Conclusion: The Reality of the Mass Mind's Dreams - Terraforming the Cosmos (1,000 b.c. to 2300 a.d.)

The History of the Global Brain XXI

"Humankind was put on earth to keep the heavens aloft. When we fail, creation remains unfinished."

The Kotzker rebbe

Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

While others predict the impact of computer networks on the mankind's futurity, this book has told the saga of the rise of global mind from earth's primordial seas. Implantable communicators and quantum computers1. will vastly change the way we interface in this dawning century. Yet eons of evolution have long since networked our emotions and biology.

Social Data-Processing

In the 1960s, observers of the Kalahari Desert's !Kung bushmen came to a rather startling conclusion about the hunter-gatherer way of life. While those of us in modern societies worked forty to fifty hour weeks to eke out a living, the !Kung were able to supply themselves amply with food, shelter, and clothing by putting in a good deal less than twenty. Our "labor-saving" technology was just a new form of wage-slavery. The real labor-savers were the hunter-gatherers2. Later analysis showed a radical flaw in this argument. While the !Kung spent only a few hours several days a week hunting for meat (men's work) or gathering mongongo nuts (a task restricted to women), they invested a considerable amount of time in information processing3. !Kung tribesmen sat up all night in meetings to resolve disputes or to discuss where the next watering hole might be found now that the current one was drying out. The anthropologists who'd initially portrayed a !Kung utopia had acted as if the work delegated in modern society to newspapermen and women, CEO's, administrators, bureaucrats, lawyers, and magistrates was nothing but leisure activity. In fact, both for the !Kung and for post-industrial humans, a great deal of information exchange does take the form of entertainment. Even child's play, an apparent lark, is a primary means of data processing4. However the networking, interpretation, and reshaping of data, no matter how much pleasure it gives, is a serious affair. For it is a survival tool without which we would cease to be.

During the 1980s, the Gabbra people - herders of cattle, goats, camels, and sheep in northern Kenya5 - ran into weather conditions which were interpreted very differently by the young turks of the tribe than by their elders. The time came to decide where the season's rains would fall many months hence and where the grass that fed the livestock would rise so the long trek toward new pastures could commence. The younger leaders had never lived through one of the area's major droughts, so they argued persuasively for heading toward the Chalbi lowlands not that many miles away - a pleasant walk which, with a bit of pleasant talk, would take an easy matter of several days. Grass had usually been plentiful in these lowlands during the young men's lives. The old-timers, on the other hand, put their trust in a legacy compiled by their fathers and their fathers' fathers before them, a traditional method of calculating weather cycles which indicated very bad times ahead. In fact, the ancient system of prediction augured catastrophe.

While the youngsters argued for the obvious and easy route, the elders spoke of a far more difficult itinerary--a long trek north through barren land to southern Ethiopia, a country whose armies had killed Gabbra tribesmen systematically from 1913 to 19236. The perils of this course were plenty, but the elders were convinced the risks were a necessity.

Some members of the tribe followed the young leaders to the simplest destination. Others joined the elders' in a tough and grim migration. The rains did not come for the next two years to their customary place. The tribal groups which had gone with the younger leaders "lost 95 percent of their cattle, 60 percent of the goats, 40 percent of the sheep...five percent of their camels"7 and were forced to beg aid workers for famine relief. The expedition which had followed the elders emerged from the drought with its pride and with its herds almost completely intact.

A complex adaptive system had exposed part of its decision-making machinery. At work was a social process common to sensors on a cell membrane, to bacterial colonies, to groups of crustaceans, troops of baboons, and to squabbling moderns of the cyber-age. Two subgroups with two hypotheses. Two roads, both taken. But only one subgroup's unity, wealth, and way of life survived. With this triumph something else lived on--the best guess of the tribe's mass mind.

There are numerous technologies with which we'll soon upgrade our interconnectivity--from smart clothes and digitized pens to information-sending-and-receiving shoes8 and computers which divine our interests by watching the dilation of our pupils then go out as personal servants to crawl the Worldwide Web for finds to surprise us, entertain us, and to help us through emergencies.9 But the web of inventions about to alter our lives will work all the better if we understand the interconnects built into our physiology. The global brain has a pulse and power grander than its constituent beings. We are modules of a global mind, a multiprocessor-intelligence which fuses every form of living thing.

