Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

The 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

Actually, let's switch to that from 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.

> 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

The "biosphere" will be fine. It's been through much worse.

It's the humans that are screwed.

I think "humans" as a race will be fine in the same sense that after a plague of locusts dies out, locusts as a species are still fine.

There will be less of us, but we'll live on.

> "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."

Having read many of his books, these are two different things. Biosphere is about 4 billion years old, so the last 1% is still 40 million years. This is inevitable, as the Sun grows warmer, eventually planet Earth gets too warm for life as well. But this death-in-40-million-years timescale is unrelated to human action.

> death-in-40-million-years

This sounds like a bold claim. Everything that I'd read before predicted about ~1 billion years before the surface of earth is functionally dead - 600 million years before there's not enough carbon for trees, and by at about billion years from now we'd be looking at extinction of eukaryotic life, the beginnings of runaway evaporation of the oceans etc.

40 million years is small enough period on a geological (or solar!) timescale that I would think it would be a lot more obvious if we were already living in the end times.

Slight tangent: even with the 600 million year scale, it's somewhat scary to think that we are living much closer to the end of the earth than it's beginning. And also closer to the end of life on earth than to its beginning.

I suspect, if humanity survives even for another 1,000 years, we will be advanced enough to consider moving earth further out. It would take enormous efforts and expenditures of energy, but we'd also have millions of years to do it.

I've read about some speculative mechanism we could use. Eg move earth by its magnetic field, or move earth via carefully tugging on the moon etc.

The funny thing is while we're towards the tail end of life on earth in general, we're pretty much smack-bang in the middle of what we'd consider complex life. Multicellular plants are about a billion years old, and the entire kingdom of Animalia (including all vertabtrates, arthropods, molluscs, worms, etc) only crop up in the fossil record about 600 million years ago.

The preceding two billion years were basically nothing but single celled organisms, phytoplankton, and simple eukaryots. Those guys will probably still survive us, but not for as long as they preceded us.

Yes, complex life is pretty new.

Another way to say the same is that nano-technology is ancient on earth, but macro-machinery is new.

My favouritely named era of life on earth is the Boring Billion.

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