Living Planets: The Gaia Hypothesis - Is Earth Alive?
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- Many have believed Earth might have a spirit, but Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis contemplates this as a scientific possibility. Could our world be alive itself?
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Credits:
Living Planets: The Gaia Hypothesis - Is Earth Alive?
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 369, November 17, 2022
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Lukas Konecny
Cover Art:
Jakub Grygier www.artstation...
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.c...
Imagine you are a sentient planet and the bacteria living on your skin are arguing if you're alive or not 💀💀
I’m sure that the answer is already known the reason there was dinosaurs where to eliminate overpopulation , a way of control , I also believe there was a time there where some sort of beings that took care of the planet , also many more things I can’t explain but I sure believe there’s a reason we have white blood cells and red blood cells .. and the world also does . It’s only a matter of time when the earth takes back its body ..
This is an insane statement in a good way. Basically bacteria can be good or bad for us also and can improve or destroy us kinda like us with earth. We can improve or destroy this world we can be a virus or good bacteria
What sucks is, the planet might not even know or feel we 're alive 😂
Comment of the year perfectly put
We need more people like you Isaac, the way you can admit that you admit you are skeptical but also explain without bias. More people could use more open mindedness
yeah generally agree
i mean like 6:24 lmfao i gotta turn it off.
@Some Austrian Painter you give me hope for the future of our world sir. thank you.
A "noosphere" can refer to the potential of a self-organizational principle in data-driven environments and this self-organizational behavior may seem like magic or spirituality to those who are disinclined to study and appreciate what is going on at the most basic level.
If it is the foundation for claiming the existence of magic or spirituality it is also not necessarily the same as defending all other claims of a similar ilk. We can simply be observing the automation of human subconscious tendencies via art and technology and the phenomena associated will likely always be novel and even shocking at times. Some processes naturally defy understanding and our language and status orientations tend to reinforce our prejudices against epiphany.
I'm pretty sure Isaac has said this a million times before about other advanced technologies (Clarktech), but it does seem odd to encounter comments like the one above in this forum. I get though that scientism is a concern that will be accused by people who disagree about such things, interchangeably betwixt positions. It's far more interesting for a majority of people to want to argue than to impartially observe and freely speculate phenomena, sadly.
@@Skiddoo42 the guy making the video has a speech impediment a mile wide and you post this???
Are you mocking ME?
or the channel?
XD
The best example of this I've seen in Sci Fi was the 1999 video game _Alpha Centauri_ where through your actions you can help the planet achieve sapience, or kill its consciousness if you prefer. It's also hands down the best Civ game ever made.
I loved that game, especially the tech development videos.
I played that game so much lol 😆 loved it
AC has never been superceded let alone matched. It could never be made today, wokeness would ruin it.
I loved Civilization: Beyond Earth, which is very similar to Alpha Centauri. I don't know why Civ fans hated it.
@@johnathanmartin1504 because it's terrible, and nothing like Alpha Centauri.
"Maybe we're all living on the remains of dead planetary intelligences..."
Well, that went full Isaac pretty hard.
Tiny specs of Light, looking upwards to exactly what we will never know and/or understand...After life is over, its as if we never existed!...Grihm but true...
A living planet sounds interesting. The mere concept of living organisms living on a living organism itself sounds poetic. Thanks Arthur!
I mean you gut bacteria are already doing that ...
@@davidegaruti2582 living organism all the way down... 😂
i've heard that jellyfish aren't a single creature, but a colony of symbiotic organisms that perform various functions needed by the whole. Fuzzy line between a single creature and a "living" colony, I guess.
@@seanehle8323 That's the Man of War, and while it looks similar to a jellyfish, it isn't actually a jellyfish.
Sounds like a skin infection. I'm sure there's poetry about that too.
It cannot be overstated how much of an inspiration Isaac Arthur is. More people need to see these videos!
He has inspired me to eat more snack food! My gut is getting large, so much more of me to love now! But I think my gut is alive....
