Gaia going to seed...

I suppose most people have heard of the Gaia hypothesis, now called Earth Systems Study to make it more palatable to the academics who discounted it when Dr. Lovelock proposed it in the 1960s. The idea is that the lifeforms of Earth make up a complex interconnected web that behaves in a systems sense like a single superorganism. It would seem to be the next level of life above us. Some limit the idea to just a description of a system; others say it is a real entity that is actually conscious--a living planet. Witnessing recent global events(fires, hurricanes, overpopulation, disease, global warming, pollution, mass extinctions looming, imminent peak oil, terrorism/religious fanatacism, war), I have been thinking about how, contrary to some peoples view that humanity is the problem and the Earth is trying to get rid of us like a body running a fever to burn off a germ, humans are actually the solution to Gaia's most pressing need...to reproduce. The chaos enveloping us may be just the inevitable push by Gaia to make us wake up and develop our technology and leave this planet; sort of like the parents kicking the teenager out of the house.

Before you discount me, look at this explanation. The Earth was originally lifeless, then either evolved single cell life(primitive bacteria) or, more likely given the age of the universe, was seeded by extraterrestrial microbes via a meteor or ETs. Then, evolution kicked in, eventually producing the wide variety of plant and animal life we know of today. In the process, the lifeforms altered the atmosphere, oceans, and land to make it more hospitible for more advanced forms of life. It has been shown that the Earth's current environment(atmospheric and ocean composition) is not stable and is only there because of the constant activity of living organisms, decomposition of dead ones, and the associated chemical reactions. We could not survive on the conditions of the primitive Earth which had a methane atmosphere, sulfuric acid oceans and a boiling hot temperature, but apparently some bacteria could and did and the earth was transformed to the planet we know of today, which can support us. Why did this happen when the primitive cells could have just left the conditions as they were? So that we could eventually evolve with all our technology, the internet, the supercomputers, the chemical factories and industry. Why would Gaia do such a self-destructive thing? Because in order to reproduce, ie. to terraform Mars or Venus or another planet around another star, she needs us to build the "seedpods" (spaceships)to carry her millions of DNA codes to those other worlds. To put the current disasters into perspective, life on Earth has been nearly annihilated many times before; the damage we are doing to her is minimal compared to that caused by asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or supernova explosions and their gamma ray bursts. Each time, over a hundred million years or so, she regenerates from primitive bacteris in the deep rocks or at the bottoms of oceans or from higher lifeforms if they survive. It may be that the only way for Gaia to produce "seeds" is to partially sacrifice herself, sort of like a plant producing fruit and dying with the frost or a mammal giving birth but suffering severe malnutrituion, osteoporosis, etc in the process. I figure that if we never reached a critical "overpopulation", we would never have built big cities and the associated industries, nor invented the technology to go to space if we didn't fight wars. Instead, we would be happy subsistence farmers as we were for a hundred thousand years before the first civilization emerged. But then Gaia would never reproduce herself and would just die when the Sun becomes a red giant. What does everyone else think?

en.wikipedia.org...
www.panspermia.org...
www.webcom.com...


[edit on 25-10-2007 by j_kalin]

i think that life produces Gaia, not the other way around.

like you were alluding to,
for several 100,000 years early mankind was a nomadic hunter gatherer, it was only after the iceage some 12-10,000 years ago that humanity started to gravitate towards 'subsistance' farming & then 'civilization'

culture, knowledge, civilization, recognizes the interconnectivity web of nature-&-life ... then gives it a name.... in this case 'Gaia'
unless your worldview is of a metaphysical nature.

a really deep & well expressed OP.... thank you



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if i recall correct, the super-clean mods here used to delete the 'Panspermia' word, back say 3-4 years ago




[edit on 25-10-2007 by St Udio]

Here's a link to a story that came out today that nicely summarizes what I just posted...
www.iht.com...

reply to post by St Udio


Yes, you are correct; rather than subsistence farmers, we would likely be nomadic hunter/gatherers living more or less in balance with our environment like the Neandertals and Cro-Magnons; overpopulation due to favorable climate conditions caused us to develop farming, then technology, then rudimentary spacetravel in the space of about 10,000 years. Now, we could conceivably launch well preserved spores from hardy bacteria into space and seed nearby stars/planets. It might take a few thousand years to reach the near ones but it could be done with ion-drive ships and bacterial spores could easily survive that long. Gaia is undergoing "labor contractions", ie. planetary turmoil in the process.