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James Lovelock has died
- bambax 4y agoThis Tom Scott's video from last year about microwave ovens features a nice interview with Lovelock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
- robswc 4y agoI had just watched that one! Literally yesterday... small world I guess. He seemed like such an amazing person.
- asplake 4y agoWow, read Gaia (1979) in my teens, soon after it came out, triggered I think by a Horizon programme (BBC science series, still going-ish). Definitely made an impression.
- digitalsankhara 4y agoLikewise. Lovelock shaped my approach to science as he was an independent worker in his field and that resonated with me when I read for my own science degree. I find Gaia compelling and beautiful. Sad day. BBC documentary; https://youtu.be/QqwZJDEZ9Ng https://youtu.be/QqwZJDEZ9Ng
- drcongo 4y agoI knew very little about him sadly, the wikipedia page is fascinating.
- dang 4y ago(We changed the url from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253402)
- adg001 4y agoWe all owe him and Margulis so much. A true giant, whose ideas will live even longer than himself. RIP.
- Darmody 4y agoI'm not a fan of his Gaia theory but many years May his books made me change my mind about nuclear energy. May he rest in peace.
- tcgv 4y agoI find the debate over nuclear energy an interesting topic. From the information and evidence provided by the Environmentalists for Nuclear [1], from which Loelock was a member, I find it hard to understand why there's still so much opposition to nuclear energy. I'm not sure if I'm missing something (I'm open minded for valid arguments/evidence on either side) or if it's just that lobby and disinformation campaigns to preserve the status quo in favor of fossil fuel companies are really effective in turning the masses against nuclear energy (which would be very sad with respect to our potential to evolve as a civilization). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear
- pfsalter 4y agoI think it's mostly down to Chernobyl and the cold war. Speaking to people in their 60's (anecdotally) they seem to overestimate the risks of nuclear power and underestimate climate change. This is probably because there's such strong visual evidence for problems with the former. I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it
- dane-pgp 4y agoI think one basic argument against nuclear is that it can't produce energy as cheaply as renewables (and nuclear energy is getting more expensive while renewables are getting cheaper). If we had decided to invest heavily in nuclear 20 years ago, we might not be in the mess we're in now, but it's probably too late for nuclear to help now. Look at Flamanville unit 3, for example. They started building it in 2007, and it still isn't producing power (in fact just this year they announced more delays to its start date). Even if we abandoned all concerns about where they were built, and started building a load of them today, they probably wouldn't all be ready until after 2040 because there probably isn't enough spare capacity in skilled nuclear engineers to parallelise their production. By that time, batteries and power-to-gas could be cheaply supplying reliable energy to a grid that's over-provisioned with renewables, without having to worry about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years or proliferation risks.
- hunglee2 4y agoRIP James Lovelock. A true radical centrist, he was not the New Age person people mistakenly believed him and Gaia theory to be (e.g. he was a proponent of nuclear energy), but equally he was an enemy of many conservative scientists.
- culi 4y ago"Gaia" is often seen as a really unfortunate name for an actually well-thought out scientific theory. However, this was exactly Lovelock's point and why he decided to go with a name like that. He and Lynn Margulis WANTED to highlight and stand against the cultural biases of science as an institution. Though it should be noted there's growing scientific support for the theory regardless https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...
- _sigma 4y agoA news release https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/james-lovelock-creator-of-gaia-hypothesis-dies-on-103rd-birthday https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/james-lo...
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- balentio 4y agoThis guy is one of those iconoclastic fellows who people partially agree with on one point, and completely disagree with on another. It's pretty hard to reconcile nuclear energy with the idea that the planet self-regulates since nuclear energy screws most of those self-regulatory mechanisms up and seems to require vast sums of time to undo.
- wiredearp 4y agoWhat natural mechanism do you belive nuclear energy to influence?
- balentio 4y agoRadioactivity--particularly waste/water.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoThat's fine you think that -- links?
- balentio 4y agohttps://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2020/05/22/fukushimas-radioactive-water-problem/ https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2020/05/22/fukushimas...
- hungryforcodes 4y agoThanks :)
- pixl97 4y agoWildlife wise the area around Chernobyl isn't doing that bad after one of the worst nuclear disaster we could imagine. For longer lived lifeforms like humans it's much more problematic, but shorter lived creatures experience less decay events and are less effected. The hottest nuclides decay in the range of decades. The long lived stuff decays much more slowly, hence is less dangerous.
- samstave 4y agoAn impressive mind. I love the stories of children of adversity that rise to greatness. His father was illiterate. his mother, while educated, worked at a pickle factory. Quick, name the nearest pickle factory to your village! --- The Gaia Revelation is something that Humans should be throwing every resource at
- timst4 4y agoFascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere. This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed. He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.
- culi 4y agoWhat's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist". Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality. It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
- svnt 4y agoIf the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy? I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
- groby_b 4y agoThe answer is "no". If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions. Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.
- zahma 4y agoThe New York Times has a nice obituary on his life.[1] There are two things that I would like to celebrate from his lifetime of innovation. The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most. The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me. 1-https://archive.ph/bQFAt https://archive.ph/bQFAt
- dang 4y agoActually, let's switch to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock. Wikipedia pages usually aren't as good for HN submission as more specific in-depth articles, and you're right, this is a nice one.
