[HN Gopher] The Many Lives of James Lovelock
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       The Many Lives of James Lovelock
        
       Author : prismatic
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2024-09-18 21:07 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | Vecr wrote:
       | The Gaia hypothesis always seemed to me like Dawkins' "God's
       | utility function", but without the same effect of calling out its
       | own ridiculousness as an idea.
       | 
       | There's an optimal scale to look at something from, and for most
       | applications, regarding Earth, this isn't it.
        
         | aaroninsf wrote:
         | That's an excellent framing of why this idea has limited
         | utility, outside e.g. propaganda.
         | 
         | Arguably this is one of the implicit arguments going on in
         | between factions in Kim Stanley Robinson's _The Ministry for
         | the Future_: in it, one faction wants to exploit the way faith
         | and the religious mindset are powerful (perhaps the only
         | proven) mechanism for constraining social behaviors, by making
         | a Gaia-religion. Another is uncomfortable with this idea, e.g.
         | because it's cynical and exploitative.
         | 
         | Whatever keeps us moving up the Kardashev scale...
        
         | mannykannot wrote:
         | Wikipedia: "The Gaia hypothesis... proposes that living
         | organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth
         | to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system _that
         | helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the
         | planet._ " [my emphasis.]
         | 
         | this rosy view has to contend with the fact that once (the
         | great oxygenation event), and possibly twice (the cryogenian),
         | life on Earth was making the environment inhospitable for
         | itself, and at least in the first case, had to evolve to avoid
         | a problem it had created for itself.
        
       | debacle wrote:
       | We studied the Gaia hypothesis in college, and, mirroring the
       | article, it really is a "it is what you make of it" type of
       | hypothesis. A room of ~20 people had 6-8 different ideas about
       | the meaning and outcome of the hypothesis.
        
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