If one were to imagine the Blue Marble, not as an image but instead as a movie that fast-forwards through the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet, we would see continents emerging, splitting, and consolidating, asteroid strikes, and all the rest played out as the biggest “nature video” of all. At the very end of this film, in the last minutes, we’d see the last Ice Age ending and the polar caps retreating, and then in the last seconds of prodigious movie we’d see something very unusual compared to what had occurred up to that point. We would see the planet wrap itself in wires, antennae, cables, satellites—together forming an intricate inorganic crust extending beyond the atmosphere. We would see the emergence of planetary-scale computation as a geological and geophilosophical fact.
The planet is thus now capable of systematic self-sensing, self-modeling, and self-simulation. If you are a Gaia person, you may say that this has always been the case, and I won’t disagree. The “natural computation” of planetary systems—ecosystems, chemosystems, geosystems—is …