions of artefacts. Modern theories of material agency adopt that position: In creating artefacts, humans become also parts of those larger assemblages. Hence, the technosphere is life-inclusive. Indeed, let us consider the fact that wild animals are now a minority of biospheric entities and by far outnumbered by domesticated animals. We can also see the biosphere as becoming a part of the technosphere.
The question of whether the technosphere exists cannot be answered unless we take a clear analytical stance towards understanding the role of human agency. I defend the view that the autonomy of the technosphere is a recent phenomenon directly resulting from the rise of capitalism. In the Weberian sense, capitalism is a technology of rationally organizing the economy and subjecting human action to it. Same with Marx’s view: The capitalist is not the creator or master of capitalism but is an embodied manifestation of its systemic logic. Therefore, the autonomy of the technosphere rests on usurping the autonomy of humans by rendering their actions artificial, literally domesticating humans, such as caging them into factories managed by Taylorist accounting logic. By implication, the existence of the technosphere is not a scientific question in the sense of asking for a reality independent from humans. It involves fundamental issues of power and domination. We know that the technosphere exists because some of us struggle with it, resist it, or try to escape it.
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 