His name is renowned in Ukraine. He was the founder and first President of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Czechoslovak, and Paris Academies, and founder of the Radium Institute. The horizon of his interests was very broad. His most outstanding achievement is the idea of biosphere and its transition to noosphere. But of no lesser interest is his concept of life’s genesis on earth. Doing geological research, he noticed that there were no signs of life’s genesis in the periods of natural history. Moreover, everything indicated that living things had been sired by living things in all times. At the same time, all experiments to synthesize a living thing from a non-living substance would give negative results, and there were no prerequisites for success in this direction. Hence he concluded, There is no beginning of life in the cosmos we observe, for there was no beginning of this cosmos. Life is as eternal as the cosmos, and it had always been transferred by biogenesis... This is also true of the whole uncountable time of the cosmic periods in the earth’s history, as it is true of the whole universe. Vernadsky pointed out that life in a latent state - spores, seeds, or cysts — can remain intact for an indefinite period of time, even perhaps for geological ages, i.e., almost infinitely. He also put forward the idea that, in addition to preserving a certain quantity of matter and energy in space, the biosphere is also guided by the law of the conservation of the quantity of life-bearing matter.
This revolutionary idea results in a number of conclusions. Above all, Vernadsky indicated that all living organisms are connected with their surrounding material and energy environment. The evolution of life on earth under the influence of the cosmos brought about the biosphere, and then, in the course of further evolution, the biosphere was permeated with cosmic energy and becomes the principal geological force. The emergent human intellect breeds the noosphere. “The noosphere, a biosphere altered by the scientific thought and prepared by a millions- or even billions-years-long process which created homo sapiens faber, is not a short-lived and transient geological phenomenon,” he wrote. “The civilization of cultural humanity’ cannot be interrupted and eliminated, for this is a major natural phenomenon corresponding historically, or, to be more exact, geologically, to the established organization of the biosphere...” The ideas of an eternal and organized life that has no beginning lead to another fundamental conclusion: there is a radical difference between the living and dead things, which in turn must lead to a certain difference between energy and matter in a living organism, as compared to the forms studied in physics and chemistry, i.e., in commonplace lifeless matter. Vernadsky pointed out nine planetary properties of life, among them the first biogeochemical principle whereby biogenous energy strives for its maximum manifestation in the biosphere, and the second biogeochemical principle whereby through evolution, only those organisms survive, which increase the biogenous geochemical energy with their own life. Analyzing differences between living and lifeless matter, Volodymyr Vernadsky noted that the Newtonian view of the world lacked a place for irreversible processes, and that there is the Carnot principle proclaiming that world entropy steadily increases with time, i.e., the course of time increases the quantity of the worked-out energy, which cannot be directed at work by any methods we know. In other words, homogeneous space and time cannot possess the customary vectors. Unlike physical space, life “increases, rather than decreases, free energy in the cosmic environment. In this respect, life counters the law of entropy.” Moreover, life is characterized by for its irreversibility: one has never witnessed the formation of a living organism from lifeless matter without the participation of another living mechanism (the Francesco Redi principle).
This irreversible process has always been going in one direction without stopping or stepping back, which is in fact a single aggregate evolutionary process. In addition, this process features the more and more functional expression of the formation of brain, the central nervous apparatus. This vectored direction of the evolutionary process compelled Volodymyr Vernadsky to introduce the notion of biological time, i.e., the time connected with life phenomena and flowing in a space acceptable for asymmetrical living organisms. This time, in contrast to the isotropic time in lifeless matter, is expressed with polar vectors, with no indication of its beginning or end. He paid special attention to the asymmetry of living organisms, i.e., the emergence of left and right forms, the disruption of symmetry, a phenomenon totally absent in lifeless nature. As Louis Pasteur found, only right forms of matter are stable in the living organisms, i.e., the space filled with life only promotes the preservation of these molecular structures. Living organisms can embrace (eat) the right antipodes and do not touch the left ones.
The principle of asymmetry is only a particular instance of the more general well-known phenomenon of right and left. The right and left, reduced to the right and left structures of atoms, are chemically identical in lifeless bodies and different in the living ones. This reveals itself especially clearly in man, whose right sharply differs from left, in chemical terms as well. This is not only well known in everyday life but also reveals itself on the mental level, i.e., psychologically, and in the functional difference of the right and left brain hemispheres. Carl Jung showed that leftward movement is tantamount to a movement in the unconscious direction. The symbolism of various peoples of the world shows almost unanimously that a leftward movement is evil, and the left side is bad. For example, the swastika, a most primeval and practically universal symbol for ancient cultures, embodied the sun’s passage across the sky, the transition of night to day, and fertility. Yet, in India, the swastika’s tips are turned counterclockwise (to the left), which means night and black magic and symbolizes death and ruin. Rightward movement, Jung pointed out, was right (correct), for it was directed at consciousness.
The existence of differences between biological time and time in lifeless nature, as well as different properties of living and lifeless matters, causes different properties to be gauged by different geometries. While common matter follows the laws of Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s theory rests on Riemann geometry dealing with spaces filled with the living organisms and lifeless matter, which in fact characterizes these spaces, a geometry responsible for the space inside a living substance has not yet been developed, according to Vernadsky. He writes: “It may be a Riemannian geometry or one of the geometries indicated but not developed by Cartan. This geometry reduces all space to a dot furnished with an embryonic vector.”
A space filled with a living matter should feature polar vectors, asymmetric right and left, and have a special biological time with its own properties. It should be free of flat surfaces and straight lines which never occur in the living mechanisms. In particular, the symmetry of living organisms features curve lines and surfaces typical of Riemannian geometry. In this case Vernadsky admitted, “In our reality there is such a phenomenon as the transition of geometrically different spaces from one state to another.” It should be noted that quantum physics, which describes the world of objects smaller than 10 -3 square centimeters, uses laws fundamentally different to Newtonian physics. This world is of a dual corpuscular-wave nature, and it obeys only the laws of probability, i.e., it lacks the law of causality. But life, Vernadsky pointed out, exists on a molecular level, so in objects of the size of at least up to 10 -6 sq. cm., i.e., these living objects obey the laws of quantum physics. In other words, life can exist in such entirely different worlds. Vernadsky’s ideas comply well with modern psychology. Sigmund Freud described the dualism of human drives.
The first drive, Thanatos, the striving for death and ruin, is a desire to return to the unconscious, to the womb, to the embryonic state, i.e., it corresponds to the entropy of lifeless matter. This is countered by a different drive, Eros or libido, which is the striving for life, creative work, knowledge, and new things, a desire to destroy commonplace and humdrum things. This drive corresponds to the increase of free energy in the cosmic environment.
Let us attempt to draw some conclusions from Vernadsky’s ideas.
1. In every living organism, biological time differs from physical time. For example, if the inner time of a man flows more slowly than physical time, he manages to do a greater amount of work, gets less tired, and also ages more slowly in terms of physical time. But the reverse is also true. Moreover, as consciousness develops, a person can learn to manage outer physical time; in other words, he will become able to thicken and thin it.
2. Vernadsky noted, “The reproduction of any, including human, substance,” proceeds in the geometric progression. But this expansion has its limits. Simultaneously, growth in the number of machines — humanity’s technical work — also proceeds in geometric progression and in all probability must also have limits. Now mankind’s efforts are being expanded towards the growing utilization of information and knowledge, which is most vividly manifested in the Internet expansion.
The growing scope of information and knowledge will inevitably lead to a qualitative leap in human consciousness, perhaps toward the teaching and use of telepathy. Telepathic abilities have been observed in small children, which confirms their link with their mother, and in the twins who live for a long time at long distances from each other, which has been a special subject of scientific research. A person’s innate telepathic abilities begin to be ousted as soon as she/he begins to learn to speak. Methods will probably be developed in the future on the pattern of those employed now to teach small children to speak and write.
