Can an entire ecosystem be one giant organism with distributed intelligence?

I need someone to fact-check me and tell me if there's anything immediately bogus or physically impossible with the scenario I'm about to propose.

Billions of years ago, under the ice of Europa, the first single-celled organism developed. Over time, members of this single species began to differentiate and eventually an ecosystem of multicellular organisms evolved from all the different strains, just like what likely happened here on Earth (albeit grossly simplified). However, unlike on Earth, this single progenitor organism never died out or was outcompeted by its offspring, and eventually it even began to group together with other cells of its kind to form simple logic gates (kind of like what we've been doing in the lab). One thing led to another and this ancestral species eventually developed into a bacterial supercomputer, from which emerged crude sentience. As the first and as far as it knew only intelligence underneath the icy surface of Europa, it inevitably came to the conclusion that all these other more complex organisms that it birthed so long ago lacked its collective hive intelligence, or indeed any intelligence, and were there merely to serve as extensions of itself. Relying on their distant evolutionary connection, it began to infiltrate other organisms in its ecosystem and turn them into biological fingerpuppets, as they were to it little more than large colonies of cells marginally differentiated from its own that existed only to serve a specific purpose, like a new limb. At the end of the process, what we have is a single massive colony of this primordial microorganism that has gained intelligence and has differentiated its cells into many different types which each form their own colonies (read: organisms/animals) that are controlled by the central hive intelligence. Thinking as this organism does, the entire ecosystem is then nothing more than one gigantic organism.

Is this plausible/realistic and could it pass as the plot for a hard sci-fi story about exploring the oceans of Europa? Or is it complete garbage psuedoscience that only reveals my admittedly shaky grasp on a bunch of different interconnected fields?

posted almost 8 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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