In every one of the 100 trillion cells in your body there’s the contents of a complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you. Those cells are smart.
Eating an apple may seem like a very simple thing, but it’s not. In fact, if I consciously had to remember and direct all the chemical steps required to get energy out of food, I’d probably starve to death. And yet, even a bacterium can do anaerobic glycolysis.
Our passion for learning is the tool for our survival.
If you were an observer from an alien world, you would’ve noticed that something very complicated has been happening here over the last few thousand years. It might take you a while to figure out the details, but you would recognize by its complexity unmistakable evidence for intelligent life. On closer scrutiny, you might even be able to recognize individual, intelligent beings. The evolution of the city is due to their conscious activity. Millions of human beings working, more or less together, to preserve the city, to reconstruct it, and to change it.
When our genes could not store all the information necessary for our survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came—maybe tens of thousands of years ago—when we needed to know more than could conveniently be stored in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory.
What an astonishing thing a book is! It’s a flat object made from a tree, with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person—maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other; citizens of distant epochs.
A library connects us with the insights and knowledge of the greatest minds and the best teachers, drawn from the whole planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.
Information itself evolves, nurtured by open communication and free inquiry. The units of biological evolution are genes. The units of cultural evolution are ideas. Ideas are transported all over the planet. They reproduce through communication. They are selected by analysis and debate. In the last few millennia, something extraordinary has been happening on the planet Earth: rich information from distant lands and peoples has become routinely available. The number of bits to which we have access has grown dramatically.
In our time, a revolution has begun—a revolution perhaps as significant as the evolution of DNA and nervous systems and the invention of writing. Direct communication among billions of human beings is now made possible by computers and satellites. The potential for a global intelligence is emerging, linking all the brains on Earth into a planetary consciousness.
Perhaps their neurons are not in direct physical contact with each other, but in radio communication. So a single intelligent being could be distributed among many different organisms.
