The Last Spirit Book of James lovelock, at the time the creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, can be synthesized in some verses by the poet Alfred Tennyson about Ulysses, the great warrior and explorer, in his old age: “Although we have lost much, we have much left; and although we lack the vigor that we once had it moved earth and sky, we are still what we are … “
Because Lovelock is far from wanting to convey the idea that all is lost. Or even more: that the solution will come from some romantic ecologist positions that want to return to pre-industrial times. Lovelock, in what will probably be his last hour, Novaceno, it shows modernist echo. Enlightened ecologist.
Gaia hypothesis
According to Gaia hypothesis, the atmosphere and the surface part of planet Earth behave as a system where life, its characteristic component, is responsible for self-regulating its essential conditions such as temperature, chemical composition and salinity in the case of the oceans.
However, that does not mean that letting the Earth self-regulate is good for human survival (or for living comfortably). The degrowers argue that we must consume less and return to a pre-industrial level of emissions. However, to get there there are two options: asceticism or creating new technologies.
Both positions, at their extremes, may be utopian. For Lovelock, however, the solution may not be so much asceticism as new technologies that generate fewer emissions (that is, who has done more for trees, ecologists or on a USB stick?).
In short, a book by a legendary author, almost a hundred years old, betting more on artificial intelligence than on shutting down nuclear power plants.
New beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think ten thousand times faster than we do and they will see us as we see plants today: as creatures that act and think with exasperating slowness. But it will not be about the cruel and violent takeover of the planet by machines envisioned by science fiction writers and filmmakers. These hyper-intelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need as much as we do for Gaia’s planetary cooling system to defend them from the increasing heat of the Sun. And Gaia is dependent on organic life. We will be allies in this project.
You can go deeper into these two positions to face the environmental problem in the following video, where the one that may be is shown the only audiovisual fiction that avoids the ascetic position: