I have been thinking about Cosmic Consciousness a lot lately. I first came across the idea in its simplest form in one of the books by Isaac Asimov. The book was called Foundation’s Edge and it described a planet called Gaia . The special bit about the planet was that it was a collective consciousness. Each living thing on the planet was a part of the same consciousness and hence we could term the planet a single huge conscious entity.

Coming back to my thoughts, I looked at the human history. From living in bunches far apart and not knowing who is where, doing what even a few miles away to this moment where we can in-essence trace any living being and many non-living beings in a matter of microseconds. Information is now available to us across thousands of miles within a few seconds. Communication is the driver of our evolution. Every day technology is helping us communicate faster and better.

It wont be long before we can link our minds to technology and communicate directly via our minds removing the need for special hardware to communicate. In perhaps a few hundred years we would all be a part of a complex network of communication where all we need to do is think about communicating with someone and its done instantly. There might not even be phone calls or letters or keyboards. The mind would think it and it would be transcribed and delivered to the required individual. In a small way, the earth would become a conscious entity.

As humans spread out into the galaxy, each planet will become a conscious entity and over perhaps a few thousands of years we would be able to bridge inter-planetary gap and all habitable planets would become a collective conscious entity able to communicate instantly perhaps.

In the astronomical scale, a few thousands of year is a mere fraction of a moment. Given a million years, humans have the capability and potentially will transform every livable part of galaxy to a single entity or a single conscious galaxy. Maybe by that point, we wont look exactly like we do today. Maybe we would become exactly like aliens we seem to have created. Maybe we would lose the need for our physical bodies completely and would only be a brain.

What if at that level of consciousness you decide that its better to leave the universe alone and not interfere in the workings of it? What if it was possible for a whole galaxy to shield itself to any observation? It would essentially be a huge space of nothingness for an observer. However, the effect of gravity will still give it away.

Or maybe the entity needs huge amounts of energy. It does so by absorbing all the light that falls in and around its surface. Hence it would always appear dark to the outside world. The effect of gravity would still remain in this case too.

And that might be what we call dark matter today. Our theories related to universe and galaxies only hold with the presence of mass that cannot be verified so far and hence the term ‘dark matter’. Maybe dark matter is nothing but huge chunks of matter which is conscious and not willing to let itself be observed.

Maybe dark matter and cosmic consciousness are related. Maybe there are beings/entities at a higher plane of consciousness than us and are just invisible to us.