Current evolutionary theory holds that an individual is "fit" only if he or she can maximize the number of his or her offspring. Even a brilliant thinker like Richard Dawkins says that the ultimate individual is not you and me, but a gene within us driving us remorselessly, and that that gene is selfish to the nth degree10 Such contemplations leave out the universal nature of networking. Less than a second after a false vacuum burped this cosmos into being, entities like quarks and leptons precipitated, separated, and set up boundaries which gave them their identity. Yet all were laced together in spite of their autonomy. When the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force failed to hold them, there was always gravity. The forces are more intricate in social systems, but the principle is the same: you can run but you can never get away. You can put distance between yourself and the center of your nation or your family, but you can never totally cut your lines of connectivity. Even when we turn inward, an army of invisible others speaks through our thoughts, twists our emotions, and populates our privacy. We are wired as components of an internet which literally shapes our brain, orders what we'll hear and see, and dictates what we'll comprehend as reality.

This book has been the story of the information nets which gave us birth and of the twists those webs have taken as we and a horde of allies and enemies have struggled for ascendance on this earth. We've moved from the attractive forces piecing together molecules to the pull which persuaded the bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago to live in megalopolises with populations larger than the total number of humans who have ever been. We've seen how these earliest of our single-celled ancestors built their massive colonies while sending and receiving information globally. We've watched as our more advanced progenitors achieved the benefits of size and skill which came with multicellularity. We've witnessed the price that multicellular creatures paid when they lost their ability to communicate minute-to-minute via data-saturated strands of DNA. We've seen the invention of a new information-mover--imitative learning - nearly 300 million years ago among the spiny lobsters of the Paleozoic age. We've seen how later data strands like words and symbols upped the speed of a new group brain--that of spreading humanity. We've watched the rise of stone-age cities and their mesh of commercial interlinks. We've noted the hastening of data flows created by war and rivalry in the sixth century b.c., when the philosopher Thales pioneered international consultancy. We've beheld the emergence of subcultures--havens for those of different temperaments--and have seen how the games subcultures play enriched the group mind in the days of ancient Greece.

We've seen how a collective intellect uses the ground rules of a neural net - or any complex adaptive system: shuttling resources and influence to those who master problems now at hand; stripping influence, connections, and luxuries from those who can not seem to understand. We've seen in the tales of Sparta, Athens, and Gilbert Ling how mass minds work to churn out, test, and sometimes crush hypotheses, and how they do it through the contest between social collectivities. We've seen how the groupthink imposed by leaders like the preachers' daughter, Mrs. Salt, and even more, by human sheepishness, creates facades of unanimity, and how fresh options spring from introverts who build subcultures on the margins of society. We've seen how sub-groups vie to commandeer the larger group's perceptual machinery, piloting masses of men and women on their next flight through the storms of destiny. And we've glimpsed the Spartan fundamentalisms striving to highjack the future visions of humanity.

This has been not only the saga of social data-processing, but the tale of how higher animals lost their worldwide mind, then slowly won it back again. It has been the tale of two global brains in conflict--that of microbes, and that of women and men. We've seen how the data swaps of science, despite their flaws, have finally allowed us to approach the swiftness of our microbial foes. Since these bacterial and viral relatives are often allies and just as often enemies, two billion human lives could be lost if we don't maximize our group-mind's speed and creativity.

We've seen how the group brain uses opposites - instincts which tear us apart and equally powerful instincts which yank us back in stride again. Diversity generators drive us to be different. Conformity enforcers compel us to agree. The referees are sorters...sorters of three kinds: inner-judges planted in the tissues of our bodies and our minds; resource-shifters couched in mass psychology; and tournaments determining which tribe comes out where in the contest between social entities11.

The Mass Mind has its dreams

Life, as Aristotle knew so well, is a matter of avoiding the extremes. Conformity enforcers are necessities (though it makes my non-conformist soul shudder to admit such a thing). But they are mass-mind throttlers when they grab hold totally. Diversity generators are equally essential. But taking them too far can destroy a civil culture and devastate once vigorous centers of humanity. Inner-judges - from depression and elation to those hidden in the tissues of our psychoneuroimmunology - make us effective modules of a collective thinking machine. But they can also turn us into preachers of mass murder or morose and suicidal beings. Resource shifters can work to motivate or can be pirated to pour the wealth too heavily on those who manage to usurp authority and who block the contributions of allegedly lesser beings. Intergroup tournaments work well in business, but can destroy men by the millions when weapons are their chosen means.

