For more than 3.5 billion years the planet has teemed with life, and now, in a virtual instant, a part of that life has suddenly organized itself into a dense net of activity that is spreading over the globe and consciously reshaping large regions of its surface.
The thin planetary patina of humanity and its creations is truly a living entity. It is a “superorganism”—a community of organisms so fully tied together that it is a single living being.
Modern technology is now drawing humanity into a cohesive entity in which activities are highly interdependent.
Just as the activities of an animal’s individual cells mesh to serve the needs of the animal as a whole, human activity has organized itself into large functional patterns that join to sustain the entirety of Metaman.
Metaman is presently crystallizing out of the totality of human endeavor that has been building and deepening for millennia throughout the world. And now this superorganism is rapidly transforming the larger human enterprise that bore it. Metaman is spreading by a process reminiscent of moisture freezing on a cold windowpane; countless tiny daggers shoot forward, branching, growing, and building on previous crystals as they extend their organized pattern.
As a product of human activity, civilization is part of the so-called natural world, not separate from it.
Organisms at each level are not only significantly more complex than ones at previous levels; they are actually composed of living forms from those lower levels.
Certain higher organisms, in particular, humans, are grouping into a social superorganism bound together by technology—Metaman.
Consider shells and teeth; although not alive or even made of organic materials, they are part of an animal’s body because they were deposited by its cells and are integrated into its form. The same can be said of the machines and other human creations that cement civilization together and are so integral to Metaman’s existence; they too are part of Metaman.
Living inside Metaman does not enslave or diminish us as individuals; by sheltering us from the natural environment, bringing us food and water, and technologically extending our powers, Metaman lets us express our individuality more fully. What Metaman offers an average person in the developed world would have been the envy of royalty in previous eras. We readily visit distant lands, listen to the best musicians in the world, watch performances of great actors, talk to people thousands of miles away, and eat fresh fruit in summer and winter alike.
It may be difficult to face, but what still remains of the wild and pristine natural world will be transformed, and we, as part of Metaman, will be the architects. The choice now before humanity is simple: Will we be deliberate in reshaping our environment, or careless?
Individual choices seem so shortsighted as to make one wonder whether humans are capable of setting aside their own immediate self-interest long enough to surmount global problems.
It is more than poetry to say we are children of the stars: the elements that make up our bodies were formed inside those blazing infernos.
Life’s second transition—the evolution of the complex single-celled organisms called eukaryotes—was therefore an organization, rather than a chemical advance.
We are absorbed with occurrences at our own scale, not with those at the global level of the superorganism. With a bit of effort, though, we can transcend our relatively limited vision and life span to view the large, integrated patterns that make Metaman a being in itself.
With a new perspective made possible by such products of technology as rapid global communication and photographs from space, humanity has begun to glimpse Metaman.
Humans and machines are not competing; they are collaborating.
In only a few centuries, the continents of the world have been transformed into nurseries for a relative handful of crops. Whether it is vegetables, fruits, grains, or simply hay or cotton, these organisms, like humans, machines, and domesticated animals, are now an integral part of Metaman.
Metaman’s “nervous system” is immensely more elaborate than any animal’s. Metaman processes huge amounts of information by combining human thought and computer calculation within the various organized networks of human activity. Such networks as science, government, and business together constitute the broad cognitive systems that function as the “brain” of Metaman. Nervous systems engage in three basic activities—sensing, interpreting, and responding—and all are present in Metaman, which houses countless sense receptors to monitor itself and its environment, organizes and interprets that information, and acts upon those interpretations.
Continually sensing, transferring, and manipulating information, Metaman does more than just shuffle and store data, Metaman interprets and processes it. In essence, Metaman actually “thinks” by using a “brain” that literally is all around us. And that brain contains within it the functional equivalent of a global “memory” housing all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
When Metaman’s global store of information exists largely as electronic patterns as readily manipulated as the volatile patterns in the human brain, Metaman will truly have a “mind” of its own. Indeed, as its “metathinking” becomes ever richer and is coupled with an ever fuller “self-awareness” provided by its evolving sensory system, Metaman may evolve a sort of planetary “consciousness.”
It takes significant effort to see the human enterprise from the larger perspective of Metaman, but doing so helps make sense of the underlying forces shaping our world. If we choose to ignore this perspective, we risk serious consequences. These forces are not distant; the currents they create are shifting the ground on which we stand and moving our lives.
