“Earth’s infection.”

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WE always hear so much about the depletion of the ozone layer. The Ozone is mainly found in two regions of the Earth’s atmosphere. Most ozone (about 90%) resides in a layer that begins between 6 and 10 miles (10 and 17 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface and extends up to about 30 miles (50 kilometers). This region of the atmosphere…. is called the stratosphere. So when we think Earth’s atmosphere.

We should envision a 80 inch ball ( the earth is 8,000 mile in diameter) with a 1/8 inch halo around it (representing the ozone level at 8 miles up.) In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living.

The world population was estimated to have reached 7.6 billion as of October 2017. The United Nations estimates it will further increase to 11.2 billion by the year 2100. The World was in harmony in mid 1992 with 5.480 billion individuals …

In his book “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning,” (Basic Books, April 2009) James Lovelock says humanity is “Earth’s infection.”

We are the viruses. While in theory it would be extremely difficult to truly destroy this planet, it’s not such a stretch for some scientists to also imagine us making it a place that doesn’t support humans. The planet would go on, the thinking goes, but it’d get rid of us much like we shake the flu. Lovelock’s thinking is that our increasing presence is getting things so out of whack that, in the manner of a human immune system, the planet has no choice but to respond.

“Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells,” writes Lovelock, environmentalist, futurologist and creator of the Gaia hypothesis. “By analogy, Gaia’s illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good.”

In his blog, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle writes that University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has an alternate new theory: Earth is set up to kill off life, including us, when it spreads too widely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population So, let’s just fix things, yes? Lovelock would reply: “So is There is nothing humans can do to reverse the process; the planet is simply too overpopulated to halt its own destruction by greenhouse gases. In order to survive, mankind must start preparing now for life on a radically changed planet.” Good luck!!!

Ward is more optimistic, Boyle reports. If we change habits, we can engineer our continued existence.

The Matrix and humans as viruses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFOxQE3wKOk

In the massively popular American movie The Matrix, the writer-director team of Andy and Larry Wachowski presented a dazzling vision of a dystopian future in which intelligent machines have enslaved the human race to use them as an energy source. One of the machine race, a sentient computer program known as Agent Smith, tells one of the human heroes at a key point in the movie that the human race is functionally equivalent in ecological terms to a virus: https://flenix.net/movies/1634-the-matrix.html

For those who can’t watch YouTube videos, here’s a transcript of Agent Smith’s monologue:

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium. . . . with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed, and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure.

(Fans of Thomas Ligotti, who claims Burroughs as a major influence, might be interested to hear that he once told me about the time he was watching The Matrix in a theater when the movie was in its original release, and he shouted at the top of his lungs, in disgust, “A virus!” in tandem with Smith on the screen, thus discomfiting his fellow moviegoers. As a longtime student of Burroughs, he had intuited the virus idea coming from a mile away, and was annoyed at the way the moviemakers presented it with a “Hey, this is a new and ingenious idea!” tone.)

James Lovelock, the groundbreaking originator of Gaia theory, in conversation with science editor Tim Radford warns that we are about to reach a tipping point, beyond which our planet will not recover sufficiently to sustain human life comfortably.

Preview James Lovelock – The Vanishing Face of Gaia

James Lovelock, the renowned scientist, environmentalist, and futurist who famously spearheaded the scientific study of global warming and formulated the now-standard Gaia model that views the earth as a living organism — and who will turn 90 years old this July — had a new book (his tenth) published last month titled The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.

His basic message is that radical climate change with globally catastrophic results for the human race is now locked in as an inevitability.

LiveScience published an article about Lovelock and his new book a few days ago that imparts the flavor: “Die, Humans! Is Mother Nature Sick of Us?” (May 7).

The article’s opening paragraphs link up Lovelock’s thesis with Burroughs’ and Agent Smith’s famous pronouncements:

In his new book “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning,” (Basic Books, April 2009) James Lovelock says humanity is “Earth’s infection.”

Nice. We are the viruses.

While in theory it would be extremely difficult to truly destroy this planet, it’s not such a stretch for some scientists to imagine us making it a place that doesn’t support humans. The planet would go on, the thinking goes, but it’d get rid of us much like we shake the flu.

