Homage to Gaia (46 page)
Authors: James Lovelock
The theme of the meeting was the concept of a superorganism. Biologists recognize that the paper nests of social wasps and bees, and the concrete constructions of termites, are the expression of the plans encoded in the genes of the queens. There is strong evidence to show that these nests are in homeostasis. Not just the individual organisms, but the whole nest, material and living parts together, keeps its temperature constant when the external temperature rises or falls. In other words, the phenotype is the material boundary of the nest. Now the Earth is not the phenotype of any species of organism, but the coupling between all the individuals of the planet and their material environment results in a homeostasis similar to that of the nest. We hoped that these thoughts would stimulate discussion on the concept of biological self-regulation at all levels, from the individual organism, the nest, and the ecosystem, to Gaia.
It was a meeting where ideas flowed freely, and for the duration of the meeting, the scientific tribes had dismantled the barricades between their disciplines. We even had a fine talk from Herbert Girardet on the city as a superorganism. On the last afternoon, we enjoyed one of those exciting moments in science, when a new and what may be a crucial thought emerges. Dick Holland had talked on the environment of the Archean period, over two billion years ago. He told us that the evidence of the rocks suggested that the CO
2
content of the air must have been low, not more than one per cent by volume. If this was so, then how was the Earth warm enough to stay unfrozen when the Sun’s output of heat was much less than now? Out of the meeting came the thought: there were no algae in the oceans then, so maybe there were fewer or no clouds. The geophysicists present knew that a cloudless Earth would be twenty or more degrees Celsius hotter and confirmed the speculation. It may turn out that this does not answer the problem of the Archean climate, but the
exchange was valuable. It is rare to have scientists from all branches of science talking together as friendly collaborators on a topic that extends outside their expertise.
The second meeting ended with a small group of us gathering for the formal foundation of the Gaia Society. Sir Crispin Tickell is the President, and the University of East London generously offered the society space and funds for an executive secretary. He is Philip George and among his tasks was that of organizing the third Oxford Gaia meeting in April 1999. These conferences have succeeded in establishing Gaia theory as a serious scientific topic. The distinguished science journalist, Oliver Morton, who attended the 1999 conference, wrote in the American science magazine,
Discover,
‘The idea that organisms collaborated to keep the planet habitable was once dismissed as New Age earth science. Now even sceptics are taking a second look.’
As you now read, there are few scientists who doubt that the climate and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface are coupled with the metabolism of the organisms that inhabit it, and the German systems scientist, John Schellnhuber, called it, in a
Nature
article, the new Copernican Revolution. No one now thinks seriously of oxygen as anything but a product of photosynthesis by plants and algae. It is easy to forget, though, that twenty to thirty years ago serious scientific papers suggested that oxygen came mainly from the
photodissociation
of water vapour in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and in the splendid book
Earth
written in 1973 by Frank Press and Raymond Siever there is no mention of life’s interaction with the composition of our planet’s surface. They shared the general view as expressed on page 489 of their book: ‘Life depends on the environments in which it evolved and to which it has adapted.’
In those days, they had no inkling that without life our planet would be like Mars or Venus, a vast desert. They knew that life needed water, but failed to see that life has actively conserved water. In a similar way, the climate research centres of the world, which once scorned the idea of life affecting the climate, now know that they must include the organisms living on the land and in the ocean in their models. Geologists now accept that the weathering away of the continental rocks is as much a matter of bacterial and plant digestion as it is a physical and chemical process. In the thirty-five years of Gaia’s existence as a theory, the view of the Earth has changed profoundly. Yet, so far only a tiny minority of scientists realize how much Gaia
theory has helped to change their view. They have adopted my radical view of the Earth without recognizing where it came from, and they have forgotten the scorn with which most of them first greeted the idea of a self-regulating Earth.
The quest for Gaia has been a battle all the way. Our critics are beginning to admit they may have been mistaken, but still they find self-regulation and the phenomenon of emergence obscure. Yet both of these are crucial to an understanding of Gaia. They may not understand Gaia, but this does not stop them mining
The
Ages
of
Gaia
for research projects in biogeochemistry or climatology. They are right to insist that a large and still unanswered question remains: if the Earth is indeed self-regulating by biological feedback, how has this come about through natural selection? I like to compare our inability yet to give an answer with Darwin’s inability to satisfy those critics who saw the amazing perfection of the eye as something that also could never have arisen by chance natural selection.
