# Technosphere **Entity class:** Scientific concept **Domain:** Earth-System Science / Anthropocene Studies / Technology **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developing ## Definition The **technosphere** is the planetary-scale system of technology, including infrastructure, machines, energy networks, communications, and the humans and institutions bound into them, treated as a component of the Earth system comparable to the biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. The geologist Peter K. Haff developed the concept, arguing that the technosphere has dynamics of its own and that individual humans operate largely as parts within it rather than as its controllers. ## Scale Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues estimated the mass of the physical technosphere at roughly 30 trillion tonnes, encompassing buildings, roads, machines and the modified land and waste that sustain them. ## Corpus Context The corpus reads planetary computation as the technosphere acquiring a metabolism and a cognitive layer. [[wiki/Computational Metabolism|Computational metabolism]] describes its energy behavior, the [[collections/American Infrastructure|American Infrastructure]] collection documents its physical anatomy, and [[articles/There Is Only One Rocket on the Pad|There Is Only One Rocket on the Pad]] treats the technosphere as the entity [[wiki/The Bloom|the Bloom]] produces and the host of [[wiki/Successor-Hosted Continuity|successor-hosted continuity]]. ## Relationships - **Related concepts:** [[wiki/Dissipative Structure|Dissipative Structure]] · [[wiki/Computational Metabolism|Computational Metabolism]] · [[wiki/Machine Civilization|Machine Civilization]] - **Corpus applications:** [[wiki/The Bloom|The Bloom]] · [[wiki/Successor-Hosted Continuity|Successor-Hosted Continuity]] · [[wiki/AI Stack|AI Stack]] - **Collections:** [[collections/American Infrastructure|American Infrastructure]] · [[collections/MARS|MARS]] ## Sources / Provenance - Haff, Peter K. "Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules." *The Anthropocene Review* 1, no. 2 (2014): 126–136. - Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. "Scale and Diversity of the Physical Technosphere: A Geological Perspective." *The Anthropocene Review* 4, no. 1 (2017): 9–22.