Gaia as Cyborg Revisited

In "Gaia and the Evolution of Machines," co-authors Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis grant living systems exclusive title to autopoietic self-production. They place machines in the planetary mix alongside an autopoietic schema for systemic interdependence that maintains the operational differentiation of abiotic, biotic, and metabiotic domains. In contrast, in Novacene, James Lovelock emphatically insists that “the bit is the fundamental particle from which the universe is formed” (89), in other words, that everything in the cosmos comes out of and returns to the form of information. As virtual bodies of information, the cyborgs will necessarily surpass us, we read, due to their superior capacity to turn matter and energy into the caches of information by which they subsist. However, as near as I can make out, under this cosmic regime of ultimate digital being, material or corporeal entities, organic and otherwise, would evanesce and disperse into informatic patterns, and along w