[staktrace]

I've often thought along these same lines (c.f. Asimov's Galaxia concept) but I think that this one-ness will inherently be limited by distance. Thoughts can be propagated across a planet pretty quickly but if we become a multi-planet civilization I would expect each planet to have it's own "one mind" (or whatever you want to call it) simply because of communication latency.

[urb]

Thought doesn't have mass. I see no reason to discount superluminal communication.

[mrob]

Superluminal communication breaks causality regardless of whether mass is involved, and we have no evidence that effects can happen before they are caused.

[staktrace]

Fair point. Another argument in favor of multiple one-ness is that of monocultures. In general things that become a monoculture are more vulnerable to sudden death. For long term survival diversity is good, and I imagine that planet-level conciousnesses would spawn daughter conciousnesses as they expand to other planets. Those daughter conciousnesses would further evolve and reproduce rather than being strongly tied to the parent.

[dreamcompiler]

Photons don't have mass either. Yet they cannot exceed the speed of light.

[the-dude]

Are you sure about that? Bits have mass.

[urb]

The underlying substrate on which bits register has mass but do they?

[the-dude]

There are more electrons in your RAM if you set bits to 1.