There are many theories (and fantasies) that involve planet Earth in large-scale operations far beyond human comprehension, namely those like the well-known Gaia theory, which proposes Earth as a self-contained living organism. Of course, in abductee lore, as well as many notions presented in John Lear’s Dark Hypothesis and other UFO literature, Earth acts as a Matrix-style “farm” of sorts, from which humans are harvested by evil aliens who operate from beneath Terra Firma in vast underground bases.
Still, following the logic of a planet like Earth being utilized by aliens for resources of some kind, blogger Geoff Manaugh of the BLDGBLOG Web site proposes yet an even stranger speculative use for which aliens may be able to source our planet: a geological harddrive.
Manaugh describes the notion where “perhaps someday we won’t actually need harddrives at all: we’ll simply use geology itself. In other words, what if we could manipulate the earth’s own magnetic field and thus program data into the natural energy curtains of the planet.”
Utilizing technology to store informational potential in the very fabric of Earth’s magnetosphere, Manaugh guesses that “mnemonic Death Stars… made of content-rich bedrock” might already be used by aliens from distant galaxies as “spherical data-storage facilities”. Could this fall into the realm of speculative Physicist Michio Kaku’s ideas regarding “class civilizations” and their abilities to master all the energy resources within in a star system… or perhaps even beyond?
I’ll leave you with this final excerpt, which evokes the ever-appropriate Dark Poet of Dunwich:
Like something out of H.P. Lovecraft
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On the flipside, it is easy enough for an intelligent nonhuman race in communication with humans (extraterrestrial or otherwise) to utilize the human race as an auxiliary processor array. Just as it has been shown that one can subvert the intent of the built-in processes inherent in NICs, routers, and switches to offload particular types of computation to the internet as a whole without having any major effects upon the network load or the effectiveness of the machines using it, a race that can precisely control their communication with humanity and that has a very precise knowledge of the behavior of groups of humans could model problems (mathematical or otherwise) in terms of human group behavior and use groups of humans to solve them.