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Gaia

 

            In 1965 James Lovelock was working on a project for NASA when he came upon a revelation, while doing research looking for evidence of life on Mars he came across the idea that maybe the Earth is itself on giant super-organism. The idea that billions of organisms on the planet were circulating and controlling the atmosphere, temperature and course of the Earth. "It was life processes, the cumulative actions of countless organisms, that were controlling the atmosphere. And viewed from outer space, the mass effect of these processes was that the Earth itself appeared as a living entity - especially in comparison with its dead neighbors. Lovelock had a sudden realization that the Earth could best be described as a kind of super-organism:".
             While trying to find out if there could be life on Mars Lovelock first started thinking about what establishes life on Earth, and how you can find it. He came across the idea that just as we would leave a certain chemical signature in the atmosphere from breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide if there was life on Mars there would be a certain pattern in the atmosphere there. With his partner Dian Hitchcock he studied the chemical makeup of Mars and discovered that the atmosphere there was about 95% carbon dioxide and therefore was chemically dead, there was no chance of any further reactions to take place there. "The Earth was 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a relatively large amount of methane. Mars was chemically dead; all the reactions that were going to take place had already done so. The Earth, however, was far from chemical equilibrium. For example, methane and oxygen will react with each other very easily, and yet they are both present in the atmosphere. Lovelock concluded that for this to be the case the gases must be in constant circulation, and that the pump driving this circulation was life.".
             The Gaia theory is a theory that the earth is alive.


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