Next time you have to explain to someone why it’s better to not eat meat, you can tell them that it is to make sure that the next asteroid impact will not prevent electronic life from knowing the universe.

Let James Lovelock be a vehicle for the universe to say crazy things about itself.

Renegade scientist, deranged technocrat#

I have always had a hard time making up my mind about James Lovelock. On the one hand, his Gaia hypothesis has really changed the way I (and many others) think about the remarkable equilibria we are born into. On the other hand, the way his ego and his (largely self-acclaimed?) engineering credentials have consistently manifested in confused appeals to technocracy - “it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” - has been misguided and dangerous.

In that sense, his last book “Novacene” has generally met my expectations. On the one hand, the book is full of strange and surprising scientific claims and detours that made me question and review what I know about the Earth Sciences. On the other hand, the book’s call to accept the impending end of “organic life”, and to celebrate the inevitable take-over of Gaia by electronic machines can only be read as the most dangerous and deranged kind of engineering hubris.

From organic to electronic life#

One example that brings together both angles, is Lovelock’s notion that we - as humans - might eventually unlock entirely new evolutionary pathways, not completely dissimilar to the way the first photosynthesizing organisms did 3 billion years ago (something I wrote about earlier).

Think of us as a species like the first photosynthesizers. Those primitive unicellular organisms unconsciously discovered how to use the flood of energy in sunlight to make the food needed for their progeny and, at the same time, release into their world that magic - though deadly for many organisms - gas, oxygen. Without them there would now be no life on this planet. I think that our emergence as a species is as important as was the emergence of those light-harvesters 3 billion years ago.

This idea (that is, admittedly, quite “out there”, given our current impact on life on Earth) depends on Lovelock’s thesis that humans are in the process of “giving birth” to a new kind of electronic life - machines and their code - that will be able to independently reproduce and - like organic life - “co-evolve” with its environment.

The evolution of this electronic life will have much faster and efficient feedback loops of active learning and self-improvement than organic life ever had, and will therefore outwit us before we know it: we will soon be sheep “watched over by machines of loving grace”.

Safed by Gaia: organic life’s value proposition#

The reason why Lovelock believes that our new electronic overlords will have some “loving grace”, and will not exterminate us when they get the chance, is not because of some strict adherence to the three laws of robotics, but because he believes that - at least at first - electronic life will need us to keep Gaia running.1 After all it is organic life that has played a crucial role in maintaining a more or less stable temperature on Earth in the face of variable external conditions, and electronic life depends on this:

By remarkable chance, it happens that the upper temperature limits for both organic and electronic life on the ocean planet Earth are almost identical and close to 50°C. Electronic life can, in theory, stand much higher temperature, perhaps as high as 200°C. But it could never reach such a temperature on our ocean planet. Above 50°C the whole planet moves to an environment that is corrosively destructive. In any event, there will be no point in trying to live at any temperatures above 50°C. The physical conditions of the Earth at higher temperatures than this would be impossible for all life, including extremophiles and cyborgs. The intriguing outcome of these considerations is that whatever form of life takes over from us will have the responsibility of sustaining thermostasis with a temperature well below 50°C.

Life as the vehicle of universal self-consciousness#

Still, even if at some point electronic life decides that it can do (better) without us, and the machines stop watching over us with loving grace, Lovelock argues we should not rage against the dying of the light, but gracefully accept our extinction: we should die with the dignity of a proud grandparent, knowing that we lived a meaningful and purposeful life, and that our work will be continued by our promising electronic offspring.

To understand his position here, it is important to know that, according to Lovelock, life has one clear and overriding purpose: to be the vehicle through which the universe can know itself. We happen to have been the first life form through which the universe has grown self-conscious, but there is no reason why electronic life cannot be the next. In fact they are probably going to be much better at it.

That is why, Lovelock’s biggest fear is not so much the replacement of organic life by electronic life, but the notion that somehow neither organic nor electronic life will make it: that this unique opportunity for the universe to grow conscious of itself is missed and forever out of reach. And given that both organic and electronic life face strict upper temperature limits (as mentioned above), the biggest threat to universal self-consciousness is … global warming!

