James Lovelock: 'The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives' | Hacker News Reader

James Lovelock: 'The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives'

theguardian.com

56 pointsakbarnama14 comments

> I would love to be able to speak to Galileo to understand how he felt.

James Lovelock is very old, and Galileo Galilei lived a really long time ago. This made me wonder how far away the two actually are in time. Lovelock was born in 1919, and Galileo died in 1642. Thus if someone was born while Galileo was still alive, and lived to the age that Lovelock is now, they would have died in 1743. Once more, and we are at 1844; then again we get to 1945 --- at the beginning of Lovelock's career in science. Surprising to think that it's really only three long lifetimes that separate Lovelock from Galileo!

The entire modern scientific enterprise has only been going on for about 400 years. That's the blink of an eye in the grand and glorious scheme of things.

There are people alive today who personally knew Albert Einstein and Erwin Schroedinger.

The atomic theory was still controversial 100 years ago. When I was in elementary school in the 1970s one of the things we were taught is that atoms are real despite the fact that no one has ever seen one, and no one ever would.

I really hate it when people's attitude to pretty much anything is 'well that is just how it is done' - as we haven't really been doing anything at all in the modern way we a do it, that long. The way we live, love, create, eat and work are constantly evolving and changing. Only 25 x 80 year life spans separate us from the time of Jesus or 62 lifetimes since the start of the dynastic Egyptians.

I am not sure what "elementary school" is but in the context of atoms I guess this is more or less 10-12 years old.

I was 10 in 1980 and as far as I can remember we were always taught about atoms as normal things, with electrons etc. No controversy (that was in France). I think nobody told us about the capacity to see them or not though.

As much as I agree with Lovelock's sentiments about the environment, Gaia is more wishful thinking and certainly doesn't have its foundations in science. That is, the world does not tend towards stability. Ecosystems tend towards chaos and don't return a norm.

Define "chaos". Ecosystems do tend towards equilibrium, unless something happens to end up having a _really great_ advantage selected for (e.g. our interpersonal politics selecting for intelligence) or the environment changes significantly (e.g. climate change, great big asteroid boi, ice age).

Chaos in the sense of instability, of constant change, of randomness. Earlier ecologists like Frederic Clements thought that ecosystems tended towards a stable climax, but this theory has been largely disproven by more rigorous data analysis that shows ecosystems are more influenced by chance of physiological and environmental condition than by competition.

If you're interested in reading more, I found Kricher's "The Balance of Nature" to be a highly engaging read. There's a good retail PDF available from Princeton University Press [0]

[0]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691138985/th...

chaos is just our way to say i dont understand or i cant measure this. so far it seems nothing lasts in the universe but it can be quite a while until things leave

I'm impressed that for his 101th birthday he's just going to go for a walk and not spend a ton of money partying like he did for his 100th. I can't imagine doing either of these things at 100.

How old is the biosphere? 3.8B years? So it has 38M left?

Or 635M years, from the Ediacaran, so 6M left?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran

When the biosphere dies, will it be worth even being born?

Through the Gaia lens it's interesting to view the warming climate as Earth's fever to clear its human infection.

In his latest book he suggests that even if humans left, the fever might not ever break.

In many COVID19 patients suffering from severe symptoms, the virus has already been cleared out of their system- but the extreme immune response itself (cytokine storm, etc) continues to cause damage, with lethal potential. Interesting parallel.

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