Nature Intelligence

When Networks Defined the Future

As a teenager, I thought the future would be defined by networks. And in many ways, it was.

The early internet connected people and ideas at a speed and scale never seen before. I built my first ventures on those digital networks, and I witnessed how communities emerge when information flows freely.

Later, I discovered that the most powerful networks aren’t just digital. They’re human: teams, collectives, and movements that combine intelligence to achieve what no individual can.

But today, I believe the most important networks of all are living.

The Oldest Network on Earth

Life on this planet is a complex web. Trees exchanging signals through fungal threads. Pollinators carrying genetic code from one flower to another. Whales enriching the oceans as they dive and surface. These are networks of energy, matter, and information — refined by nearly four billion years of evolution.

We call it biodiversity, but it is also intelligence in network form: not artificial, not centralized, but distributed, adaptive, and astonishingly resilient.

And here’s the irony: while we debate whether machines can think better than humans, we still don’t understand how a forest thinks. We build algorithms to mimic learning, but we don’t yet grasp how fungi, plants, and entire ecosystems process and share information.

The Nature Data Gap

The paradox: Humanity has built global networks to track every financial transaction and stock trade by the second. Yet when it comes to nature — the network that makes all economies and societies possible — we’re still in the dark.

How many species are disappearing every year? How healthy is a forest, a wetland, an estuary? The answers are often incomplete, fragmented, or simply unknown.

This is what we at Lemu, and many others, call the nature data gap.

And as long as that gap exists, we’re flying blind.

Building Nature Intelligence

Lemu exists to make these hidden networks visible.

We built Atlas, a platform that integrates signals from satellites, field sensors, research papers, and community observations. Our goal is to help every organization understand its natural dependencies and impacts — because every value chain is already wired into nature’s network.

And in 2024, we launched Lemu Nge, the first satellite designed specifically for biodiversity. Out of more than 10,000 satellites orbiting Earth, almost none can see life. Ours can. It took six years to build and launch; we expect it to operate for at least five — or roughly one-tenth of a century. Still tiny in nature’s timescale, but we need to start somewhere.

Step by step, we’re building the infrastructure for a new kind of intelligence: Nature Intelligence.

From Digital to Living Networks

I continue to believe networks define the future. Digital networks accelerated knowledge. Human networks made action scalable. But the ultimate network — the one that sustains us — is nature’s.

Artificial Intelligence, amplified by planetary-scale computing power and ever-expanding datasets, is already achieving remarkable milestones in automating and accelerating human behaviors. It may one day surpass human ability — but that will only ever represent one dimension of intelligence. Far from being an artificially superior intelligence, it pales beside the resilient, subtle, and effortless intelligence embodied in forests, fungi, and entire ecosystems.

The challenge of our century is to observe, understand, and respect that network. It begins by closing the nature data gap, and by weaving our human ingenuity back into the fabric of life.

Because understanding Nature Intelligence means understanding the operating system of Earth.

Read more about how we’re making nature intelligence visible at Lemu’s website: https://le.mu