27 July 2019 | New Scientist | 47So will we and the rest of the natural world
survive alongside these cyborgs?
Well, the biological won’t necessarily vanish
completely, but it will be of less fundamental
importance. People automatically assume
that therefore humans will be finished. That’s
nonsense. We are much faster, more advanced,
than plants and it doesn’t mean plants have
all vanished – we rather enjoy having them
around. I always imagine one of these new
cyborg-type people standing on a five-bar
gate and looking out at the humans...And when does your Novacene start?
I’m not sure, it may have already started.You have 11 great-grandchildren who are
presumably going to be around in our warmer
world. Do you think they will survive it?
Assuming that the Novacene system comes in,
its capacity for thinking will be 10,000 times, at
least, faster than ours. It could be as much as a
million times faster. I don’t have doubts about
survival. Look what we’ve done by increasing
our intelligence. Perhaps I’m slightly religious,
but I think the whole of the live part of the
universe, which is mostly us and things [on
Earth], is working through its existence. We’ll
just have to wait and see what happens.So you’re a fatalist?
If you like.You have seen a century of Earth’s changes,
humanity’s changes – what about you? Have
you changed as a person?
You’d have to ask Sandy. She’s still with me.
It was an extraordinary love story. I met her at
a meeting at Blenheim [Palace], but we hardly
spoke to each other. And on the last day, I had
just returned from the rather splendid loos and
saw Sandy in a group of women. She turned
around and looked at me, and I looked at her,
and we just walked straight into each other’s
arms and never said a word. And that was it.Oh my goodness. Well, now I’m starting to
understand your fatalism!
All along, I’ve just happily trundled on, doing
the experiments and getting the answers. And
they were mostly exactly what I wanted. And
it’s been a good life. Not a rich one, financially,
but a good one. ]come from cranks,” they said. A friend, a
professor of cybernetics at the University
of Reading, suggested I become a visiting
professor there. So I did, and then they
accepted it. That was the first paper from
Britain on the exploration of the other planets.In the four decades since you published the
Gaia hypothesis, the idea of interconnected
earth systems has become mainstream. There
is growing concern about how humans are
affecting these planetary systems, pushing
us into the Anthropocene, the age of humans.
I think we’re forging ahead into the post-
Anthropocene, into the Novacene. I think
the chemical-physical type of humanity has
had its time. We’ve mucked about with the
planet and we’re moving towards a systems
type of thing, [a future species] running on
cybernetics. The great thing is that if you run
your systems on electronics or optical devices,
they’re up to 10,000 times faster than what
we’ve got at the moment, and this opens up
enormous possibilities.Gaia Vince is a writer and broadcaster
based in London and author of
Adventures in the Anthropocene.
Follow her on Twitter @ WanderingGaiaDA
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YA reduction in entropy means an increase in
complexity; it implies that life is creating order.
But how could you measure it?
In bed at night, it suddenly came to me: all you
have to do is analyse the atmosphere of Mars.
If it has got gases in it that react with one
another, then it is at a low entropy.
Because otherwise, they would have reached
an equilibrium, which implies raised entropy?
Exactly. He got very excited, as we had a real
practical experiment to send, which became
part of the Viking mission. So I can look up at
the night sky and see Mars knowing I’ve got
two bits of stuff on it that are responsible for
showing that there isn’t any life on Mars.
And this led to your hypothesis of Earth as
a self-regulating living system?
Yes, because the amount of oxygen in our
atmosphere is far too high – it’s a huge entropy
reduction and it doesn’t make sense. But if you
look at it as a system that produces organic
matter and oxygen in the atmosphere, making
a combustible mixture, and that energy then
feeds back into the living system...
...You can view it as a giant superorganism.
How did you come up with the theory’s name?
My friend and neighbour was the author
William Golding, who had studied physics
at Oxford and was very interested in space.
He said, “if you’re going to come up with a big
theory about planets, you better give it a good
name. I suggest you call it Gaia”.
What a truly fabulous name...
Well, my reaction was puzzlement. I thought
he meant “gyre”, because we’d been talking
about whorls. He meant the Greek goddess,
and it stuck. The biologists hated it and so
did the Americans, but it was well-received
by most of the European geophysicists.
Was it harder because you were an
independent scientist?
NASA advised me to become a contractor, as
I’d get more money that way. But without an
affiliation, I couldn’t get papers published.
The first paper on the entropy reduction that
I did for NASA, I sent to Nature. I had published
dozens of papers from Mill Hill in Nature
before without any trouble, but this one they
sent back straight away. “We don’t publish
papers from home addresses. They mostly
Lovelock’s 1950s gas
chromatograph (top) and
vacuum pump (c.1960s)James Lovelock in his
home laboratory
in 1980