Take the most intriguing piece of evidence for Gaia—the connection between ocean algae and climate. We still do not know how the links between climate, clouds, and the organisms evolved through natural selection. It almost certainly, when finally understood, will involve a series of small steps, not some sudden large evolutionary leap. William D Hamilton and Tim Lenton have recently proposed that algae, like most organisms, need to spread their spores from areas they have denuded of nutrients to fresh pastures. Perhaps their emission of DMS acts by stirring the wind. Sailors know that the updraft generated by condensation in a cloud can make a surface wind. Perhaps the algae have used this wind to carry their spores. Dandelions have evolved their complex micro-airships for seed dispersal. So why should not algae take the opportunity of wind raised by their own gas, DMS, to transport their spores to fresher pastures? Hamilton and Lenton published these ideas in 1998 in a paper called ‘Spora and Gaia’. It helped to convince me that I could now retire from active Gaia science, the sceptics had at last come to listen, and this is all that I have ever wanted them to do.
It is thirty-five years since Gaia’s inception, that startling afternoon at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, when it flashed into my mind. Writing in 1999 I see that the theory of a self-regulating Earth, able to maintain climate and chemistry always tolerable for its inhabitants, is moving into acceptance as part of scientific conventional wisdom. If they must reject Gaia as the name of their new science I hope that they
will choose ‘Earth System Science’ as a sensible alternative. Whatever they call it, if I am right about the Earth’s capacity to regulate the planet, science must soon begin to take it seriously, or it may be the worse for all of us. As we discover processes by which life and the climate interact, many of them seem to act as amplifiers of global warming. Thoughtful Gaia theorists suggest that in the present
interglacial
warmth natural forces increase, rather than ameliorate the global warming that we have brought about.
In any creative act—whether painting a portrait, writing a book, or developing a theory of science—an important and difficult step is knowing when to stop. Writers and painters choose their own moment to finish their work, but with theories of science, there is no personal place for stopping; they are like cathedrals in the building, something to share and hand on. When in 1997 I knew that Tim Lenton’s dedication to Gaia was as deep as my own, it was easy and joyful for me to pass it on to him. I had no doubt that the time had come for me to stop my work on Gaia science and leave its further development in the capable hands of Tim, Lynn and Stephan Harding. There is still Gaia work for me to do. I want to follow up the inspiration of that most estimable of men, Václav Havel, who saw in Gaia theory a moral prescription for the welfare of the planet itself, something for which we humans are accountable.
Scientists are usually pictured as serious, middle-aged men in white coats, their surroundings filled with large and complex equipment. It could be anything from astronomical telescopes to view the beginnings of space and time to electron microscopes for disentangling the intricacies of the organelles within a cell. A lot of modern science is like this, but it would be as untrue to say that all of it is ultra high-tech as it would to say that all cooking is done in the expensively equipped kitchens of a large hotel or restaurant. Home cooking with simple saucepans can make delicious food. In the same simple way, I have discovered the delights of muddy boots ecology walking with my friend Stephan Harding and the joys of field geology with Robert Garrels. There is still a place for the amateur scientist, as the sight of the Hale–Bopp comet, which enlarged our skies in 1996, confirmed. A lone watcher of the desert sky first saw its fast approach, not professionals in their observatories.
My apprenticeship showed me that I could ask questions about the nature of things with simple and inexpensive equipment, and this knowledge gave me the confidence to set up my own laboratory in a thatched cottage in Bowerchalke. At the start, there was no need to buy more than was needed for the first research problems of my customers, and I started by setting up a small and modest workshop. In it were good quality hand-tools, a watchmaker’s lathe and milling machine, soldering and brazing equipment, and the miscellaneous items needed for electronics. As the years went by, so the range of
chemicals and other consumable items increased, until I reached that happy level where anything I needed was on the shelf. My customers were also generous in providing equipment more expensive than I could have afforded. Wisely, Pye and Hewlett Packard gave me their gas chromatographs so that in them I could more efficiently try out the new detectors I invented. JPL was a wonderful source of new high-tech electronic items. Four years after starting my lab in 1964, I was able to make my own scientific apparatus, and soon I was using it to explore the trace gases of the air. Before long, these explorations led me to discover such important trace gases as CFCs, and methyl halides and sulphides in the atmosphere, and to show that they were everywhere. The harvest of this research led to the recognition of ozone depletion, and it provided supporting evidence for Gaia theory. A modestly skilled amateur could have constructed any of the equipment I made and used.