James Lovelock! Yes I remember him! Boy that’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time! I had no idea that he just recently passed away this year! May he Rest In Peace. I remember reading about him for the first time years ago, about the brilliant but “controversial” scientist, who over 50 years ago back in the early 70s got into some hot water at the time for his mind blowingly radical environmental paper on “The Gaia Hypothesis” which I found quite fascinating and extremely thought-provoking. In fact one of my favorite works of science fiction actually took some inspiration from his environmentalist works on The Gaia Hypothesis and used it as a major plot thread in the story already rich with philosophical environmentalism, the science fiction I’m referring to specifically was an anime series to be exact, and even the show’s full title itself alludes to the Gaia hypothesis, the show was called Eureka Seven: Psalms of The Planet. He would be proud to know that his Gaia Hypothesis went on to influence philosophical works of science fiction as diverse as even Japanese animes at least to some degree.
Can't wait to watch this episode! This hypothesis is one of my favourite among Terence McKenna's talking points, that humanity is just Earth's reproductive organ and that it is part of our "mission" to seed the universe with life (:
“Humanity is just earth’s reproductive organ…”
This is an interesting analogy, given that now more than ever, when I look around…. Mostly I just see d*cks and c*nts.
@@bobinthewest8559 he also said "we are the genitals of our machines". Love Terence
...that explains alot of disturbing aspects of our species
Our lifespan is so short like a fly in the summer we are not capable of recognizing Gaia as a living intelligent being
I woke up just for the latest installment of SFIA. Love your work.
I love your closing statement. That last sentence was amazing to think about.
Trip down memory lane I haven't seen Rankine used since my older brother, now deceased, science text books. Thanks for bring back happy memories. I am from the UK so we dealt in Celsius or later on Kelvin even in the late 1970's. Thanks for another great video.
Dan Simmons has the hyperion series where there are many gods that emerged from various species through evolution. As a matter of fact a fight between two different Gods is where the primary conflict and story comes from. The shrike is one of the most powerful entities in that story and it's never quite certain whom is controlling it.
Awesome video! The idea of the planet being a self-regulating system of homeostasis doesn't require any greater driving factor than evolution itself. The various mass-extinction events, at least those at all triggered by or influenced by surface-life conditions (even something as simple as sea levels) could alone serve as a drive toward a grand planetary homeostasis force, as those ecosystems that had been influenced to be more survivable in such a disaster would then spread in the wake of one, while ecosystems without such a factor would be more likely to be wiped out.
It's a very grand-scale look at survival of the fittest, but we already see pieces of it with things like eusocial hive species and symbiotic links. Species already evolve for factors larger than the survival of an individual and already evolve to compliment the evolution of another species, and we recognize this. If survival of an individual can lead to such levels of complexity, who's to say that evolution of a whole ecosphere toward homeostasis and the ability to absorb catastrophic effects like major meteor impacts or massive volcanic activity is impossible?
It is an interesting idea.
I wanted to say I love the drink and snack part. It makes this feel like a casual college discourse than a "simple" UA-cam video, and it really allows me to get into the mood of understanding. Thank you for all of this!
I've been wanting an episode like this since forever , Happy Arthursday 🇯🇲♥️
Is a city alive? Is the internet alive? Alive is such a nebulous concept that isn't well defined. The planet is definitely an interconnected system. That doesn't mean the system is guaranteed to succeed or that there is an over arching consciousness regulating it. And I think this kind of thinking is just our bias to trying to find reason and pattern in things.
Why does awareness constrain to our limited level of system?
If it consumes it lives
Alive and conscious are two different things with consciousness being the more difficult of the two define. Is the Earth alive? Yes. Is it conscious? I honestly don't know but i imagine it depends on how one defines it. The real issue here comes from the fact that humans struggle to recognize consciousness in other beings simply due to the limitations of our biology
Right we have to understand what is alive vs aware. Even most conscious organisms are not aware of most of their life physical or mental.
@John Barber all life is aware but might not consciously reflect on what it is aware of.
This was the point of Avatar too. I bought a superb Lovelock encyclopedia of GAIA from a library sale in the 1980s. Superb and enlightening. I still have it. If we kill the birds, worms and bees, we die too.
Consider the nitrogen cycle too.
No the point of Avatar is: Civilisation bad, white men evil, giant blue smurf indians good.
And nature is not at all a dog eat dog hellscape where every day is a battle for survival and that's why humanity have spent the better part of 6000 years trying to escape it.
Whenever Isaac Arthur says something like “excellent book”, I head straight for Audible. He hasn’t led me astray yet. Singularity Sky, you’re next!
