We alive today could witness the beginnings of the emergence of a high-synergy society, a healthy social superorganism.
If humanity were to evolve into a healthy, integrated, social superorganism, this transformation could signal the maturation and awakening of the global nervous system. Gaia might then achieve her own equivalent of self-reflective consciousness, and a fifth level of evolution, the Gaiafield, might emerge. Gaia would become a conscious, thinking, perceiving being, a being functioning at a new evolutionary level with faculties quite literally beyond our imagination.
Over the last two decades Gaia’s nervous system has begun to sense the space around. A few thousand artificial satellites have been sent up; a hundred men have been put into space, some of them to the moon; probes have been sent to take close looks at Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter, some looking for life; and other missions are planned for the sun and for comets. Seen from space, it would look as if Earth were beginning to grow nerves out into the solar system, fine tendrils sensing her immediate environment.
As far as the Earth as concerned, once the conditions for the emergence of life were right, life appears to have dawned very rapidly; it seems to have been a virtual inevitability.
Ten billion seems to be the approximate number of units required in a system before a new level of evolution can emerge. Could the possibility of ten billion living planets in our galaxy herald the emergence of some galactic superorganism whose cells are awakened Gaias?
This next evolutionary step would signify the transition to a galactic superorganism. The galaxy would become its equivalent of conscious. With this might come the emergence of a sixth level of evolution, one as different from the Gaiafield as the Gaiafield is from consciousness, consciousness from life, and life from matter.