A difficulty faced by an independent is competing with university scientists for funds. When academics bid for small contracts, they are seeking perquisites only, because their universities usually pay their apparatus and other costs, as well as their salaries. This represents a large subsidy, and their bids are always less than an independent could afford to place. The same kind of distortion of the market price occurs over attendance at commissions or giving advice to government departments. Usually, only travelling and subsistence expenses at civil service rates are payable. A visit of this kind to London from Coombe Mill, for example, always involves at least two days away with a zero income during the time of the visit. Like most professionals, I manage by never having less than three main customers and this is, in any event, essential if one is to retain independence. One large customer alone, no matter how good, is inconsistent with independence, and it would be no more than exchanging one form of employment for another. One of the joys of independence is the extent to which the needs of different customers are shared in common: work done for one agency, like NASA, often cross-fertilized the work I did for another, such as Shell. Over the first fifteen years as an independent, contracts from the American agencies NASA, NOAA, the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), and from the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), provided the bulk of my gross income. More importantly, good customers were interested in the science I did independently. Shell, Hewlett Packard, NASA, NOAA, and the MOD, all encouraged me in my work on Gaia theory and on the atmospheric abundance of trace gases.
American bureaucracy can be daunting, and in my first contracts with the Jet Propulsion Labs concerning the Viking mission to Mars, JPL employed an expediter. He was a man who took my contract and me through all of the offices whose signature and approval were needed. This would have been an almost impossible task for me to do unaided, but I soon found that an American agency that needed your services pushed aside bureaucratic barriers. The possession of a provisional patent was a strong incentive for them to help in this way, because they could then say that my contract bid represented a ‘sole source’ and they could legally avoid the slow and unfavourable process of putting the contract out for bids. Of all the United States agencies, none was so helpful as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. I suspect that Lester Machta, the head of the section I dealt with, worked hard to ensure the smooth progress of my contracts with them.
To do science independently it is wise to form a company. Consider for a moment the difficulties of ordering from a home address, such as 15 Acacia Gardens, a few kilograms of potassium cyanide or a curie or two of a radioactive element. The police, not the van driver, would call on you the next day, but if you place a company order, they deliver it without fuss. I called my company Brazzos Limited after the river Brazos in Texas, near where we lived while in Houston, and formed it in 1964. I deliberately spelt it wrongly; the real river Brazos has only one z. My motive in choosing this devious name was not dishonest; to have a proposed company name compared with those already listed cost £25 in 1964. After two or three false tries, I resorted to Brazzos, a name I thought no one else could have chosen, and I was right. We have traded as Brazzos from then until now. Quite apart from easing the purchase of chemicals and radioactive substances, a company also helps in making contract bids. Agencies like NASA or NOAA would have had a much harder time giving a contract to a foreign individual than to a company like Brazzos Limited, since companies are internationally recognized. By the time a company is formed and provisional patents are filed, and contracts drawn up, the legal and accounting costs become a significant part of one’s overheads. To keep these costs reasonable, I found it necessary to reverse that old showbiz tag where an unsuccessful applicant for a part in a film is brushed off with, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ I took only contracts that were offered; I never sought them.
In the early days of my independent practice, I did not know how much to charge my customers and usually sold my services too cheaply. It did not matter much because the total returns were adequate for my needs and I gradually approached a fair price by adjusting the time spent on a customer’s problem to the amount paid.
The most valued lessons of my apprenticeship at Hampstead and Mill Hill were those in experimental science. The outstanding difference between these MRC laboratories and others I have known was the willingness, even the eagerness, of the scientists to build their own apparatus. From Mill Hill came the huge advances in separation science that enabled molecular biology, and it was all done with equipment the scientists themselves had invented and had made in the Institute workshop. It was a laboratory for medical research, yet the products of individual scientists made for their own personal research are now as important as the research itself. The Wright Spirometer, a simple instrument to measure the peak-flow rate when breathing, finds wide use in diagnosing asthma, and I well remember Wright and his wonderful inventive capacity, and fruitful arguments about the best way to measure something. He was, in the 1950s disdainful of electronics and preferred a mechanical solution if possible, and he was not alone in this. I remember Archer Martin arguing in favour of nanotechnology—ultra-microscopic mechanisms. Martin proposed a Babbage-style computer built of minute mechanical parts and said it would be as fast and as reliable as an electronic computer. Oddly, though, it is from the need to make ultra-microscopic electronics—the computer silicon chips—that has come the means of making minute mechanisms. At these medical labs, I learnt to blow glass, to make simple chemical apparatus, to braze and weld metal, and to use lathes and milling machines. I wonder why this is so rarely, if ever, in the science student’s curriculum. These skills, together with a set of tools, have given me the autarky I needed. I treasure most the small watchmaker’s lathe which was made by a firm called Pultra. I bought it in 1964 and it, with its wide range of accessories, is still in use here at Coombe Mill in 1999.
I find that I think clearly when my hands, as well as my brain, are involved. I frequently wake at five in the morning when it is too early to rise, so instead I stay in bed and try to model in my mind the invention of the day. By breakfast time, the model has taken shape as a three-dimensional image, and after breakfast I go to my lab to translate the mental model into something solid, a construction of metal,
quartz, or plastic. This act seems to refine the idea behind it, but the mental experiments done in bed ensure that usually it works first time. Seen from outside, techniques can appear impossibly difficult; how could I ever paint a portrait or play the violin? In those examples, there are no satisfactory states in between starting to learn and becoming proficient as an artist. Experimental science is different: if a customer such as the JPL needed from me a device or an instrument to go on a spacecraft, they needed me merely to make a working model, what they called a ‘breadboard’. The name breadboard goes back to the days when they made electronic equipment, like radio receivers, by screwing down the components onto a kitchen breadboard. Neither they nor I expected to send crude homemade pieces of hardware like this into space or to a planet. Their engineers would use my crude working model as a solid sketch from which to model their own exquisitely perfect constructions, each as light and as strong as an Arctic Tern, a bird that migrates across half of the Earth’s surface. So long as my home-made apparatus works and demonstrates its principle, that is all that is needed. I never minded when at the JPL or at the Hewlett Packard laboratories, engineers would look at my
handcrafted
device and say, ‘We can do better than that.’ I knew that if my breadboard had been as good as their finished product, they would not have thanked me. Even if I could have done it, it would have been an absurd waste of my time. It also pays to think small: I find that the instrument companies who supply the present-day laboratory equipment tend to make their devices monstrously large. A gas chromatograph or a spectrometer is likely to be far too heavy for one person to lift and will occupy most of a laboratory bench, but I see no reason why these two instruments should be so large and so heavy. The combined gas Chromatograph and mass spectrometer sent to Mars on the Viking lander weighed only seven pounds, and that was twenty-five years ago. Is it necessary for such instruments still to fill a small room? A project close to my heart has been to make a gas chromatograph as small as a pocket calculator. It would enable anyone anywhere in the world to do the science now only possible in the wealthy first world, and I discuss this in more detail on page 184.
The everyday life of an independent scientist is wholly different from that of a typical scientist working in the laboratories of industry, the universities, or government service. To bring you this unusual flavour let me tell you how I invented one small component of the instruments carried to Mars in 1975 by the Viking landers. Sandy
Lipsky, then a professor at Yale University, had persuaded JPL that they needed a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer (GCMS) combination to analyse the soil of Mars. It was a much more powerful instrument than either of these instruments used alone. The combined instrument would not merely separate the substances present in the soil, it would identify them. Now, it was not easy at that time, the 1960s, here on Earth to join a gas chromatograph to a mass spectrometer. A gas chromatograph column delivers the substances it separates greatly diluted in a stream of gas such as nitrogen. The mass spectrometer operates with its interior kept as close to a perfect vacuum as possible, and the sample to be analysed must be introduced without breaking this vacuum. We needed a way to isolate the substances emerging from the column from the large volume of the gas that carried them. Sandy Lipsky brought to JPL a Swedish scientist who had invented a useful device in which the lighter, smaller molecules of helium gas were separated from the larger and heavier molecules of the substances to be analysed. He did it ballistically. If you take a handful of sand and stones and throw the mixture, the stones will travel much further than the sand. This is because, lacking inertia, the sand is quickly slowed by air resistance. In the same way, the heavier molecules projected in the stream of helium went on in a straight path, whereas the much lighter helium molecules diffused out sideways. It worked well as a separator, but the space engineers were unhappy about its power needs, particularly its requirement for a powerful pump to clear away the excess of helium. They did not think it would work on Mars. One of them said to me after trying the ballistic separator, ‘What we need is a separator that removes all of the carrier gas without needing a vacuum pump.’