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!

Us vs Them...can't have one without the other

For the vast majority of the species' time on earth, human social evolution occurred in a world of little tribes which competed with each other for resources - co-operation within the group to achieve success in group competition.

From this origin arose the finest things about humans - advanced social skills, language, consciousness etc. And obviously a lot of the bad things arose from this origin as well - xenophobia, war etc.

In general our ever-growing cognitive skills have been able to rise above the instincts we inherited from the little tribes of our fore-folk. This is illustrated by the very existence of cities and states where strangers co-exist relatively peacefully, and by the onward march of ever increasing population.

However the "us vs them" instinct which helped tribes to grow and prosper in subhuman times has not gone away, and is not even deeply buried in our psyches. It is explicit and manifest in the cities and the states themselves, in the international institutions which acknowledge the rights of nations, in sport and in everyday life, and human relations everywhere on every level. It is an integral part of human nature, as instinctive as sweating.

However, we are now at an epochal moment in evolution when the "us" is becoming sufficiently large and integrated that there is no more "them". Infinitely fine networks of economics, communication and environment are enmeshing the lives of all together.

Beyond this moment the purpose of the "us vs them" instinct is no longer valid. The automatic desire to strive and achieve and own and control more than our neighboring communities no longer confers an advantage on our offspring - in fact it endangers them. We - "us" - cannot continue to profit at the expense of "them" because "they" are not there anymore. "They" are now "us".

Is it possible for human cognitive capacities to once again overcome ancient instincts, as has happened in the past? Fear of strangers was surmounted to create the city, acceptance of leadership by strangers allowed us to create the nation. But all of these earlier steps left some other "us" to be "them".

Humans are highly adaptable and I don't discount the possibility we can rise above this basic need for us-ness and them-ness. But its also fair to say this next step is altogether greater and different from earlier ones.

More likely I think is that we will identify something else to be "them"- and it's most likely to be extraterrestrial life. The discovery of Gliese 581c caused bookies to drop their odds of finding "them" from 1000-1 to 100-1. We are on a roll and things will only accelerate from here.

When extraterrestrial life is found the implications for ontology, teleology and religion generally are incalculable. Whatever differences people may perceive between themselves on religious, racial or other grounds will vanish to irrelevance in the face of life on another planet, let alone intelligent life.

With extraterrestrial life we will have another "other", a "them" for our "us". Our instincts (which evolution created, not us) will kick in once again and we will do what we have traditionally done with "first contacts" - hide behind a rock and see what we can make of them.

Then maybe all of us can sneak up on them!