Cool indeed.
There are quite a few philosophical theories that explain the entire universe (multiverses, omniverse?) as one giant organism. I.e., we all know about how humans (and other life forms) are basically a collection of cells working together/interacting, and these cells consist of even smaller cells and those consist of even smaller....etc.
Keep that concept in mind. Then think of Earth, as a cell/organism. Built up from gradually smaller cells and 'interacting' with humans and animals that are also 'entities' or, if you will, cells. Earth as a planet is the sum of all the smaller cells it's built from and the interaction between humans and animals that populate it (and meteors that crash into it and whatnot, anything). Just like the working of a human is basically the result of a combination of many different smaller cells interacting underneath and interaction between the human and his environment (and the organisms there are to be found there).
I hope you have the general idea behind this. So then it's only a matter of transposing this idea on the increasingly larger "levels" of the universe and shit. Planets, stars, moons, meteroids all functioning within a star system as a an interaction of organisms consisting of many organisms themselves who consist...and so on. Then a collection of star systems functioning within a universe, and beyond...
There's a lot of stuff you could fit in there, like cancers. As an uncontrolled growth of bad cells they can make organisms go bad an die off, etc. In the same way as our cells can suffer from tumours, so might planets and galaxies. And blabla. I'm not gonna go dig too deep here, can't be bothered.
P.S. I'm aware none of the scientists in the article said anything about universe organisms and shit...I was just going on a rampage after seeing the "DNA" in space and making connections in my head. needless to say: the idea behind the philosophy is that the whole (and I mean whole) damn shabang is one living organism. And that we're all small parts of it.
