"Everything looks like it was designed by a single mind."
It reminds of the famous Douglas Hofstadter piece, Prelude... Ant Fugue.
I'm not a big science fiction fan, but I've read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. The novel explores the mutual incomprehension between humanity and an utterly alien intelligence. Attempts to communicate with one another prove so misguided that both parties undoubtedly do more harm than good.
How do you communicate with something that shares none of your categories of thought?
Quite a large number of people advocate psychoactive compounds for the task. I'm not so convinced, but they are fascinating nonetheless.
The full ant video is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, particularly biocybernetics. They exhibit a form of "distributed intelligence," a system in which many individual agents with limited intelligence and information are able to pool resources to accomplish a goal beyond the capabilities of the individuals. Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications, and is being actively researched.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence
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