Lovelock's quest began when he was visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology as a scientific consultant. He attempted to think of a general characteristic of all forms of life so that the process for detection of extraterrestrial life could be made more definitive. His initial thought was to look for "entropy reduction". Later he developed the idea that a planet harboring life must have a cybernetic feedback mechanism of a planetary scale in action and some form of homeostasis would be maintaining the suitable circumstances for life even through abrupt environmental changes. In other words, the planet itself would act like a gargantuan organism.
First he argues about how life on Earth participates in maintaining (even against that punishing second law of thermodynamics) the improbable distribution of gases in the atmosphere. He says, "the atmosphere is not merely a biological product, but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers, or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment." Then he goes on arguing about how the life on Earth keeps the salinity of sea water in check.
He points out that as Gaia is like a living organism, it produces wastes like we, humans do and thus pollution is not something that exclusively humans are capable of causing, a considerable amount of poisonous chemicals are released from natural sources.
Except for some repetitiousness at the end, his writing style is lucid, precise, and delightful.
Words:
- Biosphere: The part of the earth and its atmosphere in which living organisms exist or that is capable of supporting life
- Wraith: An apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's death; The ghost of a dead person; Something shadowy and insubstantial
- Throes: A severe pang or spasm of pain, as in childbirth
- Pent-up: Not given expression; repressed
- Surmise: To infer (something) without sufficiently conclusive evidence; To make a guess or conjecture
- Aeon: 1000 million years
- Albedo (whiteness): The proportion of sunlight reflected to space by a planet
- Detritus: Disintegrated or eroded matter; Accumulated material: debris
- status quo: The existing condition or state of affairs
- Equable: Unvarying; steady; Free from extremes; Not easily disturbed: serene
- Garner: To gather and store in or as if in a granary; To amass: acquire
- Turpitude: Depravity: baseness; A base act
- Shibboleth: A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another; A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause: a catchword; A commonplace saying or idea; A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider
- Pittance: A meager monetary allowance, wage, or remuneration; A very small amount
- Immaculate: Impeccably clean: spotless; Free from stain or blemish: pure; Free from fault or error; Having no markings
- Conflagration: A large destructive fire
- Prescient: Of or relating to prescience (Knowledge of actions or events before they occur: foresight); Possessing prescience
- Intention tremor: With this the unfortunate sufferer who tries to pick up a pencil overreaches his target, over-compensates and swings too far the other way, oscillating back and forth in the frustrating failure to achieve a simple aim
- Stodgy: Dull, unimaginative, and commonplace; Prim or pompous: stuffy; Indigestible and starchy: heavy (~ food); Solidly built: stocky
- per se: Of, in, or by itself or oneself: intrinsically; With respect to its inherent nature ("this statement is interesting per se")
- Hypothermia: Abnormally low body temperature
- in situ: In the original or natural place or site ("carcinoma in situ")
- Blinkered: Subjective and limited, as in viewpoint or perception
- Troposphere, Stratosphere, Ionosphere, and Exosphere: Layers of the atmosphere in increasing order of height from the ground
- Ruminant: Any of various hoofed, even-toed, usually horned mammals of the suborder Ruminantia, such as cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and giraffes, characteristically having a stomach divided into four compartments and chewing a cud consisting of regurgitated, partially digested food
- Supernumeraries: One that is in excess of the regular, necessary, or usual number
- Vermin: Various small animals or insects, such as rats or cockroaches, that are destructive, annoying, or injurious to health
- Husbandry: The act or practice of cultivating crops and breeding and raising livestock: agriculture; The application of scientific principles to agriculture, especially to animal breeding; Careful management or conservation of resources: economy
- Perilous: Full of or involving peril (exposure to risk or harm): dangerous
- Pejorism: The theory that the world is deteriorating or growing worse
- Stoical: Seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by pleasure or pain: impassive
- Depredation: A predatory attack: a raid; Damage or loss: ravage
- Nihilistic: Of or relating to nihilism (An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence; A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated)
- Impunity: Exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm
- "The Second Law states unequivocally that the entropy of an open
system must increase. Since we are all open systems, this means that
all of us are doomed to die. Yet it is so often ignored or deliberately
forgotten that the unending death-roll of all creatures, including
