Reporting by XinZhiyuan
Editor: Yuan Xie Good sleepy David
【New Zhiyuan Introduction】This year, the concept of neural networks is really fragrant everywhere, both algorithms can be used as neurons to build AI, and live people can be used as neurons to build "planetary intelligence"?
When the biosphere evolved, the Earth had life of its own.
If a planet can have its own life, will it also have its own intelligence?
Adam Frank, Helen Goughn, fred Goughn of the University of Rochester in the United Kingdom, David Greenspoon of the Institute of Planetary Sciences, and Sarah Walker of Arizona State University in the United States discussed this issue in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
Thesis link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/intelligence-as-a-planetary-scale-process/5077C784D7FAC55F96072F7A7772C5E5
Their self-proclaimed "thought experiment" combines today's scientists' understanding of Earth with the broader question of how life is changing the planet.
What if people stretched their short-range perspectives and saw the Earth and all its inhabitants as part of a single agent on a large planet scale?
Can a planet have its own thoughts?
The paper playfully combines boring wording with optimistic opinions.
In the words of an ancient cartoon, it is "Combine your powers, I am The Earth Superman"
Intelligence is often seen as an individual human nature, but there are also phenomena that suggest that intelligence has collective human attributes. This study extends the collective properties of intelligence to the scale of an entire planet.
Researchers believe that the way in which intelligence that develops technology appears indicates a shift in the scale of the planet, so the emergence of human intelligence is not "happening on the planet", but "happening by the planet".
Like many models claim, the origin of life is a planetary phenomenon.
Microbes, plants, animals, the collective activity of all life forms, have changed the earth.
For example, plants "invented" ways to increase the chances of survival through photosynthesis.
In this act, plants release oxygen to the entire planet that changes the way it operates.
However, this is only a single example of the collective influence of individual life forms on a planetary scale while completing simple survival tasks.
If collective life activities called ecospheres can change the world.
So does the cognition and intelligent behavior that are the basis of intelligence also have the collective properties of changing the planet?
Prelude to history
Researchers draw inspiration from the Gaia hypothesis. According to the Gaia hypothesis, the ecosphere interacts strongly with non-living geographic systems such as air, water, and land to maintain the viability of the earth.
The researchers use this idea to explain that even species that have not developed technology can exhibit "planetary intelligence". The key is that the collective behavior of life creates self-sustaining systems.
For example, many studies have demonstrated that tree roots in the jungle are connected through the fungal mycorrhizal system. If one part of the jungle needs nutrients, the other parts transport the required nutrients through the mycorrhizal system. The jungle thus maintains its own survival.
Researchers call the current human civilization an "immature technological circle", a collection of man-made systems and technologies directly acting on the planet, but unable to sustain itself.
For example, the main energy consumption of human civilization now comes from the consumption of fossil fuels, which is destroying the main planet of human beings and will eventually destroy human beings.
Adam Frank said, "If humanity is to survive as a species, it is better to use collective intelligence to improve the broader situation of the entire planet."
"But humanity does not now have the ability to communicate in clusters for the best interests of the planet. There is intelligence on Earth, but it's not planetary intelligence."
Humanity is only a part
An important operational attribute for planet-scale intelligence is multi-layer networks.
Each layer of the planetary system constitutes its own network of chemical and physical interactions, and the specific nodes of each layer represent the links that connect the layers.
The Earth'ssphere contains chemical/physical networks associated with processes such as atmospheric circulation, evaporation, condensation, and weathering. These are modified by the biosphere through additional process networks, such as the chemical treatment of microorganisms and the transpiration of leaves. The technosphere adds an additional layer of networked processes, such as agriculture on an industrial scale, manufacturing by-products, and energy production.
The authors propose that a world exhibits five possible attributes needed for cognitive activity (i.e., planetary intelligence) at the planetary scale: (1) arising, (2) dynamic changes in networks, (3) networking of semantic information, (4) the emergence of complex adaptive systems, and (5) autogenesis.
When a world evolves from abiotic (the Earthsphere) to biotic (biosphere) to technological (technological) spheres, varying degrees of these attributes arise.
While the degree of each attribute shown in the histogram on the right is schematic, it represents a potential evolutionary trajectory in which a planet develops more or less self-organizing and self-sustaining complexity.
In summary, planetary intelligence can be divided into 4 stages:
Stage 1: Immature Biosphere.
In an immature biosphere, there is usually an atmosphere that is mostly in equilibrium, perhaps dominated by carbon dioxide.
Billions of years ago, there were microbes, but vegetation hadn't yet emerged.
The coupled system between life and the physical Earth does not have enough feedback loops to carry out robust co-evolution.
Stage 2: Mature biosphere.
In a mature biosphere, life will alter the chemistry of the atmosphere, leading to a highly unbalanced state, such as possibly a high concentration of oxygen.
From about 2.5 billion years ago to 540 million years ago, technological species were not yet formed.
At this time, stable continents formed, and vegetation and photosynthesis allowed oxygen to gradually accumulate in the atmosphere and form the ozone layer.
The influence of the biosphere on the geophysical state establishes a comprehensive co-evolution of the entire system.
This feedback may provide some degree of long-term stability for the overall system.
The third stage: the immature technical circle.
In an immature technological circle, new "pollutants" such as CFCs will emerge, while industrial activities such as combustion may alter the abundance of other pre-existing gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
This is the characteristic of the current Earth, with interconnected communications, transportation, technology, electricity and computer systems.
However, the technological circle is still immature, and the way it draws matter and energy from Earth's system will push the whole into a new state.
In the long run, our current tech scene is working against itself.
Stage Four: Mature Circle of Technology.
In a mature technological circle, the concentration of all atmospheric components may be altered in order to produce a long-term stable production state for the entire (civilization + biosphere) system.
Earth's goal in the future is to build a technological system that benefits the entire planet, including the global collection of energy, such as solar energy, in a form that does not harm the biosphere.
Mature technological circles are a form of co-evolution with the biosphere, allowing both the technological circle and the biosphere to thrive.
Time scales for intervention at different levels of "planetary intelligence". For the so-called "mature biosphere", the time scale for feedback or intervention to occur ranges from decades to millions of years.
Feedback or intervention is unintentional for "immature technological fields", intervention is intentional for "mature technological fields", and the timescale of planetary evolution can reach tens to hundreds of millions of years.
Translated in the vernacular, this is the dune planet setting of the Dune series of novels: giant sandworms and indigenous peoples consciously work together to transform the planet Ofracos into a planetary desert through biological activities and artificial technology.
Complex intelligent systems
Although no one knows exactly how planetary intelligence will present itself, the researchers say the mature technology circle will integrate technical systems with the Earth's environment to form a larger complex system with a network of feedback loops.
In short, a complex system is made up of smaller parts, and the overall behavior of the system depends entirely on the interactions between these parts. That is, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Forests, the Internet, financial markets, the human brain, nothing less.
By their very nature, complex systems have entirely new properties that are only apparent when the parts interact. Just by examining neurons in the brain, it is difficult to discern a person's personality.
This means that before planetary intelligence really emerged, it was difficult to predict its future nature from the behavior of individual humans. However, researchers say that the complex system of planetary intelligence must have the following characteristics: it has a unique behavior pattern and self-awareness, so as to achieve self-sustainment.
"Billions of years ago, the biosphere learned to sustain life by transferring nitrogen and oxygen. Now humans need to let the technosphere learn similar self-sustaining traits."
This part of the translation of the human language is that human beings should think in terms of global benchmarks, and individual humans will be dwarfed into a single neuron in the intelligence of the planet. All humanity needs to capture the datum truth data from the whole earth and stuff it into the "coupled planetary intelligence system" to do it.
Something didn't feel right.
Look for extraterrestrial life
Despite some efforts by human society, including banning certain environmentally harmful chemicals globally and moving in the direction of using more solar energy, we have yet to discover a technological circle of planetary intelligence or maturity, and the whole purpose of this study is to point out the direction in which we should be heading.
Frank said asking these questions would not only provide information about the past, present and future survival of life on Earth, but would also help in the search for life and civilization outside the solar system.
"The only technological civilizations we've probably seen are those that haven't died out, which means they must have reached the stage of true planetary intelligence," he said. "That's the point of this research line: it combines the knowledge we need to survive the climate crisis with what might happen on any planet where life and intelligence evolved."
The meaning of this passage, in the vernacular, is that if humans live long enough to solve climate change, they can meet aliens.
Does it feel a little wrong?
Resources:
https://thenextweb.com/news/scientists-say-humans-are-part-planetary-intelligence
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-planet-mind.html
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/intelligence-as-a-planetary-scale-process/5077C784D7FAC55F96072F7A7772C5E5