The path toward planetary regulation should be approached with the utmost caution. After all, if you had a little dial to control your pulse rate, you would eventually find its use an onerous burden because what was once automatically regulated would demand constant attention. The same applies to global climate. Until Metaman has evolved to the point where it can create a self-regulating planetary system as robust as the one which now exists, its best interests lie in protecting the “natural” systems that have worked so well.
It is the totality of all our individual actions that constitutes the behavior of Metaman.
Metaman derives health and vigor from the linkages in human activity.
The long-term directions of Metaman unfold largely beyond individual control as Metaman discovers its own global necessities and acts upon them.
In the era of Metaman, it is imperative to view the planetary surface as an integrated system.
Future humans will remember the twenty-first century not as a troubled, unfortunate period, but as the time when humankind burst forth from ancient patterns and made the fundamental transitions that redefined life as it had hitherto been. They will see our era as a wild and glorious epoch that spawned the seminal developments of solar power, computer intelligence, space exploration, and genetic engineering—the foundations of their civilization.
As biology and technology are becoming ever more tightly united within Metaman, they are uniting with human beings as well.
The human brain is quite adaptable, and long familiarity and practice with a tool or piece of sporting equipment can occasionally promote such a deep rapport that the device seems to respond directly to one’s will.
Humans might expand their mental capabilities with powerful enhancements of memory, communication, and computation and gain direct mental control over various machines as well. Given Metaman’s rapid technological advance, it is not absurd to ask whether human and machine will eventually merge.
Establishing electronic connections with the nervous system will eventually confer upon us some of the “psychic” powers we have long dreamed of. Controlling transmitting electrodes by thought and thereby being able to operate electronic devices with our minds would be akin to telekinesis. Implanted telephones would allow communication not far removed from telepathy. Today various businesses have dedicated communication links tying together distant sites. Perhaps future humans will create similar links to those they love.
The widespread use of pharmaceuticals is another aspect of humanity’s close association with machines. In this case, however, the connection is indirect, because the substances altering the body’s workings are the product of Metaman’s extended industrial processes, which thus serve as a sort of immense, collective, external prosthesis for humankind.
Whatever the direction, there will likely be not one, but many “human” forms in our future. As humans become more engineered, why would we not begin to manifest the same level of diversity seen in clothes, cars, and other designed objects?
Will the wedding of modern technology and genetics mean the eventual disappearance of humankind as we know ourselves? Perhaps, but as a beginning rather than an ending. When a species disappears we say it is “extinct,” yet we use the term for two very different types of disappearance. The first is a biological dead end that leaves nothing behind—for example, the saber-toothed tiger or passenger pigeon; the second is really a “pseudoextinction,” the disappearance of a species that is supplanted by the new forms it produces. Homo erectus is extinct but not gone; it lives on in us, Homo sapiens, its direct descendants. Similarly, Homo sapiens, though likely to be transcended by its offspring, will not mark the end of a genealogical line, but a point of great branching.
Some may contend that, because the newly emerging planetary environment differs from our idealized conception of raw nature, it is not “natural.” But such a view separates humanity from “nature.” We are a part of nature and our activities are as natural as those of any other living creatures!
There is no unique “natural” state to retain; nature changes unceasingly.
We stand at an extraordinary juncture in the history of life. Metaman is the greatest advance in living systems in some 700 million years, and life on Earth is entering a new phase of its history.
Soon the boundary between “natural” and “man-made” will become so blurred as to be almost meaningless.
Although still far simpler than biological systems, machines are evolving rapidly. As they begin to achieve the complexity of biological organisms, they will become an important component in the richness of our planetary environment.
An animal’s body provides its cells and tissues with a stable, healthy environment—feeding them, carrying away their wastes, protecting them from the elements. Similarly, Metaman provides humans in the developed world with an environment increasingly tailored to our needs.
Caffeine-free Diet Coke as a substitute for water is the quintessence of this trend: no calories, no caffeine, no reason to exist other than the experience it embodies.
The human environment formed by Metaman is so filled with appealing images, patterns, shapes, and colors that we take them for granted. Each, though, is the product of great labor.
Society is an immense pattern of interconnections.
Geography is a diminishing factor in human interactions.
Technology is changing the substance of what we can see. Thanks to Metaman, a pervasive layer of technology between us and the physical world extends our senses into realms never before penetrated by humans.
As our activities become more interwoven with those of others, so do our individual fates.