I've got a lot of catching up to do on Isaac's suggestions, I'm hoping it helps get me back into reading or at least started with Audible. Of all the ways I could spend my time, putting an actual thought-provoking book into my brain (even if it's while doing something else) is almost certainly one of the more positive ones :)
18:20 An episode dedicated to the Omega Point? YES, PLEASE!
Certainly a topic i am very interested in given the recent scientific discoveries of how entire ecosystems communicate through their roots connected to other plants via Fungus, Mother trees can even divert their own nutrients to their children in the nearby area through this system it is quite insane stuff, And if you think of those systems as a smaller part of what makes up a large brain i can see why this theory is gaining traction in the modern era, Should be called the Pandora theory to go with modern times considering the Avatar movie is what put this idea into most peoples heads.
An old nature film also featured wandering Bushmen. They reached the Atlantic Ocean, the Bushmen saw the ocean for the first time. They became quiet, some were scared, some were surprised. One of them finally said looking at the waves of the ocean; this planet lives and moves. I think we should all marvel at the earth every single day.
I think in your search for new content, you are begining to embrace (or giving credence to) the wilder side of the various hypotheses out there, and I mean really out there!
:) We've always covered wilder stuff, usually as a request by the audience. I don't really worry if discussing something and explaining its flaws draws attention to it or lends it credence, I only worry if we discussed it fairly and accurately.
thank you Isaac for the creation of this kind of content!
Stanislav Lem’s Solaris enchanted me with its living, psychoactive planet ocean. The Tarkovsky film was crucial in bringing it to visual life, while George Clooney’s later efforts seemed unnecessary. Lem has many other striking ideas as well as his contemporaries the Strugatsky brothers. The unfortunate New Age adoption of Gaia theory is best left in the dustbin of history.
I was a bit disappointed in the Clooney Version too, Dan, one of his rare weaker performances, though the script adaptation there wasn't good either IMHO.
@@isaacarthurSFIA quite right. But if you’re familiar with the Tarkovsky Solaris, I must recommend the same Soviet director’s Stalker. It’s based on an eery kinda-of cosmic horror novel by the Strugatsky Brothers and is a wowzer!
@@DanielGenis5000 I've heard that one recommended before, I'll have to add it to the list :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA It was an all round disappointment, even in the visuals department. If there is one movie that deserves a remake... that would be it. It's just... well, it's atrocious and the writers and director are 100% guilty of being cash grabbers.
The dark theme of the story (because ultimately... it's a really dark story) would be suited for someone like Nolan. I feel that out of all of Hollywood's directors, he'd be able to understand the theme the best without making it a "bring your flashlight" kind of movie.
Unfortunately, what with all the things going on... i doubt that movie's ever gonna see a remake.
I am surprised you didn't mention the two living worlds from Isaac Asimov's works, Gaia (Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth) and Erythro (Nemesis).
Foundation and Earth is a perfect bookend for the Foundation, Empire, and Robot continuities as far as I am concerned. Scary, inventive, and a wild ride.
@@Deridus wish he lived longer to have written another foundation book set a few centuries in the future after Gaia starts expanding more aggressively and their presence is known, how the first foundation and the second foundation and whatever planets that are not yet part of the foundation will be dealing with Gaia. The idea of Gaia always seemed sinister to me, loss of individuality to the whole really gives awful invasion of the body snatches vibes, not to mention it's the brainchild of millennia old robot playing god that now will be joining with the body of one of the most xenophobic peoples in the galaxy a Solarian. I could definitely see Daneel/Fallon becoming the bad guys and the first and second foundation having to unite and stop them.
Reminds me of Foundation and Earth - that planet Gaia which, as I understand it, was developed by humans (with aid from Daneel at the beginning,) and the proposed 'Galaxia' of a Galaxy of living Gaias. (And then perhaps a whole universe of them?)
Great show Isaac. James Lovelock was an absolute legend. RIP James. For anyone watching this I’d highly recommend researching any of James Lovelocks work. He truly was a Great Briton 🇬🇧.
from the term abiogenesis and gaia, i think we should say that we're currently in the process of agaiagenesis. this is origin of an original living planet with no parent, very analogous to abiogenesis, and nothing like the current life under darwinian evolution
This concept always reminded me of the Rube-Goldberg style computer that simulated Roundworld in Terry Pratchett's novels. I can't think of a good reason heterogeneous organic components couldn't run a mind, but I doubt I've put in as much though as Isaac. Looking forward to this one.