The mass mind, like its members, has its dreams. These aspirations can be turned to hard, cold fact if they're pursued not for merely hours or years, but for millennia and centuries. Humans have dreamed of flying since at least the days when the myth of Daedalus was told 3,000 years ago in ancient Greece. But it would take the workings of a global brain 150 generations to turn this fantasy to actuality. Italy's Leonard da Vinci did some interspecies borrowing - studying the motions of birds in flight - then took notes on pads of a material created in China - paper12 - and drew potential aeronautical machines. The Chinese innovation which had helped da Vinci popped up once again when two sons of a French papermaker discovered that by filling a flimsy bag made of their father's product with hot air, they could cause the bag to fly. In 1783, the brothers - the Montgolfiers - sent two friends drifting over Paris in the first manned long-distance13 flight. America's Benjamin Franklin soon suggested adding a propulsion engine, a visionary impracticality at the time. In 1799 England's Sir George Cayley conceived of a fixed-wing vehicle with a tail assembly for horizontal and vertical stability and stuck with his vision long enough to build a successful glider fifty years later in 1849. Germany's Otto Lillienthal - jumping from an enormous mound outside of Berlin--made 2,000 glider flights from 1867 to 1891, carefully recording each result except the last, which killed him in a glider crash. Before his final plummet, Lillienthal published a working set of data on the most effective curvature of a wing, on the means to achieve stability, and on the manner of turning the tail assemblies drawn by Cayley into practicalities. Ohio's Wright Brothers used Lillienthal's results to design a powered heavier-than-air machine which could be made to turn rather than to simply fly an uncontrolled straight line14. Finally, thanks to the development of new materials of all kinds, a human powered aircraft flew the flight path the mythmakers of Daedalus had conceived--from Crete to the Greek island of Santorini--in 1988, 3,000 years after the first telling of the tale of Icarus' wax wings.

This book's exploration of the mass mind's history is like the notes Lillienthal made on one of his early glider flights. It's intended as a small move in the progress toward another ancient dream - the dream of human peace. We will always cling to common threads yet stake out grounds for squabbling15. Such is the way the global brain does its thinking and creating, its testing and imagining. The more we can play out our necessary contests civilly, the closer we will come to turning spears to pruning hooks and swords to plowshares--purging the global brain at last of blood and butchery.

Bacterial Micro-Cyborgs

In 1998, Eshel Ben-Jacob moved from the study of microbes into the creation of microprocessors and gears so small thousands could be placed on the point of a pin. To what will this nanotechnology in its many forms lead? Here's one highly-speculative possibility. Imagine the day when we plug molecular-computers16 into the bacterial genome, then let the critters multiply. Imagine swarms of these bacterial micro-cyborgs interacting in creative webs, continually upgrading their collective software via genetic and inventive algorithms. Imagine them climbing the ladder of paradox at our behest to find new ways of conquering ancient problems from cancer to the carnage of war. A single colony of cyanobacteria in the wild - like that which is responsible for the creation of a stromatolite - has a population a thousand to a million times that of the entire human race. With a million times more agents than there are cells in a human brain, what could a nano-cyborgian, bacterial population of learning and creating hybrids do? Would they make our manner of searching possibility space - through the interacting intelligences of billions of humans spread out over 2.5 million years - look clumsy and lumbering?

Would they unfold their fractal branches into realms beyond imagining? Could they suck sustenance from subatomic plankton - the seething stew of particles flickering in and out of existence in the vacuum depths of space?17 Could swarms of nano-computerized bacteria climb and dive through nebulae, resculpting the Einsteinian landscape of time and space? Could they crawl through wormholes and discover ways to harness the energies of vast flares spewed by the black holes at the centers of galaxies?1819 Could they could become our descendants' exploratory engines, the antennae and energy-gatherers for the human race? From global brains could we go to universe-hopping megaminds? One small step for bacteria, one giant leap for all mankind?

The Horizons are within us

Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron20 which this universe had never known.21 The novel tidbits of debris were sucked up by infant suns which, in turn, created yet more atoms when their race was run. Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood. Deep Ecologists and fundamentalists urge that our faces point backwards and that our eyes turn down to contemplate a man-made hell. If stars step constantly upward, why should the global interlace of humans, microbes, plants, and animals not move upward steadily as well? The horizons toward which we must soar are within us, anxious to break free, to emerge from our imaginings, then to beckon us forward into fresh realities. We have a mission to create, for we are evolution incarnate. We are her self-awareness, her frontal lobes and fingertips. We are second-generation122 star stuff come alive. We are parts of something 3.5 billion years old, but pubertal in cosmic time. We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind.