Gaia was also the name of a planet in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. This planet was not merely a single organism but a single consciousness as well, although its individual sentient constituents retain their individual identities as well. Perhaps a better analogy than the ones that Asimov used is that Gaia is like a computer network, in which the individual computers remain distinct as individuals, but also can share resources such as files and peripherals with other machines on the network. The most prominent aspect of Gaia in the Foundation novels is the woman named Bliss, who accompanied the characters Golan Trevize and Janov Pelorat on their quest to find the planet Earth.