Perhaps there isn't a good reason why you can't have an organic component to run a mind but at the same time, why use an organic component? What's the advantage?
@@mattstorm360 I think the advantage would be a self repair. But we can mimick it with technology, organic stuff needs nutrients and such, inanimated matter is easier to manage.
@@mattstorm360 well it's less about what the advantage would be in this case and more about is it feasible for a biosphere to devote some portion of itself to computation in the first place. I don't think it's impossible, probably a lot more likely if it's artificial, but if you grant that it is, I could imagine this superorganism or wetware ASI or whatever it would be having at least some of the stereotypical Gaia-esque qualities, stuff like preserving the balance of nature since there's obvious utility in the entity regulating its own components.
@@chillax319 self-repairing inorganic machines would have their own equivalent of nutrients, they would have to intake silicon to replace processors, aluminum or steel or plastic to make housings, copper, semiconductors, plus the raw materials to make the machinery that does the actual repairing and so on. At that point it's arguably an alternative form of life
@@chillax319 there is also the fact that organic stuff is infinatly more efficient than our chemical processes , in the sense that it seeks the maximum output with the minimal energy ,
Skewing towards minimizing energy ...
There are bacterias that are making magnitite with a fraction of the energy we are using
“… both of whose names I probably just mispronounced.“
You did, and we love you for knowing that going in.
There was an MSDOS game called SimEarth that is based on the Gaia Hypothesis, where you can guide the evolution of life in a planet, or just sit back and watch it without interfering (once the life becomes sapient, you really want to get involved, because you can change the priorities the species has towards things like food production or science, as well as what they use to produce power)
Pretty fun game, you can easily find and download it even today
I was just about to comment about this
Gaia hypothesis, or as us kids of the SNES era all know it, Lavos Hypothesis.
I was wondering if anybody was gonna bring up Chrono Trigger! That's definitely a version of this hypothesis in which there is not only intent in the behavior of a planet's regulation, but that intent is malicious. Because life is tasty. XD
I’ve used the phrase “flowering earth hypothesis”, and I think it fits for some situations better.
It's so hilarious that you mention Malthusian theory while talking Gaia. Just need my hacky sack and a drum circle.
A huge study was finished that said life is inevitable throughout the universe. Life Is Inevitable Consequence Of Physics, According To The Research, from Robin Andrews.
The Nine from Destiny are an interesting take on this concept. Theres a mirror reality in the Destiny universe composed of dark matter, and this mirror reality is affected by our universe. Massive objects in our universe cause dark matter "dust" in the mirror universe to clump together. In addition, sentient life in our universe imparts some intelligence onto the dust in that mirror universe. The result of this is that every stellar object essentially has a "soul", albeit an eldritch and unusual one. The Nine in Destiny are strongly implied to be the nine traditional planets of our solar system, and they're intelligent enough to try and interact with our world, albeit with great difficulty as their reality is so alien compared to ours.
The planets of the solar system as eldritch old gods is a really cool concept.
I didn't know that, I guess I had no idea what that game was about! Doesn't really tell you a story I felt like at least the first game I never played the second
@@Aatell764 Mm. The Nine are a particularly mysterious part of the game too, not really a primary focus. I was quite proud of the fact that I figured out what the Nine were about six months before the details were revealed to us. In fact a lot of the community still erroneously thinks that the Sun is one of the Nine, not realising that Pluto is counted among their number.
Might explain a few things: the hard problem of consciousness for one, if consciousness is a property of the Earth itself. If I were a young, hyper-Intelligent and supremely beautiful planet, I'd evolve some space monkeys to build me a big, fuck-off infra-red space telescope. Then I'd start planning for the future.
Life doesn't need to take a form we understand to be sentient, that would be hubris.
This actually somewhat forms the basis of the film "The Happening". In that movie the plant life starts releasing a deadly toxin into the air as a sort of reaction to human environmental damage. It matches up with the idea of a 'cybernetic earth' with the toxin release just being a natural reaction to the destructive interactions that humans have had with the rest of the environment
One crazy guy had that idea in the happening. It’s never confirmed.
Thanks for this video!
Avatar (Hopefully Eywa is fleshed out more in the films to come) but ever since I have heard Lovelock talk about it. Its fascinated me.
