We are a team of scientists, scholars, storytellers, engineers, artists, and educators who recognize profound existential and world-historical significance in the process of globalization ongoing around us. Our globalizing world is drawing human beings into unprecedented interconnectivity, a process giving rise to new sources of meaning and calling for reinterpretation of our ancient traditions, identities, and modes of knowledge.

The significance of globalization encompasses and extends far beyond its economic, political, and environmental implications, however vital these may be. We are, as a species, experiencing the stirring of something world-historically new: an unprecedented kind of global synergy—like a sort of super-organism—emerging from the mental enmeshment created by the explosive growth of digital communication, which already today shows signs of a growing planetary awareness and an emergent global ethic.

This more complete view of globalization has a legacy. It was pre-envisioned in the twentieth century by the concept of the noosphere: the sphere of conscious thought emerging from the sustained global interaction of millions and billions of human beings across the earth. The noosphere has its roots in the biosphere and rests ultimately on the nonliving matter and dynamics of our planet, but it is a new phase of human, evolutionary, planetary, and cosmological history, a phase all of us are involved in co-producing.

This vision of the noosphere as the most meaningful form of globalization is beginning to dawn on human beings and human societies. Its emergence around us brings an array of promises and challenges still perceived only dimly. As human beings continue to weave global interconnections through cultural encounter and high-speed communication, through trade, travel, and technology, we need to find ways to view the process at the highest level of the noosphere. How it unfolds, what kind of noosphere we are creating to dwell in together, depends on all of us.