If we turned into a hive species with a collective consciousness, what of our bodies? Would we need them as they are? Could they be shrunk to the size of insects and still function? Is a world with a billion-trillion insects, each contributing a single bit of processing power to the Transcendent equal or better than a world with a billion people each contributing a thousand bits? For all we know, we are immersed in a planetary ecology constructed as such, and we are just the newest addition to it. Maybe we aren't on the top rung of the evolutionary ladder.

What if every single celled bacteria on the planet was similarly integrated? And that was just the limit that we currently imagine, going further still in forms we could not hope to imagine.