It is an interesting thought experiment. More of a way of viewing an emergent property as a mechanism that probably doesn't really exist but works for describing the possible results of a sample size of 1 and doesn't apply universally to all cases. If life does spread outside to other planets then it kind of correct
an omega point video would be interesting for sure
Surprised you didn't discuss James Cameron's avatar, with an organic World mind that served as an afterlife, and organizing principle for the lives of all inhabitants, sentient or not.
*HEYA ISAAC!* Re: The Medea hypothesis --
In the actual myths Medea only starts murdering people once Jason tries to banish her and their children so he can marry a different Princess and become heir to *her* kingdom.
If you look at it that way, it's less like the planet is out to get humanity in general and more like it's out to get Elon Musk in specific.
Came for the Sci fi, stayed for futurismo and Isaac Arthur
Intelligence is the only why to spread life to other worlds, so that could be the goal of life after all.
Solaris is the best representation of this theme, without it actually being about the planet itself, which is the thing i loved the most about the book. The level of subtlety the author put in ... is sublime. It's a very dark kind of Sci-Fi, but a dry kind of Sci-Fi where the story is nearly 100% an exposure from the human perspective. We're essentially ants in the grand schemes of something we can not comprehend. And quite frankly... i doubt there's any kind of way one could represent a living planet without looking comic book cheesy or ... cheap.
It's the old adage of one wouldn't normally bother with ants, they exist... but once one does, we either study them or play with them... and our games can be cruel.
I've read my copy of Solaris so much i had to buy another and even it is breaking at the seams. 10/10 book.
i've never heard of this "Orth" place before
Hey Isaac!! Maybe you could do a piece on the potentials of chemoautotrophs in developing true nanotechnology
My theory is that the Earth is actually a giant pizza roll.
It's got a reasonably cool outer shell, that has a dramatically inconsistent temperature variation, but the inside is guaranteed to burn the crap out of your mouth if you bite into it...
Astronauts always say from space the earth looks like it is alive.
Daily commutes in a metropolis like Los Angeles looks a lot like breathing in and breathing out.
Well if an individual human is a cell, then a civilization like ours is the organism. Roads would be analogous to blood vessels
The fungae all over our planet are some sort of a Gaia-brain
Aloha, a friend and I just stargazed and watched 2h of racetrack UFO above us. 3 white spheres cruising in a perimeter track and at very high altitude. 6-8pm. Mostly clear and starry night with few Pacific clouds at ca 700m.
Seems like they watched us.
Why could I only find two comment about Eywa from Avatar?
interesting idea. Would we be able to understand what our planet "wants" and "thinks" ? each one of our cells is alive, but can't comprehend the totality of the emergent properties of the human ...
Yes, earth is alive because we are earth. I don’t see us just living on earth we are a part of it just like the ground. What exactly is earth if we don’t include the ground that has life and the trees that are life. If we include that as part of earth then animals are a part of it too.
26:38 "Universe created life to understand itself"
Brilliant as always...
Thanks Otto!
It's interesting to think about.
If Earth is alive, and all of humanity acts as the brain, then she’s insane.
Notification gang!!!!! i got notified an hour late tho
Going a step beyond this - ie. a cosmic superorganism - Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's work makes this look interesting. The basic premise is absolute idealism with Darwinian evolution, relatively tight physicalist dynamics (thinking of Karl Friston's free energy principle) with the caveat that different layers of conscious organization don't flow into each other directly, but at the same time it yields something like functionalism with multiple realizability (ie. egregores and 'China brains') and while I'm interested in Michael Levin's biology work for all sorts of reasons his fractal take on consciousness almost sounds reminiscent of functionalism with multiple realizability as well. Also, for someone whose had weeks of intense synchronicity a few times in my life, downward causation seems like it's the most plausible story for why such things would happen.
Hoffman and Prakash actually published a paper recently, leveraging Nima Arkani Hamed's amplitouhedron as part of their model, for how Markov chains feed into that structure and then back out of it to yield our experiences. To clarify as well - Hoffman and Prakash's theories don't see matter as causal (ie. 'spacetime is doomed') but rather see it as a user interface tuned for optimizing Darwinian fitness payouts. It's not quite a simulation because the limits of matter point at deeper limitations that are real in a particular way and which can't be ignored, it's just that those limiits don't exactly map on to what our senses relay.