Lovelock’s thinking is that our increasing presence is getting things so out of whack that, in the manner of a human immune system, the planet has no choice but to respond.

Or consider these choice paragraphs from a March 1 review of Lovelock’s book in The Guardian titled “Now we know why we’re all doomed“:

Unfortunately, Gaia is in trouble today, says Lovelock. It is infected by a virus called Homo sapiens. Humans are destroying ecosystems, killing off species in their thousands and destabilising climates. “We became the Earth’s infection a long and uncertain time ago, but it was not until about 200 years ago that the Industrial Revolution began: then the infection of the Earth became irreversible,” he says.

Not incidentally, this is followed by oh-so-choice intimations of doom:

Lovelock names this illness polyanthroponomia, a condition in which humans are so plentiful they do more harm than good. More to the point, the condition is untreatable. Renewable energy projects, cutting carbon footprints and promoting sustainable development and other green ideas are no more than the posturing of “tribal animals bravely wielding symbols against the menace of an ineluctable force”. In short, we are heading towards a climate catastrophe that will leave only pockets of humanity left alive, says Lovelock.

The reviewer describes this as “impressive, frightening stuff and all the more chilling coming from a man of such a mild disposition and of such varied credentials.”

Back to the topic at hand, tracing the “humans are a virus” meme from Burroughs through The Matrix to Lovelock is of course not the only way to do it. Variations on the idea of humans as a disease on the planet and/or of human consciousness as an alien and destructive development have appeared in science fiction and horror fiction for decades. And the idea that the human race may be a destructive species without whom planet earth would be better off, and regarding whom planet earth may be prepared to take decisive cleansing action, has wound its way through the radical environmentalism movement since its birth in the 1970s.

For a recent example of the latter, see the widely quoted assertion by Paul Watson — militant whale protector, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and an early member of Greenpeace — that “Humans are presently acting upon [the earth’s ecosystem] in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system.

A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth” (“The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know It on Planet Earth?” Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, May 4, 2007.)

But all of that said, it’s still fun to see. The progressive adoption and deployment and evolution of the virus idea in Burroughs and The Matrix and Lovelock, that is.

As for the possibility that Lovelock is right about the inevitability of catastrophic climate change and Gaia’s likely destructive actions to protect herself against the human infection — well, that’s not nearly as much fun, is it?

Peter D. Ward studies life on Earth — where it came from, how it might end, and how utterly rare it might be.

Why you should listen

Paleontologist and astrobiologist Peter D. Ward studies the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) and other mass extinctions. He is a leader in the intriguing new field of astrobiology, the study of the origin, distribution and evolution of life in the universe.

In his book Rare Earth he theorizes that complex life itself is so rare, it’s quite possible that Earth is the only planet that has any. But, he theorizes, simple life may exist elsewhere — and possibly be more common than we think.

His upcoming book, The Medea Hypothesis, makes a bold argument that even here on Earth, life has come close to being wiped out several times. Contrary to the “Gaia hypothesis” of a self-balancing, self-perpetuating circle of life, Ward’s Medea hypothesis details the scary number of times that life has come close to flatlining, whether due to comet strikes or an overabundance of bacteria.

In March 2009, Ward’s 8-hour television series, Animal Armageddon, premieres on Animal Planet Network.

In April 2013, Ward published a surprisingly moving essay about his life’s obsession: the chambered nautilus >>

What others say

“What are the chances of all the necessary factors coming together to allow the emergence of complex organisms? Not good, unfortunately. As far as we know, it’s only happened once.” — review of Rare Earth in the Skeptical Inquirer. https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_mass_extinctions

Some environmentalists say toxins that work like estrogens are already having an effect: Such agents, found in pesticides and industrial PCBs, have been linked to earlier puberty for women, increased incidence of breast cancer and lower sperm counts for men.

“One of the great frontiers is going to be trying to keep humans alive in a much more toxic world,” he observed from his Seattle office. “The whales of Puget Sound are the most toxic whales on Earth. Puget Sound is just a huge cesspool. Well, imagine if that goes global.”

Global epidemics or dramatic environmental changes represent just two of the scenarios that could cause a Uni-human society to crack, putting natural selection — or perhaps not-so-natural selection — back into the evolutionary game. Then what?