When NASA’s first images of the “big blue marble,” planet Earth, hit television in 1966, the philosopher Martin Heidegger was overcome by a wave of existential nausea. “The uprooting of humanity has already taken place”, he proclaimed, “this is not the Earth on which humanity lives.”  To Heidegger, the technologies that had made it possible for us to see our planet from space were the very processes that were engaging the Earth as an object, a pool of resources, to be dominated and used.  While the rest of humanity gaped at the spectral shimmer of artificial lights that lit up the planet’s night-side like a Christmass tree, Heidegger saw a planet on the brink of multiple ecological disasters, already doomed by the “terrible ravages” of consumerism and overpopulation.

The pulsing ‘skin’ of technology that Heidegger saw glittering from space in 1966 has since expanded exponentially.  But, argues contemporary historian Manuel De Landa, this ‘skin’, or mechanosphere, can hardly be separated from the complex processes that animate our “blue marble”.  The mechanosphere, he argues, is merely the latest addition to an already existing network of immensely complex organic weather systems, oceans, rivers, and biomes.  This layering of natural and artificial components comprises a living and evolving assemblage of diverse elements - a coupling of the Earth’s biosphere and the mechanosphere.  What Heidegger had seen was, in fact, the bio-mechanosphere.

Such a natural/technical synthesis of organic and inorganic components seems to fit biologist Lynn Margulis and meteorologist James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia.  Not long after the famous NASA broadcast, Lovelock and Margulis published a controversial paper describing the Earth as a self-evolving and self-regulating living cybernetic system. Gaia, our planet, they wrote, is a giant feedback loop existing at a far-from-equilibrium state, a meta-life-form or self-organising system that comprises and produced all terrestrial lifeforms and their systems. Gaia, which includes the atmosphere, extends down into the tectonic plates, and perhaps even into the planet’s metallic core.  For biologist-turned- cyborg-theorist, Donna Haraway, such a living system is already, and has always been a technological creature, “terminally blurring the boundaries among the geological, the organic, and the technical … in itself a cyborg (an organism/machine hybrid) … the natural habitat, and the launching pad, of other cyborgs.”  Haraway’s “other cyborgs” are none other than ourselves, the denizens of the early 21^st century who are almost inseparable from our machines.

When the Gaia hypothesis came to light in the late 1960s the US military industrial complex was hard at work developing the idea of intelligent machine networks.  In 1969 the first node in the computer network known as ARAPANET was installed at UCLA.  Growing rapidly, this network, the precursor of the Internet, was intended as a self-organising system capable of maintaining flows of information without a centralised source of command.  At the same time, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) was backing various Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects with the idea of creating mechanical advisors that could handle complexity and react with more speed and clarity than human operators.  The goal of the AI process ostensibly transcended the notion of the “smart prosthesis,” however: the idea was to develop a machine (and eventually a network) with a mind of its own.

Various writers such as Dan Simmons (in Illium) and William Gibson (in Count Zero) have imagined future scenarios in which the mechanosphere, fed by various AI programs, attains sentience and becomes a living, self-regulating assemblage. According to Lovelock and Margulis, however, Gaia achieved this status approximately 3.5 billion years ago.  “One billion years after its formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of transforming this planet into its own substance,” claims Lovelock.  According to Lovelock and Margulis, humans are merely the latest expression of an ancient planetary mind that has thrown up countless other life forms across its venerable lifespan.

Gaia is undoubtedly at a crisis (or, rather, a crossing point).  Perhaps, like any other biological entity, s/he is finally ready to reproduce – at any cost.  Once humans have ruined the planet and desecrated the biosphere, we (or rather, a scant few of us) will surely attempt to leave, taking Gaia’s DNA (our DNA, the same DNA that occurs in all biological life) with us into space? One thing is certain, however – Gaia is no ordinary biological entity.  3.5 billion years and counting, s/he remains a barrelful of surprises and mysteries.