How smart has the planet earth become since 4.5 billion years ago when it first started swinging around our sun?

The definition of smart changes with context. And context is always shifting.

Smartness calls on many components of a single brain that have worked together for a lifetime. It calls on that congress of brain-bits to focus on one key confluence of problems and possibilities… the problem of this globe's IQ that you and I are pondering now. Many of our brain modules are non-conscious or emotional. Rationality--the usual measure of our smartness--is just a tiller. Our non-conscious elements are the hull, the oars, the mast, and the sail. Our perceptual context and beliefs are the sea. And our "real world" context is the wind, the clouds, the weather patterns you can see from space, and the constantly kneaded ball of sun from which the energy of this weather system comes--not to mention underlying cycles like the Malankovitch Effect and like our procession every 66 million years around the galactic core.

There is far far more to what smartness is. Was Van Gogh an idiot or a seer? No one bought his paintings during his lifetime, so what he did was stupid, right? Then the context changed and everything Van Gogh painted was filled with what critics and the public saw as inspired light. Van Gogh's smarts were not apparent until after he was gone.

Using a number to measure our planet's gain in IQ may be the wrong way to go...even though you can work with phase space and sum up 90 variables in a moving point. If the variables vary in quality, not quantity, phase space just won't handle it. If a variable evolves, if it morphs, you have to capture that with computer pictures or verbal metaphors like the one I've used above. How do you advance in measuring this planet's accumulation of intelligence if you're stuck with verbal or visual metaphor? How do you advance if today's math just won't cut it?

Vision, imagination, and legacies like that of Van Gogh have piled up over the last 2 million years the way soil has accumulated in valleys of stone thanks to a 3.5-billion-year project--an ambitious attempt of biomass to transform raw rock into biostuff. In the process, the molecules of biomass have not only smartened up themselves and their vehicles-from bacteria to you and me--they've also made smart stuff from nearly everything they've touched. The IQ of this planet has soared since the days when all its molecules were dumb.

Here's an approach to figuring out how smart or stupid this earth has become. Estimate the number of atoms on this planet since roughly four billion years ago when earth stopped being smashed by planetesimals. 3.85 billion years ago or so the first smart molecules showed up--the first macromolecular teams able to sustain cells, the first macromolecules able to pilot their cells through the slings and arrows of an outrageous orb--one that was cruel enough to freeze into an iceball or to change its atmosphere to poison. A planet swishing around a vicious sun, one that upped its output catastrophically or dimmed it equally violently and without warning.

Count the number of atoms that have since been chain-ganged in one form or another by those smart molecules--whether those atoms are now part of cells and multicellular beings, whether they're used as tools like the giant stone housing complexes cyanobacteria create--stromatolites-or whether they're the skyscrapers and automobiles us humans make.

Current estimates say that every atom on this planet at one time or another has been reworked by biomass. So leave out the atoms that have gone back to being dumb...atoms that are part of striatal rock formations or the planet's core. Ignore the fact that even these are information carriers whose data is smart only if it has readers--and that since 1800 we've been capable of reading the data given to us about past ages by strata of rock. Ignore the fact that we can read indirect data from the planet's core and use it to piece together a picture of how planets all over this cosmos form. Or don't leave these things out. The fact of the matter is that stone is now a part of our collective intelligence. It is a library of information-now that we've learned to read it. Even gamma rays that were once useless now give us clues to supernovas thirteen billion light years away. These rays, too have become our tools. So have the supernovas themselves.

So count these deposits of information we've finally decoded and unlocked, count atoms now engaged in one form of smart enterprise or another. That means the atoms in cells, the atoms in DNA, the atoms in cytoplasm, the atoms in fungi, etc. If you do count the particles we've managed to decipher--photons from the sun and distant stars--it may help. Count the total number of atoms locked up in brains and possibly give those extra points.

But that's a cop out. The stuff that makes brains work is not in their neurons, it's in the culture within which they operate. And culture can't be counted by particles and atoms. It's an emergent property. Which means, count the atoms now trapped in books. Count the photons we use in reading. Count the electrons we use in everything from the action potentials of neurons to the electrical current that powers your computer. All these figures will be guesstimates. But I think you'll see that the percentage of particles and atoms engaged in the collective project of intelligence will increase dramatically from the beginning of life to today. And you'll see that if you do count the number of atoms and particles we now recruit to the long-term enterprise of intelligence via new means of interpretation like those of astrophysicists and paleontologists, smarts are now skyrocketing.

Heck, simply count the number of human brains when I was a kid and there were only 2 billion. Then count the number of brains today, when we're rapidly approaching seven billion. Multiply by 100 billion to get the total number of human neurons now in operation. Or get more ambitious. Multiply by 100 trillion to arrive at the number of cells cooperating with a brain to make the body of just one relatively smart human being. That's a small start.

Add the number of bacteria now working together in trillion-celled, parallel-processing, colony-wide intelligences. The sum you'll come up with may resemble in some small way this planet's rapidly growing IQ. But remember, every strand of DNA, every polypeptide in a cell membrane, and every intracellular messenger molecule like cyclic AMP is also smart--if it's in the right company.

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