Introduced by my father, Carl Sagan, with whom he shared an office at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to my mother, Lynn Margulis, who was interested in the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere, the two, Lovelock and Margulis, went on to develop Gaia theory, which explored how Earth’s biosphere, far from being a planet with some life on it, was a giant thermodynamic system away from chemical equilibrium. Self-described as an engineer and inventor more than a scientist, Lovelock invented the electron capture device, an extremely sensitive chemical detector which found human-made industrial products, such as DDT and PCB toxins in remote regions of Earth, helping to spur Rachel Carson’s cri de cœur, which was the 1961 book Silent Spring, itself a spur for the environmental movement. The Gaia hypothesis was a response to the search for extraterrestrial life, specifically NASA’s Viking mission of robotic landers to see if there were life on Mars. The occasion of the passing of James Lovelock (1919–2022) provides us the luxury of attempting to look back on the life, not only of a great scientist, but of the major object of his intellectual attention, the life of the biosphere, whose status as (to quote David Bowie) a space oddity, he discovered. James Lovelock, Gaia, and the Remembering of Biological Being Thermal capacity they supply essential thermal mass to buildings.Dorion Sagan – James Lovelock, Gaia, and the Remembering of Biological Being
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