Clément Vidal
(1981-)
Clément Vidal is a researcher at the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Brussels, Belgium) in the Department of Philosophy. He is a member of the
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group and the
Center Leo Apostel. He is also a member of
Human Energy, an organization aiming to introduce
Teilhard de Chardin's Noösphere as a source of
meaning for future generations in our globalizing world.
In 2007, Vidal and
Foresight University founder John M. Smart were aware of dispersed insights in cosmology,
theoretical and evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology and the
complexity sciences, which were providing ways to understand the universe
within a broader framework.
They thought that these results and hypotheses deserved to be explored,
criticized, and analyzed by an international interdisciplinary research
community.
In 2008 they founded
Evo Devo Universe (EDU), a
framework that promises to advance understanding of both unpredictable
“evolutionary” processes and predictable “developmental” processes at all
scales, including the human scale.
Vidal's 2014 book
The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective, ranges over a vast number of big philosophical questions, whether natural or artificial selection holds on a cosmic scale, whether intelligent life has a role in cosmic evolution, whether advanced extraterrestrial civilizations have been detected in current astrophysical data, and whether computer simulations can explain the fine-tuning controversy.
In his 2021 article
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: a visionary in controversy, Vidal writes...
Teilhard de Chardin developed an evolutionary vision of our planetary
future, currently developing from a sphere of life, or biosphere towards a sphere of
mind, or noosphere. As a visionary, Teilhard was not only on the brink of formulating
the internet, but he also anticipated current academic efforts to understand
globalization, as well as human, cultural and technological evolution. However, his
ideas are sources of enduring controversies in both scientific and theological circles.
Here I uncover some of the core reasons why his ways of thinking and writing are
often problematic, and propose a way forward. This note aims to introduce Teilhard’s
central article about the noosphere (The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947),
but can also be read as an independent introduction to Teilhard’s system of thought.
A detailed exegesis of Teilhard’s article is available as a supplementary document.
In 2022-2023 Vidal was a visiting researcher at the SETI Research Center at the University of California Berkeley. In astrobiology, he is known for having introduced the stellivore hypothesis in 2016, which leads to a new way to look for advanced civilizations in existing data. In 2019, he suggested that they might have engineered a galactic-scale GPS system, or
pulsar positioning system. In 2024, he proposed the first
binary stellar engine model, and proposed that extraterrestrial intelligence may be at the origin of the movements of some millisecond pulsars.
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