Empty of What

Avatar was absolutely amazing. I saw it in Real3D last week and I am going to see it again tomorrow. In addition to blowing me away visually, it has sparked a shift in how I view the evolution of what we call the “Internet” or the “web”.
For those of you who have not seen it yet, I won’t spoil any of the story, but let me just say that the large blue hominids that polulate the earthlink moon Pandora are intimately connected with their planet and all of its creatures. The Na’vi can literally “link up” with life on their world. As a result they directly feel the interconnected nature of all life on their planet.

As I was watching the Na’vi commune with Pandora, I thought “The Na’vi have it easy. The interconnected nature of all life on their planet is obvious to them; not so on planet earth. But life here is no less interconnected. I wish we had some kind of uplink to mother earth. If the people of this planet had real time feedback on what was happening to the planet and to its people, the world would be a better place.

Later I thought about this some more. Maybe we are building that uplink, that network that we can all plug in to. Maybe it began with Arpanet, and the World Wide Web, and is now being expressed in the phenomenal success of social networking and things like Twitter. Perhaps the Internet connected to 100 of millions (billions ? ) of smart phones is evolving into our global real time uplink to the planet. We just call it the Web.

As if to prove the point, mother nature furnished me with a personal example of how well this is already working. Just this morning, my wife and I experienced a 25 second long slow rolling earthquake. There was no damage, but it felt like a big one from somewhere not too far away. The first thing I did was send out a geo-tagged tweet with a description of what we had felt. Then I searched the twitter stream for “earthquake”. In less than 2 minutes, I had learned that quake was a magnitude 5.8 with an epecenter about 100 miles from my location. It would be 15 minutes before there was anything on any of the news channels about it.

Here is another example. Every time an asteroid passes close to the earth, I can sense it. Not only can I tell that an asteroid just passed the earth, I can also tell how far away it was and how big it was if I really want to. How do I do this? Easy. I Follow @lowgflyingrocks on Twitter. When an asteroid passes by the earth, I get a tweet telling me all about it. So in a sense, I can sense asteroids.

Granted this is pretty crude compared to what is described in Avatar, but I think we are heading in that direction. Here is my “just for fun” comparison of Earth to Pandora.

On Pandora the trees share information through an interconnected web of roots. The trees form the backbone of the web. On earth, we have in the Internet. Instead of tree roots, we have fiber optic cables.

On Pandora each living thing is exchanging information with the rest of planet in real time. We are just beginning to scratch the surface with such things as location-aware iPhone apps and Twitter. We should spread web connected sensors of all kinds all over the planet if we want to catch up to Pandora.

On Pandora everything evolved to live with this incredible amount of information flow. On Earth we have long way to go in this area. How are we going to handle the information flow? Augmented Reality may help. We certainly need better, more natural ways to both send info to the web and to receive it. We will need to be connected to it much more directly than through the screen of an iPhone. But even then, we would be quickly overwhelmed with the flow of information.

Clearly we have a long way to go to catch up to Pandora, but I am beginning to think that this is were we are heading. It feels like a natural evolution. If that is true, it is bound to have a significant impact on the planet and on us. What will we have to evolve into if we are to absorb and process information on a planatary scale in real time?

Dealing with a massive amount of information flowing in from all directions is a very difficult thing. But… It has been done before. Over the course of millions of years, animals on this planet learned to successfully integrate information coming from all their senses. This was no small feat! Just imagine the massive amount of analysis required to turn a stream of photons hitting the optic receptors in our eyes into what we call sight.

I believe that our “sense of self” is the result of having to integrate all this information into something that would allow us to absorb, analyze and act on all this information. In other words, the “I” or the “me” that we all feel at the center of our being is a construct, created by the brain to allow to it deal with the information flow coming at it from our bodies and our immediate environment in real time.

If this is true, then throughout most of evolution, our sense of who we are has been formed by what we could take in though our immediate senses. If we didn’t see it, feel it, taste it, hear it, smell it, or think about it, then it didn’t enter our consciousness. It did not affect us.

What if we are able to learn to integrate information in real time from a much larger area? What if we could see what was happening in the next town over in real time? What if we could hear a baby in some war torn country crying as it happens? What if we could feel the ice melting in Greenland, and the trees falling in the Amazon, and the oceans filling up with trash?

What if we could integrate all of that in real time? What would that do to our “sense of self”? Would we still be able to pretend that we are isolated separate beings disconnected from the rest of the planet?

Would there even still be a word for mine?