The Internet as Epiphany "From my perspective as an evolution biologist, this World Wide Web of information exchange is a kind of fractal biology repeat pattern of the first version, built by bacteria billions of years ago. Like its ancient counterpart -- still in existence among bacteria worldwide today -- it is a self-organizing living system." EARTHDANCE: Living Systems in Evolution by Elisabet Sahtouris. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a visionary French Jesuit who speculated about the noosphere or planetary thinking network in his book The Phenomenon of Man. In 1969, ARPA, a communications network and the forerunner of the Internet, was envisioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a distributed network capable of surviving a nuclear blast. If one or more network nodes are obliterated, information is still able to route around the affected areas. The World Wide Web gave the Internet a graphical interface and was designed originally by Tim Berner-Lee, as an interactive world of shared information through which people could communicate with each other and with machines. Since computers were being used for information handling and almost anything one might want to know was almost certainly recorded magnetically somewhere, he designed a means of sharing this information. He took a powerful communications system that only the élite could use and turned it into a mass medium. He had a personal vision of the Web as a powerful force for social change and individual creativity and has devoted himself to its continued growth and health. The intention was that the Web should be used as a personal information system and as a group tool at all scales from a team of two to the world population deciding on ecological issues.

Amazing is the prospect of large groups of people uniting mentally. Philip M. Tierno Jr., Ph.D., has written in The Secret Life of Germs, Observations And Lessons From A Microbe Hunter, about the development of nanotechnologies that will connect people as never before:

"Eventually the division between the computing power of human brains and that of manufactured devices may blur into a seamless whole, allowing large groups of people to unite mentally, for good or ill, into symbiotic super-organisms. If that happens, humanity will have evolved full circle from its origins in a single germ cell floating in the primordial soup some four and a half billion years ago."

In this regard we may learn from bacteria who have the capability of communicating with each other to take cooperative action. Certain marine bacteria can signal each other to glow. They emit signal molecules called autoinducers and detect these signals from other bacteria. By monitoring the autoinducer concentration, bacteria are able to sense how many other neighbouring bacteria surround them. The cooperative action of glowing all together occurs only when the bacteria are densely packed together and the concentration of signal molecules crosses a threshold level; a phenomenon called quorum sensing.

Some believers in the Gaia Hypothesis envision the noosphere as analogous on a planetary level to the earth's cerebral cortex. If computer hardware seems too inorganic for you to fit within the concept or fantasy (whichever you prefer) of Earth as a living being, then consider the fact that bioengineers are attempting to integrate biological molecules with inorganic molecules by growing ultra-miniaturized computer chips with viruses. Tiny protein-like strands on the surface of common viruses - the sort of molecules that enable germs to identify and grasp their target cells - also bind tightly and very selectively to materials widely used in high-tech electronics, such as silicon and gallium arsenide. A viral molecule might then serve as a template or skeleton for the growth of super-thin threads of semiconductors. The electrical pathways would be self-assembled like the delicate whorls of seashells - the same trick an oyster uses to make mother-of-pearl - rather than etched by conventional manufacturing techniques.

What intrigues me is that our telecommunications technologies have given us the paranormal capability to send and receive information and images across space and time. They give us the clairvoyant-like capability to view things or events beyond the limits of our sensory perceptions. Shawn Brixey describes the "experience" of being present in a real physical location - remote from one's true physical location - as telepresence.

1. Creative Commons.
2. Today's Space Weather.
3. Space Environment Center.
4. SpaceWeather.com
5. Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game as a prophecy of the Net.
6. Gregory Bateson - The pattern that connects the world situation to our own way of seeing it.
7. Noosphere The Expanding Web of Consciousness. (Archived site)
8. Extropy - The premier transhumanist networking and information organization preparing for the future.
9. oneworld.net connects to a better world.
10. Global Vision - Communicating Sustainability
11. Institute For The Advanced Study Of Information Warfare. (IASIW)
12. " One stop shop" for quorum sensing research.