The material well-being brought by technological progress and global integration does not guarantee us a “better” life, but it offers us possibilities, freedoms, and choices never before available. Whether we will take advantage of these precious gifts or squander them is our choice—individually and collectively.
We are part of the larger collective process.
We may not be comfortable “playing God,” but whether the issues are medical, environmental, or social, humanity will increasingly find itself in just that role. Our newfound influence over realms once beyond our control cannot be wished away.
Through satellites and telecommunications, we are becoming aware of a newly emerging planetary superorganism that is, in effect, a “macroorganism,” a living thing too large for us to see directly.
Not only can change now anticipate rather than respond to need, but the time and energy required to develop models and ideas is a minute fraction of that needed to build “real” structures and systems. Metaman is not shackled by the limitation that has bound previous biological evolution: the need to select from physical prototypes fashioned out of randomness.
There is a degree of size and complexity that is unachievable by Darwinian mechanisms alone. Metaman could not exist were it not evolving by powerful new evolutionary mechanisms.
Metaman, however, to an extent unknown to other complex organisms, is capable of adapting its form directly! It builds cities and communications networks, forms new industries, shifts populations between continents, redraws national boundaries. The evolutionary mechanisms previously discussed—internal rearrangement, conscious design, and model building—are the mechanisms that direct the rapid evolution of Metaman, but its capacity for ongoing, major internal rearrangement is what ultimately makes Metaman’s evolution possible. Life, having evolved a being that internalizes the process of natural selection, has finally transcended that process. Through Metaman, trial and error are giving way to conscious design.
Each of these levels of organizational complexity originated as the refinement of a tightly linked group of elements from the preceding level. Bacteria arose by the enclosure of prebacterial chemical reactions in a membrane, eukaryotic cells by the symbiotic union of different bacteria, animals by the organization of clusters of sister cells, and Metaman by the cooperative association of human beings and other living creatures.
Looking at the evolution not of individual species but of entire kingdoms—bacteria, protists, plants, animals, and fungi—it is clear that the broad sweep of evolution is not directionless but moves toward ever-increasing complexity.
By moving beyond the constraints of previous “biological” materials and evolutionary mechanisms, Metaman is moving life into an entirely new realm.
With Metaman’s emergence, biological life as a whole is taking a major step toward integration and symbiosis. In addition to spreading to encompass all of humankind and its many domesticated plants and animals, Metaman, by moving genes between different species, is merging organisms and breaching the boundaries between hitherto separate life forms.
Religion—a metaphorical utterance coming from the very core of human nature—is expressed in many forms because it is molded by the local landscape from which it springs. Beneath the unique cultural aspects of different religions, however, there is great similarity because the paths all lead toward the same end. Only when the specifics of religious metaphors are confused for literal truth do different teachings seem at odds with one another.
To accomplish the underlying purpose of the practice—spiritual reflection and a pause from work and everyday concerns—requires that the interdiction be recast in a way that is more relevant to the modern world.
Many of these moving images are not so different from our own. Science has now unambiguously confirmed that the earth and sky were here before life, that the animals and plants did come from the lifeless elements of the earth, that humans are a recent arrival on the scene. Replace a personal and capricious deity such as the Hactin by a “god” synonymous with the underlying laws of nature and we have in this history a powerful and poetic rendition of human origins as we understand them today.
The truths of the universe are so complex that there is no simple way to grasp them without metaphor. Even Metaman, with its vast powers, is only beginning to decipher the story’s outlines, much less its details. Life is a miracle whose story is revealed all around us, and if we hope to know it we must look at the evolution of the stars and planets, the division of an amoeba, the growth of a seed, the workings of the brain, the physics of a transistor, the spirit of an individual. This is God’s story.
Science has missed a fundamental truth: the unique importance of human beings.
Scientists now maintain that humans are merely one of many animal species. We cannot, however, escape the feeling that this is not the whole truth. Our human intuition rebels at the thought, and humans have forever tried to validate their feelings of specialness.
Is our feeling of uniqueness really an empty illusion, merely a manifestation of our own human pride and egocentricity? No. Though evolution is not a history of preordained progress toward the human form per se, it is definitely a story of the progressive development of complexity.
We are no more than animals, and yet we are immeasurably more: we are biological creatures with intimations of the divine. The attempt to understand and explain this duality is the essence of religion and philosophy: man has a soul, man has self-consciousness, man is aware of his own existence and mortality. Ours is an exalted place; but it is also a humble one because we each are only a tiny part of something far larger and more powerful than ourselves—a concept strikingly similar to what lies at the core of all religion.
