What do you think?
Rate this book
Biospheres: Metamorphosis of the Planet Earth: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth
Earth as a cosmic seed is a biosphere. This book is about the concentric layers of experience at the Earth's surface, and the way the past gets tangled up in the present.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1989
7 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Dorion Sagan
50 books52 followersDorion Sagan (born 1959 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American science writer, essayist, and theorist. He has written and co-authored many books on culture, evolution, and the history and philosophy of science, most recently The Sciences of Avatar: from Anthropology to Xenology and Death and Sex, which won first place at the 2010 New York Book Show in the general trade nonfiction category. His Into the Cool, co-authored with Eric D. Schneider, is about the relationship between non-equilibrium thermodynamics and life.
A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has been a Humana Scholar at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and received an Educational Press Association of America Excellence in Educational Journalism Award for “The Riddle of Sex,” which appeared in The Science Teacher. His Death and Sex, a two-in-one hardcover published by Chelsea Green, won the 2010 New York Book Show in the competitive general trade nonfiction category. His current interests include philosophy and science fiction.
Sagan is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis. His younger brother is Jeremy Sagan and his half-brother is Nick Sagan.
A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has been a Humana Scholar at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and received an Educational Press Association of America Excellence in Educational Journalism Award for “The Riddle of Sex,” which appeared in The Science Teacher. His Death and Sex, a two-in-one hardcover published by Chelsea Green, won the 2010 New York Book Show in the competitive general trade nonfiction category. His current interests include philosophy and science fiction.
Sagan is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis. His younger brother is Jeremy Sagan and his half-brother is Nick Sagan.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 14, 2025
I first read Biospheres when I was starting research for The SimEarth Bible, my companion guide to the SimEarth computer simulation based on James Lovelock’s GAIA Theory. I was particularly enamored with the possibilities of biodiversity in building self-contained, self-sustaining environments for living organisms. I perceived this as necessary for space exploration and hoped that such experiments as the Biosphere II project would lead us in that direction.
Society and science have followed different priorities since then, but I found myself re-reading this little volume as I was reflecting on the implications of some of its lessons on biodiversity with regard to the transhuman movement. Even though it was written three decades ago, Biospheres offers an array of insights about the necessity of re-connecting with our ecosystem. Unlike many such volumes, this one is more techno-optimistic than dystopian doomsayer. “In the long term, technology can be expected to add to life’s overall vigor and stability.” (p. 175) “Technology’s virulent quality may be destructive in the short term, but technology may be like a pioneer kingdom— a new entity stealing across the Earth, awakening allergic species and sensibilities in a planetary spring.” (p. 176)
Indeed, Biospheres was published in a more optimistic world before the politics of hate appeared on the scene in the U.S. Even at that time, I questioned some of Sagan’s assumptions regarding earth as a closed system (“the pool of chemical elements from which we are made is finite.” (p. 29)) since it doesn’t leave room for even cosmic contamination (from a meteor strike or possibly a virus or piece of space dust returning with a cosmonaut, astronaut, or space tourist (although the latter didn’t actually exist when the book was published). Also, even though I rather enjoyed the citation of Vladimir Vernadsky’s idea of life as a “global chemical reaction, a ‘green burning’” (p. 46), I am personally much more in tune with Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological perspective on evolution and growth (with earth and life as a unified, living organism).
At the time of its publication, Sagan’s subject was largely focused on creating biospheres for sustainable space exploration. But Sagan also had another agenda. He believed (or believes) that biospheres may form the answer for earth’s future as propagules (such as tardigrades, “water bears,” p. 200), using the metaphor to suggest smaller organisms which encase, encapsulate, and protect before flowering forth with seeds. He sees this as “propagation by, for, and of the Earth through humanity.” (pp. 180, 199) But lest one think that Sagan is advocating isolationism, either biologically or sociologically, he also makes clear: “No matter how adept an organism is at propagating itself, if it does not become involved in the life cycles of others, it will fail.” (p. 80)
As a quick reference, I was very appreciative of Sagan’s summary of five definitions of life (pp. 49-50) and his discussion of problems of terraforming (pp. 70-72). I do not agree with Sagan’s ultimate assessment of humanity as transient rather than transcendent (p. 206), but there is still much to commend this volume. Indeed, one of the statements that most inspired me was, “No organism is a biochemical island; …” (p. 130) I’ll never forget that. I enjoyed the book, but since it’s not really my field and it is bound to be out of date, I can’t give it a high enough rating to be a blanket recommendation.
Society and science have followed different priorities since then, but I found myself re-reading this little volume as I was reflecting on the implications of some of its lessons on biodiversity with regard to the transhuman movement. Even though it was written three decades ago, Biospheres offers an array of insights about the necessity of re-connecting with our ecosystem. Unlike many such volumes, this one is more techno-optimistic than dystopian doomsayer. “In the long term, technology can be expected to add to life’s overall vigor and stability.” (p. 175) “Technology’s virulent quality may be destructive in the short term, but technology may be like a pioneer kingdom— a new entity stealing across the Earth, awakening allergic species and sensibilities in a planetary spring.” (p. 176)
Indeed, Biospheres was published in a more optimistic world before the politics of hate appeared on the scene in the U.S. Even at that time, I questioned some of Sagan’s assumptions regarding earth as a closed system (“the pool of chemical elements from which we are made is finite.” (p. 29)) since it doesn’t leave room for even cosmic contamination (from a meteor strike or possibly a virus or piece of space dust returning with a cosmonaut, astronaut, or space tourist (although the latter didn’t actually exist when the book was published). Also, even though I rather enjoyed the citation of Vladimir Vernadsky’s idea of life as a “global chemical reaction, a ‘green burning’” (p. 46), I am personally much more in tune with Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological perspective on evolution and growth (with earth and life as a unified, living organism).
At the time of its publication, Sagan’s subject was largely focused on creating biospheres for sustainable space exploration. But Sagan also had another agenda. He believed (or believes) that biospheres may form the answer for earth’s future as propagules (such as tardigrades, “water bears,” p. 200), using the metaphor to suggest smaller organisms which encase, encapsulate, and protect before flowering forth with seeds. He sees this as “propagation by, for, and of the Earth through humanity.” (pp. 180, 199) But lest one think that Sagan is advocating isolationism, either biologically or sociologically, he also makes clear: “No matter how adept an organism is at propagating itself, if it does not become involved in the life cycles of others, it will fail.” (p. 80)
As a quick reference, I was very appreciative of Sagan’s summary of five definitions of life (pp. 49-50) and his discussion of problems of terraforming (pp. 70-72). I do not agree with Sagan’s ultimate assessment of humanity as transient rather than transcendent (p. 206), but there is still much to commend this volume. Indeed, one of the statements that most inspired me was, “No organism is a biochemical island; …” (p. 130) I’ll never forget that. I enjoyed the book, but since it’s not really my field and it is bound to be out of date, I can’t give it a high enough rating to be a blanket recommendation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review