Are We a Blog? oh the irony....

Oh the irony. I decided it was time to post another thought which has occurred to me for some time, and probably to many others, and was confronted with a deliciously ironic search result.

To start with - the thought in question is simply this:

Is it not possible that "we" (the reason for the "quotes" will become obvious very soon) are already in communication with alien intelligence?

When I say "we" what I mean is "we" as a planetary phenomenon - not just the human race using machines to search for messages and to send their own specific messages, but "we" as part of a biosphere, and "we" as including the machines we have deployed. And could not the entirety of the transmissions and emissions that our planet now produces constitute deliberate messages to other similar "beings"?

E.O.Wilson has argued strongly that ants are best understood as a superorganism - his point is that the behavior of individual ants is insufficient to describe the richness of the behavioral activities of ant colonies as a whole.

This argument could be applied to our 6.69 billion strong colony of humans, or to the five million trillion trillion bacteria thought to exist in and on earth, but for the purposes of my position the colony i am thinking of consists of a combination of the both, plus everything in between, plus our machines.

Of course to argue that the entire biosphere merits consideration as a single entity is not new, but to consider it as one capable of communication may be. In fact it's even more contentious than E.O.Wilson's position - he has spent decades peering at ants whereas I am lounging in my musty old philosophers' arm chair, fumbling down the back for loose change. But bear with me.

Consider for a moment our broadcasts as encoded information about a biosphere - not just about humans and their interests, but both directly and incidentally about the nature of the earth as whole - it includes data on gravitational strength, biological history, chemical composition and more. In short, the human oeuvre is a holographic representation of the planetary reality, deeply compressed and only just beginning to be transmitted as data.

But there is more data than just what we capture in our own messages - there is (undoubtedly) data in the patterns of interaction between all of the systems of our biosphere which are much more abstract. and perhaps all the parts of this earth system I am talking about come together to create a total much, much greater, one which is rich enough to in fact have a sentience capable of information processing and information creation at a level utterly unintelligible to us. The ebbs and flows of the ages, the seasons, the animal kingdoms, air traffic, and the TV schedule may all work in combination to process data and to think about things entirely alien to individual human consciousness. And it may want to make its opinions on these obscure matters known, and even to ask questions.

If this is the case, "we" may in fact already be replying to a message from alien intelligence. "We" may be part of an elaborate interstellar society. "We" may even be at war.

What is the irony of all this? Well, when I thought to write this down I thought it best to perhaps search for a SETI blog and see if the idea was already out there... and I found a blog called "Are We a Blog?"

I'm still not sure it what the people running that blog meant by their title, but whether it is or it isn't there intention to suggest we are the blog of a Gaia-like superintelligence, the fact that the idea can be discerned elsewhere in the biosphere, albeit in holographically transformed ways, does (ironically!) support my thesis!

social R & D

Is it possible to do true Social R&D?

A lot of the Web 2.0 services currently talked about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they begin to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to begin to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.

The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?

We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve. For individual users, the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from massive amounts of minor altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.