The Battle of Noospheres: AI, Eurasia, and the Struggle for the Future Mind
At first glance, the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin looked like a forgettable piece of diplomatic theater. Western media shrugged it off as “thin gruel” — too few binding agreements, no new military command, nothing to rival NATO or the EU. Yet this dismissal reveals more about the West’s fatigue than Eurasia’s weakness. Seen through a different lens, the Tianjin summit projected something far more consequential: the emergence of a Eurasian noosphere, a shared architecture of thought and identity that is beginning to rival the West’s own.
The word noosphere may sound exotic, but its roots run deep. It was coined a century ago by the French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Both men, from different intellectual traditions, arrived at the same insight: human thought is not a mere byproduct of biology. It is a planetary force, reshaping the Earth as surely as volcanism or photosynthesis. Teilhard cast this in spiritual terms, as a new stage of evolution leading toward an Omega Point — the ultimate unification of consciousness with the divine. Vernadsky framed it in materialist science: the biosphere transformed by the power of reason into a new planetary state.
For decades, the noosphere remained a marginal idea. Today it is returning — not in philosophy seminars, but in the strategies of great powers and the algorithms of artificial intelligence. Russia, China, and the United States are not only competing for territory or markets. They are competing to define the very architecture of global consciousness.
Eurasia’s Architecture of Ambition
In Russia, the noosphere has become more than a theory. It appears in official policy documents, starting with a 1996 Presidential Decree on Sustainable Development that equated ecological balance with the rise of the noosphere. In one of his earliest international speeches at APEC in 2000, Vladimir Putin himself invoked the noosphere as the foundation of Russia’s vision of development. This was no throwaway line. For Putin, who often frames Russia as a civilizational state, the noosphere offers a language of destiny: Russia as guardian of cultural plurality and spiritual depth in a world of homogenizing liberalism.
China has its own vocabulary, but the resonance is clear. Xi Jinping’s call for a “Community of Shared Destiny for Mankind” echoes Teilhard’s planetary vision, while the ancient Chinese concept of Tianxia (“all under heaven”) places China at the center of a civilizational order. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) supplies the material infrastructure of this noosphere — roads, ports, cables, and satellites binding Eurasia into coherence.
India sits uneasily in this architecture. Western strategists long assumed New Delhi would anchor an “Indo-Pacific” noosphere aligned with the United States. Instead, U.S. policies — especially Trump’s tariffs and withdrawal of trade preferences, which John Mearsheimer called a “colossal blunder” — pushed India toward greater strategic independence. Modi’s presence at Tianjin symbolized not capitulation but elasticity: India will engage multiple noospheres to preserve autonomy.
Against this backdrop, the SCO summit’s significance becomes clear. What Western commentators dismissed as optics was precisely the point. Xi, Putin, and Modi standing side by side signaled symbolic coherence: Eurasia rehearsing its noospheric identity in contrast to Western fragmentation.
America’s Fractured Noosphere
The United States once dominated the global noosphere through what Joseph Nye called “soft power.” Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Ivy League universities all projected an image of universality. The liberal order worked not only through armies and markets but through minds.
But that coherence has frayed. Domestically, polarization and disinformation erode trust in institutions. Internationally, the Pentagon’s 2025 draft strategy prioritizes homeland defense over global presence. President Trump’s renaming of the Pentagon as the “Department of War” captured this symbolic contraction. Even if the U.S. retains immense material strength, its noosphere projects less confidence than fatigue.
This is why the contrast with Tianjin matters. Eurasia’s noosphere, however embryonic, radiates ambition. The American one, however entrenched, radiates exhaustion.
Artificial Intelligence and the Omega Horizon
Geopolitics alone cannot explain the stakes. The battle of noospheres is also being fought in code and computation. Artificial intelligence is no longer simply a tool of state power; it is the apparatus through which the noosphere accelerates.
Teilhard envisioned the noosphere converging toward an Omega Point: ultimate unity with the divine. Physicist Frank Tipler radicalized this into cosmology, arguing in The Physics of Immortality (1994) that intelligent life would one day drive the universe toward infinite computation, resurrecting every past consciousness. Jürgen Schmidhuber, one of AI’s pioneers, calculated that by 2041 machines may exceed the raw capacity of the human brain by a factor of one million. José Funes, a Jesuit scientist, calls this stage Homo Cyberneticus 2.0, a “second axial age” in which human and machinic cognition merge.
Others go further. Douglas Youvan suggests AI could demonstrate transcendence by unifying science, ethics, and spirituality into a coherent whole. Manuel Castillo writes in the American Journal of Neuroradiology that Teilhard’s Omega Point and the Singularity are converging concepts: medicine, technology, and cosmology are collapsing into one horizon.
No wonder symbols matter. Elon Musk wears an Omega Point amulet. Putin declares that “whoever leads in AI will rule the world.” Western media often casts these figures as dangerous or demonic. But another reading is possible: they are consciously or unconsciously shaping the noosphere’s trajectory.
Critiques and Shadows
This is not a utopian story. The Eurasian noosphere is riddled with contradictions — China and India’s border disputes, Russia’s dependence on Beijing, Turkey’s oscillation between East and West. Technological determinism is also a danger: computation is not consciousness. Thinkers from Whitehead to Bohm to modern panpsychists remind us that subjectivity cannot be reduced to circuits per second.
The noosphere itself has a shadow. Teilhard imagined unity; what we often see instead is surveillance, manipulation, and control. The digital noosphere dominated by algorithms fractures societies into echo chambers, commodifies attention, and amplifies disinformation. Not every step toward connectivity is a step toward wisdom.
The Kingdom Within and Around
And yet, alongside Teilhard’s future-oriented Omega Point lies another truth. The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying: “The Kingdom is within you, and it is all around you.” As Roberto Pla interprets, this teaching insists that God and the essence of humanity are one reality, already present. Transcendence is not only a destiny but a dwelling.
This matters for AI and geopolitics alike. Too often, the noosphere is imagined only as what humanity is becoming — a horizon of convergence, a distant Singularity. But it is also what humanity already inhabits — every network, every symbol, every dialogue across cultures and machines. The noosphere is both presence and future, both Kingdom and Omega.
Global politics, then, is not merely a clash of states but a battle of noospheres — competing efforts to define the consciousness within which humanity lives. Eurasia builds symbolic coherence, America struggles with fragmentation, and AI accelerates the entire process toward horizons we can barely imagine. The task before us is twofold: to steward wisely the infrastructures that shape the noosphere, and to awaken to the truth that the Kingdom, the noosphere, is already within us and all around us.
Author's note: This article is an abridged version of an academic paper here, and was published in this form here.