[D66] James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues

[A.OUT]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y

"Lovelock argues that increasingly self-engineering
cyborgs with massive intellectual prowess and a telepathically shared
consciousness will recognize that they, like organisms, are prey to
climate change. They will understand that the planetary thermostat, the
control system, is Gaia herself; and, in tandem with her, they will save
the sum of remaining living tissue and themselves. The planet will enter
the Novacene epoch: Lovelock’s coinage for the successor to the
informally named Anthropocene."


BOOKS AND ARTS 25 June 2019
James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues
Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body
of writing.


James Lovelock proposes that Earth will be saved by artificial
intelligence.Credit: Tim Cuff/Alamy

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane
(2019)

James Lovelock will always be associated with one big idea: Gaia. The
Oxford English Dictionary defines this as “the global ecosystem,
understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism,
in the context of which all living things collectively define and
maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth”. It cites the
independent scientist as the first to use the term (ancient Greek for
Earth) in this way, in 1972.

On 26 July, Lovelock will be 100; his long career has sparkled with
ideas. His first solo letter to Nature — on a new formula for the wax
pencils used to mark Petri dishes — was published in 1945. But,
unusually for a scientist, books are his medium of choice. He has
written or co-authored around a dozen; the latest, Novacene, is
published this month.

As that book’s preface notes, Lovelock’s nomination to the Royal Society
in 1974 listed his work on “respiratory infections, air sterilisation,
blood-clotting, the freezing of living cells, artificial insemination,
gas chromatography and so on”. The “and so on” briefly referred to
climate science, and to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The
story of Gaia began with a question posed by NASA scientists while
Lovelock was a consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California. That is, how could you tell if a planet such as Mars
harboured life?

Final warning from a sceptical prophet

With microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock published a series of papers
on the subject. In 1974, they developed a view of Earth’s atmosphere as
“a component part of the biosphere rather than as a mere environment for
life” (J. E. Lovelock and L. Margulis Tellus 26, 2–10; 1974). Earth’s
atmosphere contains oxygen and methane — reactive gases, constantly
renewed. That disequilibrium radiates an infrared signal, which Lovelock
later described as an “unceasing song of life” that is “audible to
anyone with a receiver, even from outside the Solar System”. Thus, the
answer to NASA’s question was already written in the static Martian
atmosphere, composed almost entirely of non-reactive carbon dioxide.

That was the beginning of a sustained and developing argument, in the
face of sometimes dismissive criticism, that recast Earth as, in effect,
a superorganism. Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the
past 3.8 billion years, a holistic feedback system has played out in the
biosphere, with life forms regulating temperature and proportions of
gases in the atmosphere to life’s advantage. Earth system science is now
firmly established as a valuable intellectual framework for
understanding the only planet known to harbour life, and increasingly
vulnerable to the unthinking actions of one species. Colleagues and
co-authors acknowledge that the argument continues, but endorse the
importance of Lovelock and Margulis.
Entwined evolution

“The insight that the oceans and the atmosphere are thoroughly entwined
with the living biosphere, and must be understood as a coupled system,
has been completely vindicated,” says marine and atmospheric scientist
Andrew Watson of the University of Exeter, UK. Lee Kump goes further.
“Lovelock also showed us that Darwin had it only half right,” says Kump,
a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
“Life evolves in response to environmental change, but the environment
also evolves in response to biological change.” Despite severing formal
links with universities decades ago, Lovelock has been showered with
honorary degrees and awards from bodies as varied as NASA and the
Geological Society of London.

The procession of engaging books began in 1979 with Gaia: A New Look at
Life on Earth. Each volume made its case more forcefully than the last,
exploring what was known first as the Gaia hypothesis, then simply as
Gaia, and the hazards facing either the biosphere or humanity. The books
include his endearing autobiography Homage to Gaia (2000), increasingly
urgent warnings of climate devastation in The Revenge of Gaia (2006) and
The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), and the less apocalyptic A Rough Ride
to the Future (2014).
A black and white photo of James Lovelock standing in front of a row of
bare trees.

James Lovelock pictured in 1989.Credit: Terry Smith/The LIFE Images
Collection/Getty

Novacene picks up from that note of hope, and showcases another big
idea. Gaia might, after all, be saved — by the singularity. This
artificial-intelligence takeover, which so alarms many doomsayers, will
be our redemption. Lovelock argues that increasingly self-engineering
cyborgs with massive intellectual prowess and a telepathically shared
consciousness will recognize that they, like organisms, are prey to
climate change. They will understand that the planetary thermostat, the
control system, is Gaia herself; and, in tandem with her, they will save
the sum of remaining living tissue and themselves. The planet will enter
the Novacene epoch: Lovelock’s coinage for the successor to the
informally named Anthropocene.

Lovelock welcomes this. “Whatever harm we have done to the Earth, we
have, just in time, redeemed ourselves by acting simultaneously as
parents and midwives to the cyborgs,” he writes. He takes the long view
on this rescue, however. Climate change is a real threat to humanity,
but Earth will inevitably be overtaken by a ‘big heat’ in a few billion
years, as the Sun slowly waxes more fierce.

Although co-authored with journalist Bryan Appleyard, Novacene reads
like undiluted Lovelock. From the start of his writing life — no matter
how tortuous the narrative or complex the argument — Lovelock has
written persuasively. In his debut, Gaia, he sidestepped evolution’s
first and biggest obstacle (how to get from organic chemistry to a
living, devouring, excreting, replicating organism) in two sentences
that seem to me models of clarity and brevity: “Life was thus an almost
utterly improbable event with almost infinite opportunities of
happening. So it did.”

No place like home

In The Ages of Gaia (1988), a richer and more closely argued
restatement, he answered the vexed question of how life contradicts the
second law of thermodynamics. Life, he wrote, “has evolved with the
Earth as a highly coupled system so as to favour survival. It is like a
skilled accountant, never evading the payment of the required tax but
also never missing a loophole.” This metaphoric brilliance is no rarity.
A few pages on, he reminds us that Gaia is “a quarter as old as time
itself. She is so old that her birth was in the region of time where
ignorance is an ocean and the territory of knowledge is limited to small
islands, whose possession gives a spurious sense of certainty.”

Lovelock’s Gaia theory is only one aspect of his nonconformism. His
vigorous support for nuclear power annoys many environmentalists.
Brought up as a Quaker, he registered as a conscientious objector in
1940, then changed his mind and prepared for military action in 1944
(the National Institute for Medical Research in London considered him
more useful in the lab). Later, he became a consultant for the security
services of Britain’s defence ministry. Among his inventions is an
electron capture detector sensitive enough to identify vanishingly small
traces of pollutants — such as the pesticides that spurred Rachel Carson
to write the 1962 book Silent Spring — and chlorofluorocarbons, later
implicated in damage to the ozone layer. In Novacene, he writes
teasingly that he now sees himself as an engineer who values intuition
above reason.

Lovelock to the last, he even has a kind word for the Anthropocene,
marked by degradation of natural resources and the devastation of the
wild things with which humanity evolved. He gives a “shout of joy, joy
at the colossal expansion of our knowledge of the world and the cosmos”,
and exults that the digital revolution ultimately “empowers evolution”.
Is he right? Some of us might live to find out. In the meantime, if you
want a sense of hyperintelligence in bipedal form, Novacene is a good
place to start.

Nature 570, 441-442 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-01969-y