That's the startling thesis of Larry Smarr, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Smarr believes exponential growth in computing devices linked via the Internet is leading us, inevitably, down the road to a planetary, integrated computer.

"The planetary computer has been assembled over the last several decades, with the Internet providing the wiring, and the Web the hyper-linked document retrieval system," Smarr told an attentive crowd at the Pervasive Computing conference Monday.

Smarr says the planetary computer is a self-assembling, viral infrastructure most people aren't even aware of. "The commercial world thinks they invented the Internet but it was late to the game," says Smarr, who worked with Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and others at NCSA where the first Internet browser, Mosaic, was developed. "It was five years after we connected (with Mosaic) that the first dotcoms started showing up."

With an array of social implications left unresolved, the planetary computer is being enabled by all manner of network-connected devices. For example, Smarr showed a video of a woman taking a pill that contained a tiny camera that transmitted video images as it made its way down her throat. The technology was developed by an unnamed Israeli company. "Information is being collected everywhere," notes Smarr. "Even planes have black boxes. In the future it may be illegal not to have (a device) that monitors your health for insurance purposes or medical care."

FROM GIGABYTES TO PETATYPES TO ONE GIANT BRAIN?

Smarr points to developments such as peer-to-peer computing and the explosion in technology to enable information sharing as evidence of the planetary computer's eventual arrival. "If you go out to the deep Web, it's about half a trillion documents or 7.5 petabytes. There are about a billion emails a year," says Smarr. "And all of this is globally cached by companies like Exodus and Akami, so its being extruded throughout the planet."

P2P technology first gained wide notoriety with the release of the Napster music file sharing site. Another high profile effort at distributed computing power is the Seti@home project which makes use of the unused computing cycles of some 500,000 Internet-connected computers to help in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Smarr is an advisor to a San Diego company called Entropia which uses distributed computing in a wide range of projects including AIDS and cancer research. He calls Seti@home "the biggest computer on the planet" but only the beginning of even greater distributed computing endeavours. "In three years there will be 30 million computers with cable or DSL access to the Internet," the Professor notes. And what happens when or if millions of computers are linked to the same task? The implications are staggering.

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"The planetary computer is becoming self empowered, now the question is will it become self aware?" asks Smarr. "A petaflop is roughly a human brain-second. Peta is equal to a million gigaflops or a million gigahertz Pentium processors. So we're crossing to a transition of computing power (equivalent to what's) in your head. What will we do with it, or it with us?