Childhood's End, Gaia, Global Brain, and Terraforming

Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

A writer who calls herself Gaia Vince, which may be bad Latin for "the winning Earth goddess," has a story on BBC. To be kind, I characterize this as a fresh perspective on an old concept. Reference Peter Russell's "The Global Brain," published in 1982. The underlying premise is that an organization on the order of 10 billion units manifests an emergent property. Ten billion atoms, properly organized, result in a self-replicating cell. Ten billion cells, properly organized, result in a self-aware being. Therefore, Russell theorized, ten billion self-aware beings, properly organized, might result in a super-consciousness. This last leap is facilitated by the connecting phenomenon of language, which first enabled the individual to access the thoughts of his neighbor, then enabled the individual to access the thoughts of a mind on the other side of the planet or of a mind four thousand years dead. The Internet is a medium of increasingly dense interconnectivity, pushing communication into new dimensions. More than a decade before the advent of the World Wide Web and mass access to the Internet, Russell postulated that the trend toward increasing human connectivity would result in the emergence of a new property, a super-consciousness, a humanity that was at peace with itself and that was a good steward of its sustaining environment.

Talk about old hat! One could go at least as far back as Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End," published in 1953, for this concept. Then there was James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, formulated in the mid-1960s and published in 1979, in which he postulated that Earth's biota influenced the environment to its advantage through some agency of coordination. Both of these were Brits, yet Gaia Vince's pondering in presented as "news" on BBC.

"Homni is essentially a concept – I invented him because our superorganism has characteristics that go beyond the simple accumulation of humans." Not only does Gaia Vince credit herself for inventing the already invented, she never describes the concept of "emergent property," so she cannot adequately articulate what she is trying to explain. In apparent ignorance of any of the intellectual antecedents that I have mentioned, which she does not reference, her singular contribution is to invent a new term: "homni." Oh, good on her! Rhymes with "ennui." Before expounding on the interconnectivity of the human race, she would have done well to connect with her intellectual antecedents, and to give them their due. That seems harsh, but I admit that I have made the same mistake of imagining that my ideas were novel, only to find to my chagrin that they preceded my birth. That is why the careful writer does a literature search before reeling it out and stepping on it.

Speaking of stepping on ones reproductive organ, Russell listed about ten functions that any recognized life form exhibits. What I found interesting was that he did not call attention to the one function that the Gaia concept failed to exhibit: reproduction. Being a young aerospace engineer, the implication was obvious to me: the human race is destined to reproduce a biosphere on some other planet, and the most convenient venue is Mars. The term "terraforming" was coined by science-fiction author Jack Williamson in his short story "Collision Orbit" in 1942. When I posited to a long-time space journalist at the Case for Mars IV conference in 1990 that the human race was Earth's reproductive organ, he rolled his eyes and looked away in embarrassment, yet Lovelock himself flirted with this idea in his 1985 book, "The Greening of Mars." In 1998, Peter Perrine presented a paper at a Mars Society convention entitled "Earth Having a Baby" in the context of humans establishing a permanent presence on Mars, thereby reproducing Earth's biosphere on another planet. It seems that Gaia Vince overlooks the reproduction angle, disparaging humankind's reach into the cosmos as "littering space with telescopes, satellites and other artificial junk."

This is the essence of tragedy, that for the most part environmentalists and the aerospace sector have talked about the same emergent phenomenon without recognizing their common ground. There are too few visionaries, such as Lovelock, who have a well-established presence in both venues. Environmentalists and naturalists have had a historical distaste for aerospace, as Walter A. McDougall noted in his 1986 book, "The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age," which won the Pulitzer Prize for History; space exploration is viewed by them as "macho and polluting." Ironically, sending humans to the Moon in the 1960s gave the environmental movement its most enduring icon: the Whole Earth. On the flip side, nearly everyone who has journeyed a couple of hundred kilometers above Earth has returned to remark on the Overview Effect. If only we could get everyone on Earth to experience the Overview Effect just for one revolution of Earth, the time it takes to watch a feature film, it would utterly transform our society and our politics; sadly, we are not yet capable of putting seven billion people in space.

What will happen to our terrestrial environment as seven billion people and counting aspire to the same standard of living as 1/3 billion Americans? Developing our spacefaring capabilities might well result in relocating off-planet increasing portions of the industrial base that is essential to modern living, allowing us to remake Earth into a garden. Would anyone disagree with Joni Mitchell, that "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden?" However, I believe that the direction of the path to the garden is forward. I am taking Jerry Garcia's advice: "You can't go back and you can't stand still."

Thomas Gangale in Outer Space!