Perhaps the most startling idea to emerge during the 21st Century, although not entirely new, was that expounded by J. Lovelock and L. Marguilis: the Gaia Hypothesis. Against typical reductionist opposition, they demonstrated how conditions required for life -- a steady global temperature and atmospheric composition -- are maintained by a process of Geo-Homeostasis: a tropical aquarium floating in space. However, the spread of the World Wide Web, with it's filamentous network of satellite and cable communications systems, analogous to the formation of a global nervous system, points to the fact that organic life, en mass, is but one living thing -- a super cellular organism -- in an advanced stage of entelechy. Taking this hypothesis just one step further, we can postulate that not only is Earth a self-regulating, self-conscious organism but that the entire universe may also be an organism!

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