What if we could take our own short-sighted view away and see the planet Earth and all its inhabitants as one giant global intelligence?
That is the question that has recently been addressed by a trio of researchers paper titled “Intelligence as a Planetary-Scale Process.”
ALSO: the theory “By your combined powers, I am Captain Planet”, as we like to call it here at Neural.
This one is a little stupid. The paper itself is interesting, but my first instinct was to call it ironically boring and painfully optimistic.
Here is an excerpt from the abstract:
We consider the ways in which the emergence of technological intelligence can represent a kind of planetary-scale transition, and so could be seen not as something happening on a planet but to a planet, just as some models suggest that the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon.
Anyone else gets it “DuneVibrations?
Aliens
Oh, didn’t you expect this to be about aliens? Nor were we. Thanks to PR.
Press release of the University of Rochester involves this research in the search for extraterrestrial life:
“We say that the only technological civilizations we’ll ever see — the ones we should expect to see are the ones that haven’t killed themselves, that means they’ve certainly reached the stage of true planetary intelligence.”[lead author Adam Frank] says. “That’s the power of this survey: It combines what we need to know to survive the climate crisis with what could happen on any planet where life and intelligence are evolving.”
Okay, so this is really about climate change. Basically, if we live long enough to solve climate change, will we meet aliens?
Yes, yes. Researchers seem to claim that observations of how the Earth’s climate is adapting to technological advances will give us a great understanding of what we should look for when looking for signs of high-level intelligence in the universe.
Climate change
The researchers describe a kind of evolutionary gap between the barrier-free world before the advent of technology, the destruction of the climate through the use of technology, and the ultimate salvation of the planet through … more technology.
In their words:
We believe that the concept of planetary intelligence has a promise to provide a framework for understanding possible paths of long-term inhabited planetary development that are both broad and deep. Most importantly, it can ultimately help unify disparate perspectives into a single explanatory paradigm for the transitions in the Earth system observed in the past, with what we are experiencing now and will experience in the future evolution of the Earth.
From this point of view, it seems that humans are a childish species that will eventually grow to save the planet from the damage we have caused. Climate change is our responsibility, but it is not our fault because we are the world and the world is us.
It’s nice to be peeled, but we still have to figure out how to fix the problems. And there the researchers say we should literally to think worldwide.
According to the paper:
Our explicit definition of planetary intelligence is the acquisition and application of collective knowledge, operating on a planetary scale, which is integrated into the function of interconnected planetary systems.
Certainly science people. We’ll just capture terrestrial true data from the entire planet and shove it into our “connected planetary systems.” That will solve the problem.
Was that grumpy? I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t really feel like a single, flawless neuron in planetary intelligence.
Counterpoint: Humans are parasites
The researchers’ article concludes:
Planetary intelligence research can unite three domains of study: the evolution and function of the Earth’s biosphere; the current appearance of the technosphere in the Anthropocene; and the astrobiology of worlds inhabited by technologically capable ex-civilizations.
Our contribution is a little different. Perhaps a thought experiment in which we look at intelligence from a planet-scale point of view is helpful when it comes to imagining the consequences of man-made climate change.
And it’s certainly nice to think of this whole climate crisis thing as just dental problems while we finally find our place as part of the Earth’s self-preservation machine.
But the fact of the matter is that people are not spectators working to win the hand we received.
We are the architects of our own nightmares. Every system the Earth has built to protect itself is shaken under the strain of humanity, from the individual biospheres separating savanna lions from jungle panthers that no longer exist, to the polar ice caps that stood for millions of years until the air conditioner was invented. .
We are parasites. We are the only living beings that take more from the planet than we contribute.
Perhaps climate change is a natural function of our evolution towards planetary intelligence. And maybe only the planet is slowly becoming uninhabitable because people are greedy and stupid.
Source
Tristan Greene