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Why aren’t you a fan of the Gaia Theory? It isn’t really much of a theory. The Earth adapts to our foolishness and outsized impact. It will survive in some cond

by zahma 4y ago

Why aren’t you a fan of the Gaia Theory? It isn’t really much of a theory. The Earth adapts to our foolishness and outsized impact. It will survive in some condition or another even if life as we know it is extinct.

retrac 4y ago
> The Earth adapts This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up? So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange? I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.
- munch117 4y ago
  In the Gaia book, Lovelock talks at length about all these challenges that life on earth has met. All these chances the earth had to become lifeless and barren, or at least barren of intelligent life. When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle). It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming. I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Lovelock ultimately agreed with you. From The Guardian: > 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
    - robocat 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250694#32254924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250694#32254924
  - gilleain 4y ago
    From an interview I read a couple of years ago, this part stuck out (paraphrased, from memory). The interviewer asked something like "Are you optimistic about human survival?" and Lovelock's reply was, roughly - "Oh yes, I am optimistic. I mean, there might be a bottleneck of the population down to a few thousands, but long term we will survive". Talk about the large-scale view.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Surely “humans” are very unlikely to survive long term precisely because of evolution. Intelligent life probably will. But it might need to reboot from closer to the soup again.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  If you've never seen Dana Meadows videos on complex ecological system theory [1] you are missing a huge insight into modernity. When you have massive interlocking systems of convection, atmospheric thermodynamics, tectonics, ocean currents and winds, all in concert through feedback loops, regulators, non-linear compression and expansion functions, multipliers, hysteresis and tipping points, you don't need to ascribe sentience, evolution or even biology to see the sum as "living". Push here. it reacts there. In the simplest analysis, overpopulation of "too successful" species leads to pandemics that wipe them out. Hardly a stretched metaphor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc

by zahma 4y ago

retrac 4y ago

> The Earth adapts This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up? So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange? I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.

munch117 4y ago
In the Gaia book, Lovelock talks at length about all these challenges that life on earth has met. All these chances the earth had to become lifeless and barren, or at least barren of intelligent life. When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle). It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming. I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Lovelock ultimately agreed with you. From The Guardian: > 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
  - robocat 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250694#32254924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250694#32254924
- gilleain 4y ago
  From an interview I read a couple of years ago, this part stuck out (paraphrased, from memory). The interviewer asked something like "Are you optimistic about human survival?" and Lovelock's reply was, roughly - "Oh yes, I am optimistic. I mean, there might be a bottleneck of the population down to a few thousands, but long term we will survive". Talk about the large-scale view.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Surely “humans” are very unlikely to survive long term precisely because of evolution. Intelligent life probably will. But it might need to reboot from closer to the soup again.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
If you've never seen Dana Meadows videos on complex ecological system theory [1] you are missing a huge insight into modernity. When you have massive interlocking systems of convection, atmospheric thermodynamics, tectonics, ocean currents and winds, all in concert through feedback loops, regulators, non-linear compression and expansion functions, multipliers, hysteresis and tipping points, you don't need to ascribe sentience, evolution or even biology to see the sum as "living". Push here. it reacts there. In the simplest analysis, overpopulation of "too successful" species leads to pandemics that wipe them out. Hardly a stretched metaphor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc