I’ve been looking at how the way the brain manages the body, information, and the world as a primary example of how the human species might begin to operate on a planetary scale. At the same time I’ve been looking at similar structures at the molecular scale with Virtual particles and forces, the city scale with trade and communication, the building scale with research and production, and the affect these have on humans in general.
Through all of these I’ve noticed a pattern. Distance creates innovation through specialization and cooperation. Molecules separate into specific proteins, stretching out across the cytoskeleton for specific tasks(1). Neurons stretch out across the brain creating specific pockets of activity, dedicated to certain ideas(2), for example.
On the planetary scale, cities tend to focus on certain tasks and industries. Most of us are familiar with the concept of the 1st world/3rd world spectrum we see today after the fall of the 2nd world. In the last few decades since the iron curtain fell, vast networks of trade have been established between the 1st and 3rd world, with the scales of value on each node being primarily based on GDP of physical goods to be bought and sold. At the basic level, this means that every element of wealth has a real and physical object which backs it, either in promise or in reality.
Or at least that’s what we like to tell ourselves. In reality, for most of the last hundred years, the concept of promising has been creating wealth off of the interest of that promise. The idea of it had value. In the last ten years in particular, similar concepts have exploded thanks to electronic networks. At this moment in history, countless trades can be done within milliseconds, on penny worth interests, creating millions of dollars of garnered interest within actual seconds.(3)(4) Wealth here is being created out of the work of exchanging ownership virtually over stagnant physical goods. The idea, indeed faith, that the goods in question exist, are what are really being traded. The physical goods are in a hangar somewhere, never moving. Indeed, rotting in many cases if they are perishables. And from this wealth, money is used to find faster and faster technology to feed back into trading. Effectively, the knowledge of a a product’s existence, and its ownership, is traded with interest to pay for trading knowledge of its existence, and its ownership, faster.
At the extreme of this, nations have begun buying each others debt, making money off of the interest payments, effectively inventing wealth from monetary movement. In this case, the derivative of debt interest becomes wealth. The idea which follows is that we have both the means, and in some cases already operating reality, that we can begin to value ideas and knowledge, and the spread of their movements, instead of products and their movements. The further consequences are that invented wealth, such as through debt interest, is used to invent physical wealth, such as infrastructure in Europe, buildings in China, and armies and research in the United States.
From this I can extract a deeper operation that can help in a design.
And this also helps me look into the scales of my previous concepts of acquisition, archive, and curate.
The basic thought I have begun to arrive from this, with feedback from the reviews, is that I can begin to map these physical and hypothetical examples onto an x and y axis to derive a z axis that can be a species:
In essence, here an architecture to hold policy would be at the building scale.
And at a larger scale, I can begin looking at how colonization would direct specialized packets of humans, ideas, and resources to fuel them.
1: https://www.boundless.com/biology/cellular-structure-and-function/the-cytoskeleton–2/cytoskeleton-functions/
2: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2811%2900792-6
3: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/
4: http://www.radiolab.org/story/267195-million-dollar-microsecond/