3. The methods of classical science are approaching a dead end. This is connected with the fact that classical science only considers and recognizes what can be unconditionally replicated experimentally. What was impossible to repeat was declared unscientific. However, science has made an exception for nuclear and quantum physics, agreeing to a conditional degree of probability in the repetition of certain events. And this branch of science operates with the notions of probability. But the well-used probability theory is not used in the field of psychology and paranormal phenomena. It is only used on a primitive level in sociology. At the same time, as noted early, the law of causality may not work in a living space. This phenomenon, as applied to humans, was first described by Carl Jung in his Synchronicity, where he introduced the idea of “sense coincidence” to describe things that occur in man without cause but in connection with sense. For example, if a man wants to meet somebody, he suddenly rings or “accidentally” encounters this person on the street. More complex coincidences also occur. This work was published under the same cover with a work by the outstanding physicist Wolfgang Pauli, known for the Pauli principle in quantum physics. Pauli noted that Jungian psychology of the unconscious goes hand in hand with quantum physics. Jung in fact considered borderline processes in living and lifeless matters. The behavior of all people is of a probability-related nature, as it is in Brownian motion, so it is impossible in most cases to trace the cause-and- effect line in their actions. This is why the humanities should take up the mechanism of probability methods to prove its findings replicable.
4. We should also note a factor of great importance not described by Volodymyr Vernadsky: innate human desire and will. These can apparently influence the field processes in a living organism, while extreme situations often lead to manifestations of paranormal abilities, which has been recorded many times but cannot be repeated because it is impossible to reproduce extreme situations. The point is in the existence of the vector of biological time, such that even a similar situation is bound to occur in a different point on this time vector. As the ancients would say, “You cannot step into the same river twice.”
5. The development of human consciousness can lead to the final formation of the Earth’s noosphere, and the field of consciousness will thus become all-embracing, as the Internet is, so one will be able to get connected to it. At the very least, it is obvious that ideas are not the product of analysis, no matter how fundamental the latter, while the synthesis of new ideas is directly connected with the noosphere, in turn connected with the cosmos.
I would also like to note another facet of Vernadsky’s personality, his moral and social persuasions. I will only quote his diaries, which need no comment:
August 30, 1920: “I cannot imagine or reconcile myself to the fall of Russia... But, on the other hand, the repulsive features of a lazy and ignorant animal, which the Russian people and the Russian intelligentsia are, their servile, predatory, and venal essence, their all-pervading historical ‘barbarity,’ makes me sometimes despair of the future of Russia and the Russian people.
“There is no honesty, no desire to work, no broad intellectual interests, no character or energy, no love, or freedom... For Russian democracy is a kingdom of well-fed pigs.”
1927: “What is going on is, in my view, a mindless waste of talent, the people’s most precious property. Moreover, these talents are not subject to uninterrupted restoration. And even if we saw them being recreated in our people, some personalities can never be mechanistically replaced by others. We must use at this moment what life has granted us: the great gift of past generations.”
January 21, 1941: “The police communism is growing and in fact rusting the state structure... What strikes me is the paucity or even absence of meaningful ideas and talent in the speeches of the Bolsheviks. Their intellectual power has dwindled away. There is only a bunch of bureaucrats afraid of telling the truth.”
May 17, 1941: “German troops are said to be on the border. I do not think they will drool over us... The future inspires alarm. I am confident in the strength of the Russian (Ukrainian, etc.) people. They will hold out.”
May 19, 1941: “I am afraid the Party Central Committee mistakes social flattery and servility for reality, while formidable displeasure is all around. Thus the authorities, surrounded with a mass morally and ideologically weaker than Party nonmembers, can break away from reality. There only are two figures, Stalin and Molotov, the rest are insignificant.”
June 16, 1941: “Our system clearly shows that millions of people have been ‘temporarily’ turned into convicts: this is a kind of slavery. In the long run, great ideas are being radically distorted.
“One should revise Marx from this viewpoint: he saw clearly that human thought creates productive force.
“This is manifested more and deeply in the noosphere. But this requires an indispensable condition, freedom of thought.”











