We are hearing about turning the whole of the planet into a kind of wired organism; it is Hewlett-Packard’s project, and in their technology news release, they call it the Central Nervous System for the Earth.

So what is it exactly? They call it Smart Dust; they plan to make tiny, dust particle-sized sensors, billions of them. Each will be capable of sensing a wealth of things, temperature, vibrations, poisonous chemicals, biological changes, and so on. Actually, these will be tiny computers that will be able to process whatever inputs they receive.

You have heard in the technology news about how Hewlett-Packard is a nanotechnology giant; this is where all of that comes in.