Midweek Chill September 26th, 2018: Naturally

By Slow Train Soul.

Galactic Scale Organisms: Part Two

The previous post on this topic had worked on the assumption that there was only one civilization spreading throughout a galaxy. But Forge of God and it's sequel went further with the idea by including other possible civilizations too.

So let's take a look at the implications. As planetisms spread out into the galaxy they'll encounter exo-planetisms with different forms of life and civilization.

The possibility here is for further evolution of one or more planetisms, either via cooperation, parasitism or competition. In essence it's the creation of a galactic scale ecology which, if it can stabilize, becomes a galactism.

Just as a planetism is a planet-spanning organism a la Gaia, a galactism is a galaxy-spanning organism with very large scale "metabolisms" and homeostasis. The size of a galactism would in fact be so vast that (assuming no faster-than-light travel is possible) its equivalent of breathing or a heartbeat would last on the order of a few hundred-thousand years to millions of years.

A topic like this is rather big and has a lot of ground for speculation, with that said the post ends here but I might return to these ideas in future posts.

Midweek Chill September 19th, 2018: Counts Dukes Strays

By Mocean Worker

Musings On Galactic-Scale Organisms: Part One

What if a galaxy itself could evolve into a lifeform? A novel that asked this question was The Forge of God written by Greg Bear, and it's a pretty interesting idea.

Before talking about it though, I have to talk about something called the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis originated from the ideas of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and the general idea is that Earth's biosphere as a whole can be considered a living organism (note: I'm not going to go over arguments for or against the hypothesis or take a specific stance as to its truth or falsehood, this post will treat it as true for the case of speculation in this post only).

The Forge of God then asks a question: if a planetary ecology is itself a living being, what role does intelligence play for it?

Planets with an ecology (and therefore alive) but no intelligence can be considered analogous to a mule, living but unable to reproduce. In the planetary organism's case it's because non-intelligent organisms tend not to have civilizations and therefore no space programs. This dooms the planetary organism (or "planetism" as referred to in the novel) to die whenever there's a catastrophe in the stellar neighborhood or when its star ages.

But what about planetisms that have developed intelligent agents? In this case the planet could reproduce by these intelligent agents colonizing and maybe terraforming planets, moons, asteroids and building various kinds of habitats. In this sense the planetism spreads throughout the star system by virtue of its "seed pods" in the form of intelligent members of civilization.

Why stop at one star system though? Spreading farther afield into the galaxy proper would ensure its survival long into the future.

RSS is here

I found an article several weeks ago by Wired.

It's Time for an RSS Revival

So I added an RSS widget to the blog (look at the sidebar). I've been quitting certain social networks due to disagreeing with their policies. So I figured I'd make it easier for people to keep up with the blog without having a social network subscription.