The study of both general history and specific historical processes requires an under- standing of their driving factors. Therefore, historians have always paid considerable attention to this issue. In practice, it is generally accepted that production activity, which is based on the productive forces of society, is the driving force behind historical processes. Recently, in this regard, great importance is attached to social phenomena called the noosphere and technosphere. This article is devoted to the definition of the essence of these social formations that are part of the productive forces of society, and their relationship to the “envelops” of the planet Earth, primarily to the biosphere. The idea of the existence of some of the surrounding “envelops” of our planet, in which all the processes occurring on its surface are carried out, have taken a strong position in science for quite a long time. The concept of “noosphere” arose at the end of the first third of the twentieth century thanks to V. Vernadsky, who presented it because of the evolution of the biosphere under the influence of the human mind. Today this concept has become quite widespread. However, many of those who consider themselves followers of V. Vernadsky have basically moved away from his views, and present the noosphere as a special, independent envelop of the planet, supplementing it with a new, artificially created envelop – the technosphere. In the concepts of the noosphere and the technosphere, as well as their interaction with each other and with the biosphere, there are many different, including contradictory, approaches that coincide only in the fact that these phenomena arose thanks to the human mind. In our opinion, the reason for such statements is the consideration of these “envelops” as some kind of independent formations relative to our planet. This article proposes the idea that the noosphere and technosphere, which arose due to the emergence of a new living entity in the biosphere – human society, are structurally and ...