ourselves, is the essential complement to the unceasing renewal of
life. The death sentence of the Second Law applies only to identities,
and could be rephrased: 'Mortality is the price of identity.' The family
lives longer than its members, the tribe longer still, and homo sapiens
as a species has existed for several million years. Gaia, the sum of the
biota and those parts of the environment coming under its influence,
is probably three and a half aeons old. This is a most remarkable yet
quite legal avoidance of the Second Law. In the end, the sun will
overheat and all life on Earth will cease, but that may not happen
before another aeon has passed. Compared with the lifetime of
our species, let alone that of an individual human being, this time
span is no tragic brief spell, but offers almost an infinity of opportunities
to terrestrial life." - "Our uncertainties about the future of our planet and the consequences
of pollution stem largely from our ignorance of planetary
control systems. If Gaia does indeed exist, then there are associations
of species which co-operate to perform some essential regulatory
functions. The thyroid gland is present in all mammals and most
vertebrates. It harvests the meagre supplies of iodine from the internal
bodily environment and converts them into iodine-bearing hormones
which regulate our metabolism and without which we
cannot live. [As indicated in chapter 6,] certain large marine algae,
laminaria, may perform a similar function to the thyroid gland but on
a planetary scale." - "The very concept of pollution is anthropocentric and it may even
be irrelevant in the Gaian context. Many so-called pollutants are
naturally present and it becomes exceedingly difficult to know at
what level the appellation 'pollutant' may be justified. Carbon monoxide,
for example, which is poisonous to us and to most large
mammals, is a product of incomplete combustion, a toxic agent from
exhaust gases of cars, coke or coal-burning stoves, and cigarettes; a
pollutant put into otherwise clean fresh air by man, you might think.
However, if the air is analysed we find that carbon monoxide gas is
to be found everywhere. It comes from the oxidation of methane gas
in the atmosphere itself and as much as 1,000 million tons of it are so
produced each year. It is thus an indirect but natural vegetable
product and is also found in the swim-bladders of many sea creatures.
The syphonophores, for example, are loaded with this gas in concentrations
which would speedily kill us off if present in our own atmosphere
at similar levels." - "One of the most characteristic properties of all living
organisms, from the smallest to the largest, is their capacity to develop,
operate, and maintain systems which set a goal and then strive
to achieve it through the cybernetic process of trial and error. The
discovery of such a system, operating on a global scale and having as
its goal the establishment and maintenance of optimum physical and chemical conditions for life, would surely provide us with convincing
evidence of Gaia's existence." - "At the end of the last
century Boltzman made an elegant redefinition of entropy as a
measure of the probability of a molecular distribution. It may seem
at first obscure, but it leads directly to what we seek. It implies that
wherever we find a highly improbable molecular assembly it is
probably life or one of its products, and if we find such a distribution
to be global in extent then perhaps we are seeing something of Gaia,
the largest living creature on Earth." - "If we can imagine a planet made of nothing but the component
parts of watches, we may reasonably assume that in the fullness of
time—perhaps 1,000 million years—gravitational forces and the restless
motion of the wind would assemble at least one working watch.
Life on Earth probably started in a similar manner. The countless
number and variety of random encounters between individual molecular
components of life may have eventually resulted in a chance
association of parts which together could perform a life-like task,
such as gathering sunlight and using its energy to contrive some
further action which would otherwise have been impossible or forbidden
by the laws of physics. (The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus
stealing fire from heaven and the biblical story of Adam and
Eve tasting the forbidden fruit may have far deeper roots in our
ancestral history than we realize.) Later, as more of these primitive
assembly-forms appeared, some successfully combined and from
their union more complex assemblies emerged with new properties
and powers, and united in their turn, the product of fruitful associations
being always a more potent assembly of working parts, until
eventually there came into being a complex entity with the properties
of life itself: the first micro-organism and one capable of using
sunlight and the molecules of the environment to produce its own
duplicate.
The odds against such a sequence of encounters leading to the first
living entity are enormous. On the other hand, the number of random
encounters between the component molecules of the Earth's
primeval substance must have been incalculable. Life was thus an
almost utterly improbable event with almost infinite opportunities of
happening. So it did."
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