The Noosphere is considered to be a ‘mind-sphere,’ or Earth’s mental sheathe surrounding the Earth, just as the atmosphere does. The concept comes from the word Nous, the Greek word for mind, combined with the word sphere. As a word, it was was coined jointly by Édouard Le Roy (a French philosopher and student of Henri Bergson), Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Russian geochemist, Vladimir Vernadsky, in Paris, 1926, though the concept itself was first introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his Cosmogenesis. At the root of the primary definition of Noosphere is a dual perception: that life on Earth is a unity constituting a whole system known as the biosphere; and that the mind or consciousness of life - the Earth’s thinking layer - constitutes a unity that is discontinuous but coextensive with the entire system of life on Earth, inclusive of its inorganic support systems.

Teilhard de Chardin perceived a directionality in evolution along an axis of increasing Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the Noosphere is the sphere of thought encircling the Earth that has emerged through evolution as a consequence of this growth in complexity / consciousness. The Noosphere is therefore as much part of nature as the barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. As a result, Teilhard de Chardin saw the "social phenomenon as the culmination of and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon." These social phenomena are part of the Noosphere and include, for example, legal, educational, religious, research, industrial and technological systems. In this sense, the Noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The Noosphere thus grows in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth.

A critical premise is that the Noosphere defines the inevitable next stage of terrestrial evolution, which will subsume and transform the biosphere. Teilhard de Chardin argued the Noosphere evolves towards ever greater personalisation, individuation and unification of its elements. He saw the Christian notion of Love as being the principal driver of Noogenesis. Evolution would culminate in the Omega Point—an apex of thought/consciousness—which he identified with the eschatological return of Christ.

However, there are those that believe that another sphere has been intelligently and artificially placed around both our planet and our solar system, to prevent human consciousness from reaching the next step and becoming self-aware on this plane of existence. We will explore this “matrix grid” kind of sphere in future posts.
 
Credit for Image Above: https://tekgnostics.blogspot.com/2016/09/russian-device-monitors-earths-noosphere.html