In the XXI century, the world of man and nature develops mainly in socio-technogenic living conditions. Global technospherization of the planet Earth is the most important cause of continuous socio-cultural, techno-medical and biological changes in man. In technical, natural and human studies a human is usually considered from the point of view of only one discipline. This narrow approach leaves its incorrect mark when recreating the new image of a human in the virtual environment of the digital image of the world. Digital Earth technologies establish a link between the spheres: social, biospheric, natural-inanimate and artificial, created by society using a number of important sciences. It is necessary to approach systematically the representation of the evolving human being in the constantly updated digital space of the planet, to supplement the existing developments of scientists with a scientific and philosophical understanding of the interdisciplinary processes of socio-technogenic development of the biosphere life. Scientific visualization of interrelated evolutionary changes in man is of great interest for the Digital Earth project both from the point of view of studying anthropogenesis, and from the point of view of developing promising programs for preserving his biosphere body and natural health in a developing socio-technogenic world.
Social and natural world is now changing dangerously due to the spontaneous
introduction of achievements of scientific and technological revolution. The expectations of the
unilateral ruling economic and political elite of the strategic development of mankind
are associated with the prospects of obtaining gratuitous wealth and the introduction of
the digital revolution. Its technologies are aimed at system processing of the
information accumulated by all mankind about the "biophysical objects" of the
environment in the virtual space, which will allow artificial recreating a complete image of
the real earth world in detail. The Digital Earth project, declared by Albert Gore at the
end of the twentieth century, as a key task of information technologies of the twenty
first century [
Subsequent paragraphs, however, are indented.
At the same time the precursor of discussing digital visualization of the planet should
be considered the following novels: "The Master and Margarita" by M. A. Bulgakov
(1928-1940) and "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy (1869) [
In 1995 professor E. S. Demidenko proposed the project "World Information
Encyclopedia" of multimedia content, supported in the Declaration of the United Nations,
the International Academy of Informatization, the Administrations of Moscow region
and Dubna (Russia), providing regionally quality assessments of all objects and
processes of world development on the basis of certification systems for quality and
ecology. Its part is already being worked out in Kaliningrad region, and this may find
applied in the development of the project under discussion [
In engineering sciences, the "live" globe of the Digital Earth is identified with a
dynamic pulsating system of representing geoinformation data outside the scales of
traditional maps. In contrast to the narrow technical interpretation the concept of "Living
Earth" developed by us in this and other papers, combines various phenomena of
natural biological life, cultivated by millions of years of biosphere evolution, including man
himself as a biosocial organism. This paper deals with filling the virtual space of a
digital planet with more than just geoinformation data. This refers to an extended model
of recreating the biosphere in virtual space in relation to social, natural and
technological processes affecting the modern evolutionary development. And man is an integral
element of these processes, whose visualization in the dynamic artificial environment
of a virtual planet seems necessary. This paper continues the topic of visualization of
evolutionary socio-technogenic processes, raised in an earlier work by one of the
authors of the paper [
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 3 real copy of the Earth in digital space, it is necessary to present the historical perspective of the evolutionary changes that occur to man. Visualization of global socio-technogenic changes in man is a digital challenge to information technologies to recreate in detail the processes of the Living planet, that is the biosphere system of life in the unity of society, man and nature. To implement this idea in the digital space, an interdisciplinary symbiosis of information technologies with natural and social sciences is necessary. It is quite possible that we are talking about the construction of a «time machine», since the Digital Earth project will allow us to model retrospective and prospective processes in visual images.
The project implemented by various international research groups involves complex
mapping of the Earth's surface, including social and cultural objects [
As the developers of the Digital Earth project from different countries hope, this
virtual environment should reflect the image of the real world, both social and natural
[
In our research, we initially rely on a systematic socio-natural approach, discovered by V.I. Vernadsky. Biosphere over the entire history of life has not only developed itself, but has also transformed the entire surface of the planet, creating man. Now society is even more transforming not only the world, but the biosphere itself. V.I. Vernadsky, relying on the centuries-old experience of farmers in cultivating plants and domesticating animals, strongly believes that associated humanity will continue to form a higher level of biosphere, which corresponded to his understanding of noosphere [17, p.175]. But the bourgeois organism developing on the scientific and technological basis of private property affects the biosphere nature (including man) not so much by changing it positively, as by negatively transforming and destroying it. Visualization of changes in biosphere and man is important for the purposes of retrospective and prospective analysis of the Earth state.