It is illusion to see ourselves as isolated individuals. Increasingly, we are each a dynamic part of an immense collective consciousness, which even after we die will retain the influences of our presence.
The concept of Metaman resonates with our natural awe of the universe and gives humans a place that neither diminishes us nor contradicts humanity’s understanding of the physical realm. In essence, Metaman restores us to a story of the universe that possesses the strength of the ancient myths—their ability to explain the workings of the world and our place in it. We now know the basic outlines of a history of life and the cosmos so rich that it can serve as a powerful modern mythos to orient our lives and our vision of the world.
Humanity is an important participant in a saga extending from the universe’s distant past toward its far future. The story begins with the giant explosion that created everything around us, tells of the formation of galaxies, the births and deaths of fiery stars, and the condensation of our own Earth from the swirling gases that also bore our sun. It traces the long evolution of life from the primeval ooze: its triumphant moves into new environments, its massive die-offs, its prolific creations. Approaching our era, the saga tells of the arrival of humanity and how this led to the birth of Metaman; looking into the future it prophesies Metaman’s journey out from its cradle into the larger universe awaiting it. There is no greater epic. Its scale is vast, its outline compelling, its details riveting. It is more than a story, it is the story, and we are privileged to know as much of it as we do. No generations before us have been so fortunate.
Our knowledge, vision, and power have expanded to previously unimagined levels. To the ancients, unleashing a storm, healing the sick, leveling a city, or foretelling the future would have been ample demonstration of divinity. Now, having seen equivalent powers in Metaman, we might inquire how the “miracles” were performed rather than falling to our knees. Flight, television, a corneal transplant that restores sight, even high explosives would once have been considered godlike. Now we take them for granted. Knowing more, seeing more, having greater powers than any who have gone before, we—through Metaman—have in a sense become as gods. And yet we are “gods” only in the limited terms of early humans, because Metaman’s emergence is giving us an awareness of the true enormity and power of the universe.
Ours is a world of progressive change and adaptation; human society has grown from, and is an expression of, the natural world; all of humankind is joining together and can look toward a limitless future. This modern mythos offers us an expansive new vision of who we are, one that can encompass all humanity in a shared and inspiring future.
Civilization is not an intrusion into the natural realm, but a harmonious extension of it. Indeed, when we reflect on all that has contributed to the creation of the familiar buildings, vehicles, and other man-made devices around us, they can reveal the inherent beauty of life just as completely as a wildflower sprouting in a field does. Each reveals the complexity and potential of the living process. Even a simple telephone—by manifesting the networks of manufacturing, transportation, and communications that crisscross our globe, the accumulated knowledge from humanity’s long history, and the miracle of conscious design as a mechanism of evolutionary change—can remind us of all that life has achieved and whisper of the long future ahead.
Metaman affirms that we are all connected—giving to and drawing from one another as we participate in a momentous step in the evolution of life. Stone tools came from Africa, writing from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, paper currency from China, the steam engine from Britain—all humankind has played a part in bringing Metaman in to being. Together, we can exult in this shared accomplishment, try to solve our immediate problems, and look with anticipation to the amazing future stretching before us.
The mutually dependent parts [of society], living by and for one another, form an aggregate constituted on the same general principle as is a living organism. The analogy of a society to an organism becomes still clearer on learning that every organism of appropriate size is a society.
Aerobic metabolism extracts and uses the energy released as heat during combustion. It does so by dividing this uncontrolled chemical reaction, the oxidation of carbon (C + O2 → CO2 + Energy), into a linked sequence of controlled chemical reactions. These metabolic reactions shunt the oxygen’s energy into stable, high energy compounds such as ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which subsequently power the activities of the cell.
Calculating the percentage of Metaman’s energy involved in information processing would be difficult, but the demands this activity will make on Metaman’s metabolism will eventually be very high. After all, our own brains use about a quarter of the total calories we consume!
Metaman does “think,” and furthermore its thoughts are becoming increasingly complex. It is intriguing to consider whether one day this giant superorganism will also have a consciousness of its own.
Developments are giving Metaman an increasingly clear “vision” not only of its environment, but of itself. And these are the rudiments of large-scale self-awareness and perhaps even the early stages of eventual consciousness.