I truly believe this is the case, and I don't really think there's anything mysterious about it either: the human body is a self-regulating system, and Earth, with all the life on it, is also a self-regulating system. Many of Earth's natural cycles are caused by life in the first place, and life depends on many of these cycles' continuance, so what has really happened is the biosphere is "operating" the rock its sitting on, which I assume is analogous to the brain operating the body.
As for the Earth having a "spirit" like us, at that point its a matter of philosophy. Does a colony of bees have a single spirit, because it behaves as one thing? Either way, we should probably respect the Earth as if it has a spirit anyway. It did make us, after all.
Splendid brotha.Thanks
Interestingly, the Humanity:firstborn Space Civilization is set to release on my birthday. It's also 1 day after the anniversary of the attack on Pear Harbor in 1941.
Cars have other purposes besides getting from A to B efficiently. They tend to be status signals.
Stellaris Lithoid Hivemind: "I am seven parallel universes ahead of you."
Imagine if the Gaia Hypothesis is less like earth and more like deadspace's brother moons though
I have seen "omega point" used to describe a sensible coherent concept. Assume a big crunch cosmology. Now suppose that infinite computation is possible at the last instant. (As the universe collapses, more and more energy becomes available. So we can compute faster and faster. Each computation taking half as long as the previous.) Nothing with magic "purpose", just an interesting consequence of plausible physics.
👍 for Rankine!
Interesting video as per usual.
The earth just needed plastic and couldn’t make it by itself so it created humans and now that it has a limitless supply, is why it’s been trying to get rid of us lately. - Gaia hypothesis joke.
Seriously though, very good video and love the comparisons made.
I'd like to see a video on a planet that is in itself alive. Perhaps covered in a single large multicelular biomass.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, old but great
I've only seen one comment on here bringing up Lavos. If you like the Gaia hypothesis, you should look into the SNES game Chrono Trigger. There is an entity known as Lavos who arrived on the planet in the year 65,000,000 BC and began to regulate the ecosystem specifically so it could harvest all life on the planet in the year 1999. It's true that this isn't technically a case of the planet itself being alive, but it's a prime example of deliberately controlling the circumstances of a world in order to cultivate life- and it's malicious. The end game goal is to destroy Lavos- to destroy the mechanism that's been keeping life going on the planet before it kills everything. It's a very cool concept.
Some of this really sounds like what the moon Pandora, from the movie Avatar.
The ORIGINAL Final Fantasy movie way back in 2000, aptly titled, "The Spirits Within," dealt with the Gaia hypothesis. I actually enjoyed the movie, although I may have been one of the only FF fans that did.
My take on it, is life evolved and adapted to the planet, but the planet also changed because of life and these changes allowed for new and more complex life to evolve.
Planet and life affects each other, so the planet is in a way part of life.
I do think of an advance technology civilization MAKING a Gaia planet is an interesting topic. Or transforming a world into a Gaia world.
The concept of a living/feedback-based planetary consciousness/mechanism is certainly an interesting one.
Not one I think that could truly happen spontaneously, let alone with unregulated or with a technological species active there unless it was specifically designed to have such.
It’s certainly a compelling feature for a sci fi setting. Planets redesigned to mass refine/cycle their heavier elements up through volcanic and tectonic actions. Ocean worlds where the moon periodically sets a percentile of the ecosystem into “catch baskets” the size of continents onto to settle back later to replenish naturally while people harvest and examine the bounty for use elsewhere. Planetoids rich in common elements that crumble terrain into fertile soil or dunes of regolith that can then be sent into orbit via scaffolded megastructures that spend millennia shipping out the material as fast as its generated.
Not Gaia certainly but an interesting set of mechanisms for a civilisation rocketing through the kardashev scales. Waste not what’s wanted not. Why scrabble in the bottom of volatile gravity wells when you can slowly repurpose them using excess energies to supply your system wide mastery.
Hey Isaac !!! You should add subtitles to your videos!
Hi Isaac!
What is gaia is actually roko's basilisk ?
Even sociology has a problem with overly teleological explanations.
Right, almost to an example, empires aid the rebels of rival empires even though those rebels are anti-imperialist. Even if each empire is individually teleological, they are acting as the agents of destruction of the world system that allows them to exist. This process has advanced so far that nowadays colonial empires are infeasible. A group of competing teleological agents ended up producing a naturalistic, non-teleological result: the age of nations.
