The idea of a conscious universe, conscious stars, conscious planets have been kicking around for a while.
One of the problems with science is that they will be totally unable to identify or understand this phenomenon if it exists, because they won’t even know the correct questions to ask.
Science is based on repeating experiments based on identical initial conditions—whenever it bumps against consciousness that methodology is a total failure.
We will need a new way of thinking, a new type of analysis, to evaluate these types of issues.
Terence McKenna is someone who has thought a lot about these issues. He argues in favor of telos in the universe, that everything in the universe has a purpose and is not a random event. If he is correct the question that should be asked is “what is the purpose of x” and stop focusing on x looks like that or x moves like that or x is made of that.
The analogy I like to use is that if science bumped into a radio and knew nothing about it, they would take it apart to try to find the little talking people in it.
Bad assumptions lead to ridiculous analysis—and imho that is where the “settled science” is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
(end of rant)
Wow...That was powerful analysis with the greatest of brevity. Bravo!
It's also likely that the nature of human consciousness is simply incapable of understanding neither scale nor the physics of these and other phenomena. An astronomer whose name escapes me at the moment once said, "The the universe is not only queerer than we know, it is queerer than we can know."
We have no idea what we are looking at, much less the fundamental forces underlying it all.