The history of the idea of the noösphere is specifically examined as manifested in the World Wide Web. First conceptualized by a Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), and biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945) in the mid of 1940s, the noösphere is the biospheric ‘sphere of reason’. Banished to China by the Jesuit Church for his controversial theory of evolution that proposed a 'law of complexification', the concept of the noösphere had drawn on the 6th-century Confucian thought. Worth adding is that the noösphere conception was further elaborated as ‘expanded cinema’ during the 1960s by American newspaper film critic and new media theorist Gene Youngblood (1942–2021), whose name rarely appears in semiotic literature. The metaverse is a materialization of the original idea proposed by which appeared in the cyberpunk fiction Snow Crash (published in 1992) by Neal Stephenson (born 1959). The relative free-for-all semiotic that is the noösphere transcends the narrowly focused metaverse that is contained within it as the metaverse has been captured by commercial interests, enslaving algorithms, and social media. The noösphere is argued here to be just as ontologically fractured and subject to nationalist, cultural, social, economic, and religious conflict as occurs in the realm of the physical. The arena of the virtual is, in fact, a hypermediated war of opposing cosmological worlds and semiotic struggles that are rooted in physical manifestations of real flesh and blood conflict from the personal to the supernational. In discussing the promise of the noösphere hypothesis, researchers need to analyze how it is used as a site of struggle that has amplified pre-existing differences and contributed to conflict.

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