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!

The mechanics of a metal ecosystem

We are living through the next great evolution of ecosystem complexity and it is the era in which metallic and mineral materials become incorporated as structural and electrical components of biological systems.

Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.

Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.

As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.

At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.

Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.

But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).

The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.

If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.