The reverse process can also take place. Warring Chinese states or small businesses competing on a market or stock traders are teleological agents but may as well be Brownian motion when combined as a whole. But all of those systems have a strong tendency toward monopolization. Massive banks that can individually rule an economy, private monopolies, capitalist governments, dictators hand-picked by powerful industrialists, and Chinese dynasties are all examples of teleological entities.
27:03 Why is the Earth rotating in a retrograde fashion?
probably a screw up by the animator, it's stock footage and I honestly never noticed before.
Like Pandora right? from avatar?
yes, like that lol
Eywa!
Notification gang!!!
_Ego the Living Planet has entered the chat_
this is such a silly concept but i love that you covered it anyway- a worthwhile watch!
The Ymir Hypothesis, because the tree on which the nine realms rest was grown from his corps.
Could you cover asymmetrical life forms like the Tyranids from 40k? Or Xenomorphs?
You know, I never noticed that. Great, now I'll never unsee this. Time to press the button. The Emperor protects!
[=]I[==]
I truly believe the earth is the host and we are negative parasites!!! And the earth will rid itself of us soon!!!
Just started the video but just a thought that has been on my mind.
It bothers me so much that all youtubers assume alien life would be hostile. What if humanity is an extreme anomaly in its hostility. The concept that aliens would be anywhere close in our mentality is so strange to me.
The reason that view is so prevalent is because, given what we know of how life on this planet evolved, there has to be a degree of hostility in any organism JUST to keep it alive. Even horses and deer and dolphins and stuff aren't peaceful, they compete with members of their own species and kill others, because that keeps them alive. If there was ever a form of life that had NO way to be aggressive, even if it was just by aggressively reproducing, it has long since died out. Obviously, the more hostile life would consume it or drive it away from resources.
So let's say there was some alien life like that, and it managed to survive long enough that we found it. Enjoy it while you can, because it won't be there long.
Aggression is a byproduct of evolution, but really we're not all that agro as far as these things go. I mean among social creatures aggression is significantly limited since it has to balance with cooperation otherwise sociability(a very expensive trait) is lost.
As far as most species go we're pretty chill. We're no honey badger or nothing & most of the animal kingdom has aggression in spades compared to us. Hell we're about as nice as u can be without evolution starting to weed us out. Any creature with sufficiently low aggression, even in isolation, will be outperformed by a more aggressive variant. Being too slow to rise to violence is not a good thing in the bush. Certainly not when surrounded by similarly aggressive intelligences, jumpy herbivores, & apex predators.
Look up the Comic Book called "The Warriors of Plasm". It's about a Living Planet you describe. Comic Books have produced some great Stories. - Since you are dipping your toe into religion and delving into the possibility of Pantheism, perhaps you are Willing to Vlog about the possibility of Christianity. Deism is popular amongst some Secularists, and can be a 'Gateway' religion to Christianity...
I think this video raises an interesting point: assuming a purpose behind any given phenomenon is frowned on in modern science, even though such an assumption is not necessarily wrong.
I think this is why so many people have trouble conceiving of a God or gods scientifically. The standard paradigm assumes a lack of intent behind almost all phenomena, up to and including human consciousness in some extreme examples. This means that gods, noncorporeal entities with power over nature, are ruled out a priori, since any divine action would be assigned a natural explanation.
This is why I hate scientific discussions of gods. Outside disproving the most boneheadedly literal interpretations of a given myth or story (most of which even ancient theistic scholars had already settled on being metaphor), scientific arguments don't really work when trying to talk about divine or spiritual beings.
Of course scientific arguments don't work when trying to talk about divine or spiritual beings. Science doesn't work with nonsense.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom You can hear that fedora tipping from the moon.
You just gave Tyler Perry another movie idea. Thanks for that
The high temperature since mid-2023 has been blamed on a positive feedback in clouds.
Kind of a similar idea, if on a larger scale, is found in Babylon 5, where the Minbari believe that the universe itaelf is alive and sentient, and that sentient life is the process through which the universe is attenpting to understand itself. This is explicitly framed as religion, not science, though it is an interesting concept, and as with any other religious belief presented on the show, assumed to have at least a grain of truth to it. Which is frankly mindboggling, when you consider that the showrunner is an Atheist. But that's very much the point - being able to present ideas without interjecting our own bias, much like our man Isaac Arthur.