The earth as hub

| No Comments
So it turns out, with virtually no "conscious" thought for the most part, we humans do networks just like nature.  It is fascinating to me that we see the same efficient "hub" based network design virtually everywhere, six degrees of separation, the Internet, cell function, airline hubs. It seems that even that galaxies may have this characteristic. So at some fundamental level it appears that there is a universal propensity to gather or coalesce that facilitates the functioning of the entire universe. 

This is an interesting point of view. Let's assume for a moment, that we are at/in a hub looking outwards, what would we see?  Probably not much, since by their nature, hubs are surround my areas of far less density.  So for me, the most almost blindingly obvious hub is the earth. It is just due to scale factors, and the fact that we reside in a hub, that we can't see the network of which the earth is a node.  There is absolutely no reason that I can think of, that this elegant design of nature would somehow be suspended for the planet.

So lets take this assumption to the next step.  So as we have seen in virtually ever other network, hubs facilitate communication within a network, they serve as a clearinghouse of information, that can be passed to other nodes without having to poll every node.  Or to state this in another way, if I am just a normal node on the network, where do I go first for info, to a hub node e.g., for the Internet network they would be sites like Amazon.com, google.com etc....

So here are some questions based on the above assumptions.  If the earth is a hub, could we look for who is polling earth?  If the earth is a hub, what does a normal, non-hub node look like?  What does communication between nodes look like?  
There are "easy" answers to these questions but my guess is that any true insight into this area has to take into account the perspective and scale of the organism (humans) that are doing the "looking".  I think it is only when this "corrective lens" of perspective and scale is applied, will we gain any meaningful insight.

Leave a comment

Categories

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
All non-commercial comments are welcome, comments from new contributors will be delayed pending approval. This writer has no affiliation with Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates or any other commercial enterprise. All writings are my own unless attributed otherwise. The writings in the background category provide some general information on the authors point of view, they are not directly related to the topic at hand. Read them at your own risk. :-)

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by kts published on May 29, 2009 6:14 AM.

Perspective and Scale was the previous entry in this blog.

Networks continued... is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.