Gaia

Gaia is a European Space Agency astronomy mission whose primary goals are to: (1) measure the positions and velocity of approximately one billion stars; (2) determine the brightness, temperature, composition, and motion through space of those stars; and, (3) create a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy.

If the entire history of planet Earth were condensed into a year, human beings wouldn't appear until 8.30 p.m. on 31st December. For Gaia – the Earth – we are just three-and-a-half hours old.

The name Gaia for planet Earth was coined by the scientist James Lovelock from the eponymous Greek goddess.

[page 1] As I write, two Viking spacecraft are circling our fellow planet Mars, awaiting landfall instructions from the Earth. Their mission is to search for life, or evidence of life, now or long ago. This book is also about a search for life, and the quest for Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth. […] [I]f Gaia does exist, then we may find ourselves and all other living things to be parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life. […] [page 11] We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

If we are all—from the lowliest microorganism to the largest whale—a part of Gaia, then we are all potentially important to its well-being. Therefore, the ecologists who deplore the elimination of a species are not merely appealing to our sentiment. They are warning us, often without knowing it, about a blind and dangerous tinkering with the mechanism of the world. It is not enough just to regret the extinction of a whale, or even of the smallpox virus. When we delete one of these from Gaia's catalog, we may have destroyed part of ourselves. We are also a part of Gaia.

In fact Planet Earth can be seen as an active participant in the creation of its own story, a living being now given the name Gaia, a name from Greek mythology for the goddess of earth. […] The very ability to perceive of the earth as living, as Gaia, is an indication of the expansion of consciousness that humanity as a whole is experiencing.

Having recognised the Gaian phenomenon I would like to explain where I think Gaia comes from and ask for how long this Gaia phenomenon has persisted on the surface of the Earth. And then I would like to raise some of the objections to the Gaia hypothesis. To my knowledge the Gaia hypothesis has never been discussed in polite scientific society by sympathetic scientists; this is an all time first.

Meanwhile, mankind is getting on with the business of turning the Earth barren; sooner or later, but more likely sooner, Gaia will shrug us off and the Earth will carry on as if we had never been.

At first, Lovelock didn’t view global warming as an urgent threat to the planet. “Gaia is a tough bitch,” he often said[…] But a few years ago[…] Lovelock became convinced that Gaia’s autopilot system[…]is seriously out of whack, derailed by pollution and deforestation.

While investigating the Greek mythology, we have found reason to suppose that Juno, Ceres, and Gaia are but three different forms of the same original tradition of a divine feminine: of whom Ceres is the Pelasgian copy, Juno the vivid and powerful Hellenic development, and Gaia the original skeleton, retaining nothing of the old character, but having acquired the function of gaol-keeper for perjurors when sent to the other world.