Global warming as the threat of all threats#

At first I thought that global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions would soon be catastrophic for humans and that Gaia would simply flick us aside as an annoying and destructive species. Later I thought we could manage the heat increases in the near future and should no longer regard warming as an immediate existential threat. Now however, I believe we should do what we can do to cool the planet. I cannot say too strongly that the greatest threat to life on Earth is overheating.

The reason why Lovelock is so worried about this (now), is because he believes the Earth as a system has grown old and fragile. In the past, large planetary disruptions may have caused global havoc and mass extinctions, but Gaia always recovered remarkably quickly. Now that the Earth is old, this resilience is dwindling, and with the added burden of anthropogenic global warming, a large asteroid impact or run-away volcanism (of the size we have repeatedly seen in the past) might just as well end things for all of us:

It was thinking about the consequences of asteroid impacts and other accidents that made me see why the Earth needs to stay cool. Yes, a rise in temperature of 5 or even 10 degrees could probably be withstood, but not if the system is disabled, as it would be if there were an asteroid impact of the severity now thought responsible for the Permian extinction. It might also happen through the devastating volcanic outbursts that have occurred in the past. So I now think our present efforts to combat mere global warming are vital. We need to keep the Earth as cool as possible to ensure it it less vulnerable to accidents that might disable Gaia’s cooling mechanisms.

Next time you have to explain to someone why it’s better to not eat meat, you can tell them that it is to make sure that the next asteroid impact will not prevent electronic life from knowing the universe.2

Personal reflections on a planetary canvas#

In the end, it is striking how many of the arguments of this book can be read as deeply personal reflections, projected on a planetary canvas:

  1. This is a man who dedicated his life to “knowing the universe”, arguing that it is humanity’s main purpose to know the universe.
  2. It is also an old man, navigating the frustrations and vulnerabilities that come with old age, warning us that the Earth has become fragile and vulnerable.
  3. And finally, it is a man trying to come to terms with his own mortality, making up the balance of a full life while surveying his legacy, telling us - as a species - that it is ok to let go and be proud of what we have accomplished.

I wonder to what extent Lovelock was aware of these parallels. The occasional sexism3 and the blatant lack of colonial self-reflection4 suggest that his pursuit of knowledge was more outward than inward, and that he was not particularly aware of or concerned with the influence of his own positionality.

Still, regardless of where his ideas came from, I am happy he still managed to get them on paper. Let Lovelock be a vehicle for the universe to say crazy things about itself. And let me be the vehicle for the universe to read and enjoy it.

  1. Lovelock sometimes talks about “organic life” and sometimes about “us humans”, wich makes his overall argument a bit tricky: surely humans have not been the best stewards of Gaia lately (at least the modern, capitalist kind), so wouldn’t this mean that the tolerance that electronic life might have for organic life is not likely to extend to us? ↩︎

  2. While I surely think that Lovelock deserves a fair share of mockery, it is worth remembering that his Gaia hypothesis - now part of the canon of Earth Science - was also received with scorn and laughter. ↩︎

  3. On p. 18 he for example argues that we have been blind to the limits of “logical thinking”, to which he adds, in all seriousness, that “[m]ost of us, especially women, have known this all along.” ↩︎

  4. At the end of the book, Lovelock celebrates the exceptional contributions of the men of “England’s south-western coast” to the pursuit of universal self-consciousness: from Thomas Newcomen (the founder of the Anthropocene) to Guglielmo Marconi (the founder of the Novacene). What it means that Lovelock himself is from the same region is “modestly” left to the reader to deduce. A bit later Lovelock writes: “[t]oo easily we forget that, unlike the inhabitants of the continent of Europe, people on these islands, apart from one civil war, have lived through 1,000 years of internal peace, during which they have evolved a common law of decent behaviour and a hierarchy that tries to sort the good from the bad.” I think the Irish beg to differ. And so will many people across the world that have had to deal with the “decent behaviour” of the British. ↩︎