Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...astronauts rocketed to the moon. It was the first time earthlings could see their home as a whole, and NASA's pictures said with stunning force what neither words nor theories could adequately convey: life has radically transformed this numinous sphere. The heart-stopping beauty of the earth set against the dark void of space earned inventor-scientist James Lovelock the first adherents to a theory that appears to reconcile science and religion in the study of life on earth. Lovelock's idea, named the Gaia hypothesis after the ancient earth goddess of the Greeks, is that the planet...
Lovelock was not the first to argue that earth functions like a giant organism; Scottish geologist James Hutton made the same point in 1785. But Lovelock's formulation is compelling because science now has the tools to explore some of the vast interactions that govern global systems. Although Lovelock first articulated his hypothesis in the early 1970s, in collaboration with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, it has only recently begun to have significant impact on the scientific world. Initially, Gaia was only embraced by New Age types who responded to a holistic view of nature that blurred the distinction between life...
According to the Gaia hypothesis, earth's atmosphere would be unstable for life if it were not regulated by the biosphere, the envelope of life surrounding earth. Oxygen levels have remained at roughly 21% of the atmosphere for 200 million years, Lovelock asserts, whereas they should have fluctuated wildly, according to some geochemical models of the atmosphere. Were oxygen levels to rise above 25%, spontaneous fires would break out; if they dropped below 15%, many higher life-forms would suffocate. Climatologist Tyler Volk of New York University argues that life controls earth's temperature as well. In a study recently...
Lovelock and Margulis have modified the theory over the years to address scientists' criticism that Gaia implied that the earth acted with a sense of purpose. In its newest form, Gaia has inspired a flood of research into the interaction between living systems and the atmosphere, earth and oceans. At the first major scientific conference on Gaia, sponsored by the American Geophysical Union in 1988, the austere group of scientists ended their meeting by giving Lovelock an exuberant standing ovation...
Scientists have yet to uncover the actual mechanisms by which life processes regulate earth's climate and atmosphere. Lovelock maintains that this makes it all the more imperative that man halt the mass extinctions threatened by the destruction of tropical forests, because he does not know what creatures are essential to his own survival. At the American Geophysical Union conference on Gaia, Lovelock argued that diversity makes earth both stable and habitable: "You cannot have a sparse planet any more than you can have half an animal...