Nowadays philosophers and scientists rely more and more on the use of interdisciplinary
research to determine the fundamental laws of the world's development. In our approach to
interdisciplinary research of the socio-technogenic development of the world and the change
in the evolution of life, philosophy plays the leading role. Its multidisciplinary approach is
based on the essence of philosophy, which covers not only the scientific side of life, but also a
significant area of non-scientific knowledge, social experience of mankind, socio-cultural
values developed by it, especially the principles of morality [
Digital Earth is a kind of virtual image of a globe of multi-contour socio-economic, ecogeographic and other data, combined with appropriate algorithms for their analysis and models. The mechanism of constantly updated data in a high-performance computing environment allows to see the state of the Earth's systems (atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere) in their historical dynamics, monitor changes, and build a probable forecast for the future. This project is of an interdisciplinary nature, since, on the one hand, it is filled with data from observations of various sciences and connected by a network of digital libraries. On the other hand, eventually system analytics represented by visual models is more easily perceived by scientists from different research fields. Data visualization technologies provide a visual representation of social and natural processes taking place in the world. This approach formally allows to apply the information obtained in the natural, social and technical sciences jointly, make sciencebased decisions, and in the future – to strengthen control over the state of subsystems of Earth's biosphere. All this confirms the fact that the Digital Earth establishes a connection between the worlds: social, biospheric, naturally inanimate and artificial, created by society using a number of important sciences, but, in our opinion, far from scientific, since it ignores the foundation of scientific knowledge i.e. philosophy, reducing it to a worldview discipline.
In the guide to Digital Earth published at the end of 2019, which fully reflects the
research developments related to this topic, man is presented in the aspect of studying
social and behavioral activity in the virtual space. According to a number of
researchers, it is necessary to focus on this aspect of man’s life, which is associated with the
activities and interests of many users in social networks, when building an image of
man in the digital space. Visualization of behavioral models of network users (leaving
"digital traces") will allow not only to build marketing strategies and provide economic
justification for planned activities in the virtual environment, but also to predict and
even prevent social disasters, to understand the relationship between the environment
and individual’s behavior. After all, man at his pages in social networks shares feelings
and emotions about events from the real world in an iconic form [
As a result of the spontaneous socio-technogenic development of the world, homo sapiens himself changes in many ways spontaneously as a biosocial being, whose life
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 5 activity is mainly connected with the growing techno-urban environment of life. Natural man, nurtured by millions of years of biosphere evolution, undergoes transformations in the technosphere environment of life in three spheres: socio-cultural, natural-biological and artificial-technogenic. We believe that visualization of interrelated evolutionary social, technical and natural changes in the human is of great interest for the Digital Earth project, both from the point of view of studying anthropogenesis for scientific and educational purposes, and from the point of view of developing promising programs for preserving his biosphere body and natural health in a dynamically developing socio-technogenic world.
In accordance with the historical stages of socio-technogenic formation of the world, we distinguish two epochs in the existence of mankind: 1) the epoch of biospheric humanity, which combines social systems: a) gathering, b) agriculture and crafts; 2) the epoch of post-biosphere (technogenically developing) humanity, including c) industrialtechnogenic, d) post-industrial-technogenic (information-technogenic) society. The concept of D. Bell considers three societies on the basis of changes in the technical and technological way of production of social life: agrarian, industrial and post-industrial (informational). This division gives a different understanding of societies, in which only social laws are taken into account, and changing natural processes due to socio-technogenic development are left out of consideration. We extend understanding of the societies proposed by D. Bell, and add their characteristics with the consideration of sociotechnical and natural evolutionary changes. On this basis, we consider societies as industrial - and post-industrial-technogenic (Fig.1).
Industrial-technogenic society
Post-industrial-technogenic, or information-technogenic society
We should also note that D. Bell, being a Marxist, ignored Marx's research on the class division of social systems. This is especially true for bourgeois and socialist industrial and technogenic development, without which we cannot combine the projects of Digital and Living Earth.