- DennisP 4y ago> The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. Lovelock himself was less sanguine. According to the Guardian's obituary, Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life." https://archive.ph/I3dog https://archive.ph/I3dog
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThe "biosphere" will be fine. It's been through much worse. It's the humans that are screwed.
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- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/bQFAt https://archive.ph/bQFAt
- AJ007 4y agoNovacene was a little more optimistic than this obituary ended.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoYes definitely he made waves and did interviews when it came out in 2019 and was very interested in how Artificial Intelligence could end up solving so many of the worlds problems -- forget the Anthropocene already here comes the Novacene and it's going to be amazing!
- jl6 4y agoI have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Wikipedia summarizes as: “… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.” How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet? Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals. Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time. What does the theory allow us to predict?
- jacquesm 4y agoLet me condense it for you: "we're all in this together".
- jl6 4y agoI actually don’t have much of an issue with the New Age version of the theory. We are indeed all in this together. But this is the version of the theory which Gaia proponents have typically insisted they are not pushing.
- jkmcf 4y ago"Remember I'm pullin' for ya" And, keep your stick on the ice.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoYes and no. We will all experience the same world wide changes. But the rich people WILL have an easier time of it.
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- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoMy mother was huge fan of his, and of his Gaia hypothesis. She even traveled to the UK, last century, as a sort of "pilgrimage," and met with him.
- techdragon 4y agoDespite everything else he accomplished in his quite storied professional career as one of the last independent scientists... Including his work on the Viking mars landers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y but if you’re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his "microwave" starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s
- hsnewman 4y agoLife reproduces, how can the earth?
- gwern 4y ago> His family confirmed the death in a statement on Twitter, saying that until six months ago he “was still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and take part in interviews, but his health deteriorated after a bad fall earlier this year.” Another death from elder falling, like Freeman Dyson.
- Smoosh 4y agoWe need to invent airbags for the elderly.
- Qem 4y agoFalls are the beginning of the end for many elderly people. I think devising ways to avoid falls, or at least make them less serious, is a quite underrated line of research and a remaining low-hanging fruit for life extension.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoThe current thinking is to retain muscle mass; it’s the reduced muscle mass that causes the falls.
- paulpauper 4y agomaybe the key to immortality is not falling
- totetsu 4y agoOnce elderly become bed-ridden from a fall it's very hard to recover.
- WebbWeaver 4y agoWe're losing people who have no true replacement and James Lovelock is one of those people. According to the wikipedia article he was pro nuclear and fracking as an environmentalist. I think largely natural gas and fracking is a relative success where regulation are followed and cost cutting does not occur. Some of the capability learned and gained in that area can be applied for a lot of useful things in the future. >Retreat, in his view, means it's time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future. We definitely need to consider moving towards sustainability much more quickly. CO2 burden related to climate and daily life should be looked at. Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans. Why? (Genuine question interested in your answer)
- WebbWeaver 4y agoSupporting article https://www.science.org/content/article/rerouting-mississippi-river-could-build-new-land-and-save-retreating-coast?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/content/article/rerouting-mississipp...
- WebbWeaver 4y agoTo prevent habitat loss. Like the mangroves in Florida it can help resist sea level rise and from that the city and shipping lanes itself. There is also an entire local economy supported by it. You have tourism, sustainable living, and ecological science being done. He thought New Orleans is a goner and it honestly it might be. We can learn a lot of things regarding erosion and climate impacts from the wetlands of the area. In return we can help others resist other climate impacts. I'll support saving wetlands anywhere due to how useful they are. In the past we have viewed them as useless in other areas of the country and subsequently destroyed them. https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/why-are-wetlands-important https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/why-are-wetlands-important
- birriel 4y agoTIL: The birthday effect. RIP
- pfdietz 4y agohttps://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/the-gaia-hypotheses-science-or-pseudoscience-43831f75f457 https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/the-gaia-hypothese...
- getpost 4y agoBy coincidence, I listened to this 2012 biographical interview only a few days ago. This is a good summary of his life's work. He was unbelievably lucid at age 94, and more recently. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h
- pomatic 4y agoI met had the good fortune to work environs his son, Andrew, when I was around 18. He introduced me (unintentionally) to his father's work, for which I was very grateful.
- beastman82 4y ago> Dr. Lovelock caused a sensation in 2004 when he pronounced nuclear energy the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to fulfill the large-scale energy needs of humanity while reducing greenhouse emissions.
- I_complete_me 4y agoI wish to pay my respects to this great intellect and person as I don't know where else to do it. Rest in peace.
- riversflow 4y agoThought I'd posted this as a top level comment too. If you are interested in his Gaia world hypothesis he worked on Sim Earth. You can play it online at various locations if you search "play sim earth online". He is credited on the title screen.
- h12nz 4y agoBy the end of his life, he was far less pessimistic about the consequences of climate change than this obituary makes out.
- mlindner 4y ago
- koheripbal 4y agoDescribing the Earth as a single living organism is a semantic perspective made to illicit an emotional connection between humanity and the health of Earth. He did not ever posit we should believe there's some sort of magical energy through the interior of the planet itself.
- slow_kindjal 4y agoElicit dear boy.
- kurupt213 4y agoI can't believe they left out the zombie hamsters. He literally made a primitive 500-watt microwave to revive frozen hamsters. It's tied to the same experimental biology work that led to the ECD's development