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

[A.OUT]

Lovelock, vijand van Gaia.

On 29-10-19 09:50, A.OUT wrote:
> 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
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