The global anthropogenesis is associated with the appearance and development of primitive people. First there appeared homo sapiens -Neanderthal man (about 400 thousand years ago), then - Cro-Magnon man (about 200 thousand years ago), and 50-60 thousand years ago there appeared a modern man based on Cro-Magnon with traces of Neanderthal genes. For thousands of years, the evolution of society has been in organic unity with nature. Its life activity, corresponding to the appropriating type of economy, completely fit into the chain of the biotic cycle of substances. During that period, evolutionary changes in man were of biospheric and biological nature: there was a formation of races and the division into blood groups. But the resources of cropping and gathering were exhausted, so humanity was forced to switch to agriculture (as the first type of producing economy) and the use of natural, biospheric (i.e., agricultural and breeding) technologies. Neolithic revolution (approximately 10 thousand years ago) was the end of the era of human existence as an ordinary animal species, since it marked the transition from an appropriating to a producing economy (agriculture and craft) with a noticeable formation of the technosphere and technogenic type of life development. Society began to change the biogeochemical cycles of nature purposefully and to create an artificial cycle of substances using manual technologies, although just on small territories at that period. But these changes have not yet led to the emergence of a technogenic society and to significant technogenic transformations in biosphere and man. All these and many other facts give reason to believe that the societies of gathering and farming should be attributed to the epoch of existing biospheric humanity (i.e., natural, evolutionarily nurtured by nature).
A society consisting of people is a subsystem of biosphere that has been evolving over many millennia in the biosphere system of life. About three centuries ago, during the transition to industrial-technogenic development, the dominant role in the relationship "society-nature" began to shift to a technogenic society, which significantly reconstructed the natural environment of life, creating an artificial one.
The industrial revolution (XVIII century) created conditions for a radical transition
of society to the mass socio-technogenic development of biosphere and
machine-technical subordination of nature to the technogenic society in the XIX – XXI centuries,
which led to the mass destruction of biosphere. For example, in 1920-1970s, the
discharge of humus from the soil covering into rivers, seas and the ocean increased from
3 billion tons to 24 billion tons [
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 7
There is integrated interdependence of the whole socio-economic, technosphere and
biosphere development, which eventually results in expansion of processes of the world
social and technological development, technogenic transformation of the
biogeochemical cycles of substances, and more generally – in changing the direction of the land
surface evolution – from biosphere to post-biosphere, mostly artificial [
Intensification of processes in social, technological and natural development of the
world indicates that the Digital Earth project is a valuable and logical reflection of the
global technologization of all life processes in biosphere, and then it can also serve as
a kind of big data library of created technosphere. In the created technosphere, two
components should be distinguished – the post-biosphere world (physically tangible,
technospheric) and the off-biosphere world (virtual, supplemented by the imagination
of people, symbolic, described by technical means of information technologies). Virtual
tools (information technologies) can be considered as info-technosphere [
Technogenic society systems Artificial environment – technosphere
Technogenically transformed biosphere
Social and technonatural processes in the world
Social and technological development of the world
Post-biosphere biotechnological development of life (in the urban technosphere)
To maintain the functionality of non-material, virtual space, a significantly increasing amount of electricity is consumed in the biophysical world. Technosphere, connecting with a technogenically developing society and technogenically transformed regions of biosphere, forms a semi-artificial (i.e., transitional to artificial) social, technical and natural system of life. Technogenic transformations happening to man include both changes in his social qualities in life, and purposeful changes of the body by social, technical and medical interventions, as well as the impact on the body with synthetic chemicals produced by society, located in the atmosphere of cities and food, weakening of his physical health as a result of leaving the sphere of natural selection and as a result of a sedentary lifestyle (Fig. 3).
Social and technogenic transformation of man
Social and cultural changes (changes in man’s social qualities) Social, technical and medical changes (purposeful changes of the body)
Social, technical and biological changes (socio- and techno-impact)
Dangerous imaginations of transhumanists Social and natural changes (increase of mutagenesis and genetic inad
equacy due to reduce of natural selection)
In the agricultural society, the main socio-natural qualities of man were: workaholism, conciliarity, collectivist morality with primary spirituality, kindness, honesty, trust, compassion, tolerance, empathy, forgiveness, faith in the supernatural and powerful things, justice, love, protection of wildlife, limited ideas about the world and knowledge of life, low average life expectancy, high mortality of children, extreme poverty of the absolute majority of the world's peoples, naturally defined health and its strengthening by sports and medicine. The highest meaning of life was love for close people and divine symbols. Creative achievements in activities and agricultural culture were the following: cultivation of higher types of plants, domestication of animals, creation of unique religious buildings and cultural monuments, folk festivals and useful leisure activities (Fig. 4).
