During the last one-millionth part of Earth’s history, the biosphere has undergone a dramatic change. Since the evolution of agriculture 10,000 years ago, eco-systems have progressively made way for farmland, and lately, for industrial wasteland and concrete jungles. Within the last fifty years this process has escalated so dramatically that the amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, at a steady decline over most of our planet’s venerable lifespan, have suddenly begun to rise. Simultaneously our planet has become an intense emitter of radio-waves. Like a star about to supernova sending out a final blast of gamma rays into the void, planet Earth’s apotheosis seems to be fast approaching.

The pulsing ‘skin’ of human technology (including agriculture) that has covered much of the planet can now be seen from space. By day, the smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture obliterates most of the tropics and by night the heady guzzling of fossil fuels lights up the darkness. Yet underneath it all lies an ancient network of organic weather systems, oceans, rivers, and biomes, a living and evolving planet that can’t be totally divorced from the artifice of humans. During the 1970’s, shortly after the first picture of our blue-planet was televised, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock extended the concept of the biosphere and came up with the science-fictional notion of Gaia. Described as a self-evolving and self-regulating living cybernetic system, Gaia is described as a giant feedback loop existing at a far-from-equilibrium state, a meta-life-form or self-organising system that comprises all terrestrial life-forms, including the atmosphere, and extending even down into the tectonic plates. For techno-theorist Donna Haraway, such a living system is already, and has always been a machinic and technical assemblage, “terminally blurring the boundaries among the geological, the organic, and the technical … in itself a cyborg … the natural habitat, and the launching pad, of other cyborgs”.In other words, our machines represent an extension of nature into abstract and conceptual realms as much as nature is already machinic. After all, as Manual de Landa points out, humans can only imitate what nature has built already. Even our fastest supercomputer can’t begin to match the processing power of an insect’s brain. 

The real question we need to ask ourselves, writes anthropologist Jeremy Narby, is whether the same nature that evolved the brain that’s writing these lines is really as dead, dumb and random as reductionistic science would have us believe? The notion that the planet itself is ‘minded’ is a venerable one.  Alchemists and the archaic shamans imagined that our planet was a living network or sentient weave and they populated it with an array of vegetable, mineral, bestial, and celestial intelligences. These hybridized spirits wove their ‘code’ into the eerily interconnected matrix of life, controlling the weather, the movements of animals, and the welfare of human communities.  For shamans caught up in ecstatic trance, this matrix served as a self-revealing communications network through which flowed pathways, chunks of data and minutiae – information on every thing that was alive, dead, or yet to be.  When Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis first came to light in 1969, it merely revitalized this archaic conception of a conscious latticework of planetary information spaces.   Likewise, the tinkering of the US Military Industrial complex with various Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects as well as the Internet also represented and still signify serious efforts on the part of techno-science to engender a mechanized self-regulating planet-wide communications system and network of intelligence with a mind of its own.  

Whilst various writers of sf such as Dan Simmons (in Illium [2003]) and William Gibson (in Count Zero [1986]) have imagined future scenarios in which the mechanosphere of today, fed by various AI programs, attains sentience and becomes a living, self-regulating assemblage, Gaia - the “vegetable matrix” of planetary intelligence - is described by Lovelock and Margulis as having achieved this status approximately 3.5 billion years ago.  “One billion years after its formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of transforming this planet into its own substance”, claims Lovelock, toying with the idea that humans are but the latest expression of an ancient planetary mind that has thrown up countless other life forms across its venerable lifespan.  

Given humankind’s increasing danger to the planet (through pollution and overpopulation), we are arguably at an ecological and ontological crisis point.[i]  Humans and their artificially constructed mechanosphere could represent the onset of a bio-technological apotheosis whereby nature either withers and dies, or skips the organic and goes into silicon - perhaps via us.  Alternatively, as Lovelock warns in his latest book, Revenge of Gaia, nature may be gearing up to get rid of us altogether – or rather, we are gearing up to get rid of ourselves. “After all,” jokes Lynn Margulis, “Mother Nature is a tough old bitch.”

There’s no doubt that spaceship Earth will survive the depravations of global warming, overpopulation and goddess-knows what else, but there’s also very little doubt that no mischievous bipedal monkeys will be around (in their present form, anyway) causing havoc during Her final 5 billion year journey.