The Web of Society

Isn't it amazing how large an organism the human society have become?

Its funny to draw an analogy. Millions of years ago, single celled and simple multicellular organisms would have been grown in population, and might also have got into thinking "Hey, how do I talk to Bob across the pond?". So they also might have started looking for a way to come together to unite, to communicate with each other, to work for a higher purpose...something like how we connect and collaborate on the net. It looks like another loosely coupled organism in the making.

All the traditional boundaries of caste, race, color, creed...all dissapear online. Eventhough its not a collective realtime communication, large groups of people connect and communicate on many places on the net. Almost the way cells in an organism communicate.

For an alien observer, the world should now seem like a huge organism, surrounded by very tiny simpler organisms (uncool guys not connected to net...lets call them dumbos), if what they are looking is the flow of information. Maybe such an image might deter them from an attacking earth! And the web shows the collective intelligence of thousands, if not millions of people. Type a question on Yahoo Answers and see the response you get. I bet its better than asking your schoolteacher, or the supergeek in your locality. I guess its difficult to imagine a topic not available in wikipedia, or howstuffworks!

Somehow its ironic that scientists are moving towards the conclusion that the fundamental unit of existence is information, and we are moving towards building an organism whose fundamental building blocks are the information too.

Its almost scary!