Over the millennia, the average life expectancy has changed as the main indicator of the level of socio-historical development and the state of natural and biological viability of man (Table 1). So, if in Russia the average life expectancy in 1897 was 32 years, in
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 9
1990 in the USSR-70 years, in 2020 -71 years [
World agricultural productive forces in biosphere society (social
power, %)
Muscular force of people – 30 % Physical energy of domestic animals – 68 %
Manual technical energy – 2 %
Peasant Russian of the ХIХ century: Dependence of people’s life from biosphere mortality of children under 18 – 60% mortality of children under 5 – 43 %
Average life expectancy – 32 years
The main socio-natural qualities of man and people's relations in a technogenic socialist society (the USSR and China) in the conditions of socio-collective orientation of life, socio-natural and humanely developing consciousness (mind) was the predominance of national socio-natural values, such as: workaholism, conciliarity, socialist morality and spirituality, kindness, honesty, trust, forgiveness, empathy, compassion, tolerance, faith in the supernatural and especially the powerful things, justice, a high level of culture, education and health of people, love and collective protection of nature, the average level of ideas about the world, knowledge about life, average life expectancy, low mortality of children, above average living standards of the entire population (Fig. 5), lack of exploitation, socially defined health on the basis of free medicine and sports, predominance of public funds and social justice, the highest meaning of life — love to the closest, to work, creating values. Type of society/ regions, countries / gender Gathering
Chronological Framework 400 thousand years – 10 thousand years ago Early agricultural society 10 thousand years ago – New chronology
Creative achievements in collective activity and socialist culture of the USSR and China were creative development of culture as opposed to the bourgeois, high level of education of the population and higher education, high level of mastering the specialty, creative nature of labor, cultivation of higher types of plants, domestication of animals, creation of unique religious buildings and many cultural monuments, folk holidays and useful leisure activities. At the same time, this socio-historical stage is characterized by an excessive level of technogenic-industrial development: artificial forms of human life, urbanization and forming technosphere for people and animals, negative technological
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 11 effects on biosphere life in cities and nature, destruction of soil cover as the basis of biosphere life, forming promising biotechnological production to replace biosphere forms of production and human life. Since the entire economy of a technogenic society is motivated by the rationality of effective income generation, then man develops qualities related to the search for individual benefits, high professionalism, and education.
World scientific and technical productive forces in a technogenic society
(social energy, %)
Muscular force of people – less than 1 % % Physical energy of domestic animals – less than 1 %
Machine technical energy – 98 %
Industrial USSR in 1990: average life expectancy – 70 years
Bourgeois industrial Russia in 2020: average life expectancy – 71 years
During global technospherization, man develops new, technogenic qualities (in
particular, new norms of communication, habits, ideas about everyday life, having leisure,
lifestyle, etc.) that replace natural ones. They are associated with scientific medical
technologies for improving human nature and endowing the body with new properties,
maintaining weakened health. On the other hand, the uncontrolled expansion of technomaterials
in the biosphere adversely affects the health of an individual, which leads to the growth
of allergic, oncological and other diseases of civilization [
Strengthening of the era of the fourth industrial revolution proclaimed by the
technocratic elite of the world [
The main task of modern society is to preserve the natural man in the conditions of
spontaneously increasing socio-technogenic development of the world, to preserve
biosphere necessary for his life. Complementing the thoughts of Yu.N. Golubchikov
about threats to biosphere development, we can say that the development of strategies
for the survival of natural humanity is becoming the most important "new geoconcept
of geography" [
Socio-technogenic transformations, considered in the paper, are largely spontaneous. It is necessary to include them into the content of the virtual environment of the Digital Earth. A systematic representation of the evolutionarily changing appearance of a human being in an artificial environment is important from the point of view of developing all promising programs for preserving his biosphere body and natural health in a highly transforming and perversely developing socio-technogenic world. Effective decision - making to maintain human viability depends directly on the quality of percepting the context in which these decisions are made. The context in this case is the geospatial space of the Digital Earth.
The quality of virtual geospatial management is determined by the quality of modeling social, technogenic and natural processes in it. Until recently, geospatial analysis was conducted primarily on the basis of data presented in traditional maps and geo-information systems. Information technologies of the Digital Earth represent a more perfect tool, because they avoid static images of the world and allow to see the world as it is in reality. With the help of scientific visualization tools, we are able to see "Living Earth "(biosphere) in a natural, alive way without the use of "dead" conventions (signs, models, categories) and plan programs for the safe socio-technogenic development of the world and man. The living world will be integrated into the decision-making procedure for managing socio–technogenic changes due to the immanent quality of virtual space - the natural character of reproducing processes modeled using the Digital Earth.
The modern world is only taking the first steps in scientific visualization of the
human image in the Digital Earth [
Visualizing Global Socio-Technogenic Human Transformation… 13