At 100, James Lovelock Has New Ideas About Gaia and Earth’s Future

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Our blue-marble planet, imaged by the DSCOVR spacecraft. Life maintains a stubborn balance here–but for how long? (Credit: NOAA/EPIC)

James Lovelock has a lot to
celebrate. The renowned British futurist and environmentalist just enjoyed a
100th birthday party with his wife and friends. Over his long career
he has seen his once-controversial Gaia hypothesis steadily gain significant acceptance
among his colleagues. And capping all that, he has just published Novacene, a book that predicts the
impending end of the world – but does so in a gently, almost loving style.
Lovelock may be the happiest pessimist I’ve ever spoken to.

Optimism has always been baked into Lovelock’s worldview. In 1974, at a time of energy crises and political crisis, he came up with his signature idea about life on Earth, working in conjunction with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. The Gaia hypothesis posits that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating organism.

Over billions of years, as the Sun
has grown brighter and continents have risen above the seas, life has
influenced the composition of the land, water, and air in ways that have helped
keep temperatures stable within the narrow range that is necessary for biology.
Without life, Earth might have frozen solid or boiled over; with life, it has
remained just right. The problem, according to Lovelock, is that we are nearing
the limits of what Gaia can do.

In another billion years or so, the ever-brightening Sun will overwhelm life’s ability to compensate. Long before then, humans may reset Gaia completely in a way that could spell our doom. That latter scenario is the subject of Novacene. Lovelock envisions that artificial intelligence will soon dominate the Earth (though he never defines “soon”—it could take decades, it could take millennia). At that point, AI will also take control of the Gaia process.

At first, the AIs might collaborate with us humans to protect the planet. Over time, though the Gaia imperative will lead them in a new direction, refashioning the planet in ways that are optimal for synthetic life but quite possibly deadly for us. But Lovelock, for one, welcomes our future AI overlords. I spoke with him about his surprising embrace of humanity’s demise, and about his perspective on life after 100 years on the planet. An edited version of our discussion follows.

What inspired you to write Novacene
and to lay out such a dramatic vision of the future?

To be completely honest, to some extent I wrote the
book to help our survival as a family. Money doesn’t grow on trees! You have to
work, and I’m one of those who keeps working regardless of age. At the same
time, in my mind was the idea of the planet as a self-regulating entity. It’s an
extension of the concept of life itself. You can’t help but wonder where it
will lead, and the wondering led to the book.

James Lovelock at 100, relentlessly optimistic even as he contemplates the last days of life on our planet. (Credit: Sandy Lovelock)

In the book, you imagine that future artificial intelligence (AI) will
have a physical form—cyborgs, you call them. Couldn’t they just as well exist
virtually, entirely within a computer world?

That’s a good point. I chose to consider one given
form and left it at that, but I agree with you that it could be a different form
of life. Its significance would depend on what powers it had, regardless.

A number of futurists, most notably Ray Kurzweil, envision a
coming convergence between humans and AI. You imagine they will follow separate
paths. Why?

The reason why I have the view expressed in the book came from working with my colleague Lynn Margulis. She was a famous biologist who is now is sadly dead. She figured out that the different kingdoms of life formed about 700 million years ago by a process called endosymbiosis [one organism living inside another in a cooperative manner]. More than one form of life combined.

We and plants together are made out of more than
one form of life. These combined sometime in the past and produced animals on
the one hand and plants on the other. Both evolved in a Darwinian fashion, but
the end result was very different. Animals move and think do all sorts of
active things, of course. The plants just sit in the ground and collect the
energy from the Sun. I was thinking of cyborgs as another kingdom of life, if
you like. We would stand to them in much the same way as we, as a kingdom of
animals, stand to plants.

Given
that huge evolutionary gap, what would cyborgs think of us?

Our thinking process is 10,000 times faster than that
of plants. In that kind of speed difference, we would stand to cyborgs in much
in the same way as plants stand to us. We think we’re very bright when we’re
not really. You might imagine that this difference would make us very dull to
cyborgs, but not at all. Think of the way you go to a great arboretum to look
at the plants and whatnot and take your children along with you.

What would
a world run by cyborgs be like for us? Would we be able to communicate with
them, even?

Oh, heavens, I can’t just imagine. I tried to
because it would have helped the book to put it in, but I can’t imagine. It
must be a bit like a dog trying to understand a genius. I don’t think they can
do it.

Why would synthetic life—cyborgs, in your terminology—want to
cooperate with humans initially?

The dominating feature of my writing, here and
elsewhere, is the Earth itself. We don’t have much longer surviving on this
planet [because of the brightening of the Sun]. It’s a very dodgy future. Cyborgs
are limited by the properties of the Earth, too. You’ve got to be very careful
how you treat it and you’ve got to be a good gardener or so to speak. The
cyborgs will know all the tricks and they will soon find that working with us
in a benevolent way is much better than trying to have a war, or something like
that.

But life has not always worked to keep things stable on Earth. Humans are not doing a good job keeping things stable right now.

Yes, we are making pretty prideful mistakes
leading to global heating. Part of the problem is there’s just too many of us. Even
so, Earth is still just about in balance. Through Earth’s history there have been
some very disruptive phases; think of the Permian Period. But life did survive
all of it. It’s amazing that we did.

If cyborgs take over, will that be the final stage of life on
Earth, or could there be another era after that, and so on?

It will be the final era of life, I think. Earth’s
chances of surviving a lot longer, astronomically speaking, are very poor. The
sun is warming up and nothing will stop it. It will heat up until it becomes a
red giant and there will be no Earth worth having then.

Even your cyborgs won’t be able to figure out a way to survive, then?

Keep in mind that cyborgs will be able to think at
least 10,000 times faster than we do. One consequence is that, for them, time
will be extended. The future [until the Sun overheats the Earth] will seem an
absolute eternity to a cyborg. They may not worry about what seems, to them, an
unbelievably distant future.

You argue,
in Novacene and elsewhere, that Earth
might be the only living planet in the universe. That
goes strongly against the grain of modern astrobiology. Why do you think so?

Time. The cosmos started with the Big Bang, some
14 billion years ago, but it took an awful long time for the consequences of
the Big Bang to settle down. Eventually stars dotted all over the cosmos. Then
a long period passed while the stars evolved and spread elements of different
kinds into the cosmos. Then it took more time for planets to condense from
them, and so on.

When you add up all the times for those events, it’s amazing that the Earth actually formed. The cosmos is limited to the output and products of the Big Bang, and there wouldn’t have been planets like the Earth until a certain time. It’s not surprising that we haven’t advanced very far yet. I’ve been involved personally in the search for life on other planets. I went to JPL an awful long time ago to work on that kind of project. I think the chances [for intelligent extraterrestrial life] are very poor.

Those are
some heavy ideas to bear on your shoulders. Do you put them all aside when you
live your daily life?

Well, I think we’re pretty human, my wife Sandy and I. We’re not strict, unbending, scientifically inclined people. We have a statue of Gaia in the garden and sometimes we look at her and think, or if it’s a fine day we go for a long walk or things like that.

You have seen extraordinary changes in the world over your
100-year lifetime. What do you imagine will happen in another century? Could
the Novacene era emerge by then?

What a wonderful thought. Well if it does and
there are as many changes as they have been in my own life, it’s going to be
quite an exciting place.

Exciting”? You remain an optimist even though you are anticipating a post-human age of life on Earth?

I’m now past a hundred and to have an optimistic
view is the only one worth having.

Maybe when you write your next book, we’ll speak again.

Okay. That’s a date.

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