Gaia and Medea

[alan refail]

An interesting opposition of views of Earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/s ... ioncode=26

[Nature's Babe]

Yes, and I know how Gaia might colonise space, but I'm damned if I will spoonfeed you the answer, because all you do is poo poo my ideas.
Check out the first link on my answer to Johnboy, mycelium is the one species science has largely ignored and was the gateway species that enabled all the rich diverse life of earth to flourish. It's a fascinating video
if you bother to read it.
PS and our gardening and farming techniques are busy destroying this species

[alan refail]

Hi N's B

I don't follow your reply.

[Nature's Babe]

Did you read all the article you posted?
It said if Gaia was an organism, it should be able to reproduce? Well maybe she just has a very long gestation period, she needed us to come of age to do it.
Mycelium were the gateway species that made all this diverse life on earth possible, unlike plant life science has barely begun studying these.
just maybe mycelium will be key to colonising and making other planets habitable by us.
The first link on my reply to Johnboy was a video about mycelium, it explains
this and is fascinating.

[Mike Vogel]

I do not have much time for mysticism about material matters. I feel the threats to our environment are too serious to justify allowing those who wish to ignore them to point the finger at mumbo-jumboism. Sorry, that's my personal reaction; although more or less an atheist myself, I would not want to tell people what to believe or what not to, except if these beliefs include the right to exterminate others.

However, just because the earth may well not be a LIVING organism, that does not mean that all the elements which make up our planet are not interconnected. Destroy one element and it affects them all. For example, warm up the seas and the carbon-storing plankton or algae recently identified will be reduced and thus more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere, leading to exacerbation of the greenhouse effect, leading to warmer seas, etc etc. But the earth doesn't have to be alive for this or the reverse to happen .

Environmental change has been a feature of earth's existence ever since its creation. The massive Permian Extinction seems to have been due to a supervolcano or an asteroid; the dinosaurs did not cause the separation of Antarctica or the post-Cretaceous upheavals and Man did not cause the ice ages. 60,000 years ago the Congo rainforest was cool savannah and will be again, mankind or no mankind.

But as we learn more and more about the deleterious effects of overproduction and pollution, we do have a duty to do what we can to mitigate, if not eliminate, their effects. But let's be clear about this: this duty is to our own species, or more specifically to our own descendants alone, who can understand what's happenig to them and therefore suffer the more from our neglect. The planet will never know or care; it will simply exist with different species on it until the sun expands in 15 billion years or whatever and burns our atmosphere up, swallowing the earth in the process.

[alan refail]

Nature's babe

Just to clarify - I posted the links for a simple, specific reason: to show that for every "hypothesis" there can be an opposing and opposite one. The cosy mysticism of "mother nature", "Gaia", a self-regulating organism or call it what you will on the one hand, and on the other hand the world as an environment where "life is, in the end, suicidal". If asked to choose I would definitely go for the latter, as fitting in with the mechanisms of evolution.