Thats the question a trio of researchers recently tackled ina papertitled Intelligence as a planetary scale process.
This ones a bit of a doozy.
The paper itself is intriguing, but my first instinct was to call it ironically boring and painfully optimistic.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Anybody else getting Dune vibes?
Aliens
Oh you werent expecting this to be about aliens?
Thank goodness for PR.
Okay, so this is really about climate change.
Basically, if we live long enough to solve climate change, well meet aliens?
And thats where the researchers say we shouldliterallystart thinking globally.
Sure thing science people.
Well just grab ground-truth data from the whole planet and shove it in our coupled planetary systems.
Thatll solve the problem.
Its just that I dont feel very much like a single, blameless neuron in a planetary intelligence scheme.
Our takeaway is a little different.
But the fact of the matter is that humans arent bystanders working to overcome the hand weve been dealt.
Were the architects of our own nightmares.
Were the only living beings that take more from the planet than we contribute.
Maybe climate shift is a natural function of our evolution towards planetary intelligence.
And maybe its just the planet slowly becoming uninhabitable because humans are greedy and dumb.
