a hundred million years ago the
cockroaches discover agriculture become
the first super organism ten thousand
years ago the first intelligent
superorganism forms their own species do
intelligent super organisms that exist
at the global scale carry within
themselves the seeds of their own
destruction have we got a hope of
surviving
what I’m going to do this evening is
really talk to you about my latest book
the book came out of my attempt to
answer a question that I was asked very
frequently when I was talking about
climate change particularly after I’d
written the weather makers in 2005 and
that question was what are our chances
really of surviving this the shifting
climate that’s looming and that we we
are causing and the only way I could
think of to answer that question was to
really go back to the scientific
fundamentals to go back to the process
that created us and our planet and of
course look at the intersection between
our species and this thing that we call
planet Earth because it’s at that
intersection that the issue of
sustainability arises and I couldn’t
think a better way really of starting to
look at the issue than to go back to the
work of that man there the reason I
wanted to start with Darwin was because
he’s the man who really explained to us
how what would the process that made us
and the process that made our earth and
his idea his great idea was an extremely
simple one it was simply that in every
generation there is variation between
individuals and that some of those
individuals are more likely to survive
and reproduce than others and that over
the vastness of time that people were
just becoming aware of the history of
the earth in the mid 19th century that
that must tell on heritability on those
which are on the shape of species as a
whole as he put it so as a very very
simple idea but Darwin being a very wise
man I think a very perceptive person
decided to sit on that idea
for twenty years and it was only when I
went to Darwin’s house in Kent that I
really understood a little bit more
about why he waited so long before he
announced this fundamental idea that
that changed our view of the world just
outside his house he built a little
thing that he called the the sand walk
and that’s it there it’s actually a
pebble walk I don’t know why he called
it the sand walk but there you go
even great men can do odd things and
every day of his life at downe house he
would walk for several hours around that
sand walk and people have wondered why
he did it what was he thinking about
what was he doing as he walked around
that racetrack really it’s just a loop
around the forest there I think what
Darwin was doing as he wandered the sand
walk was metaphorically fingering his
worry beads he was thinking about the
implication of his theory for religious
belief in his country for the shape of
civil society and other deep matters I
guess
at base what he was worried about was
the deep he destroyed faith by showing
that we were not the unique creation of
a loving and caring God but instead
we’re the result of a an amoral and
utterly cruel process that by destroying
faith he might destroy hope and charity
as well and have a very adverse impact
upon his society he may never have
published his theory if it hadn’t been
for this man here in 1858 20 years after
Darwin first stumbled on the idea of how
we and every other living thing on the
planet was was made this man here Alfred
Russel Wallace was working in Indonesia
he was a man 20 years younger than
Darwin he was a working-class lad
self-made went to the tropics to collect
biological specimens and while he was
there on the island of Turin arte he had
a malarial attack
and as a result of that malarial
attackers he was highly fevered the idea
came to him that perhaps species were
created by exactly the same mechanism
that Darwin had chanced upon 20 years
earlier when he recovered enough from
his malaria to write he wrote a note to
Darwin in great excitement outlining his
theory and asked Darwin if he wouldn’t
mind transmitting it to one of the
journals to be published in bringing a
when Darwin received the letter he was
horrified he said you know Wallace
couldn’t have made a better precis or
summary of my work if he’d had my notes
in front of him and he thought perhaps
that his whole life’s work was about to
be stolen by this upstart this working
class later as it was he appealed to his
friends particularly those who looked
after journal publications and so forth
including Charles Lyell the great
geologist and as a result of their
intervention both pieces of work would
Co published in July 1858 both Darwin’s
and Wallace’s and it is extraordinary
how similar they are it was like a squib
going off in British society no one took
any notice in fact the man who was in
charge of publishing the Journal of a
professor Bell who was an expert on the
store guide Crustacea wrote in his
summary of the year 1858 that there’d be
no significant scientific discoveries
really published in a journal that year
nothing that would revolutionize the
department of science that they bear
upon of course he couldn’t have been
more wrong and that was showed the
following year in 1859 when Darwin
published his book on the origin of
species and then as Darwin perhaps
feared with the theory unleashed upon
his society everything began to change
within five years Herbert Spencer had
coined the term to survival of the
fittest and social Darwinism had been
born so I as I was beginning to look at
the process that created us read reread
Dawkins
selfish gene reread Darwin and began to
despair that perhaps we were selfish
short-sighted ruthless entities forged
by an amoral and utterly cruel process
but it was this man here that really
gave me hope that that may not
necessarily be the case Alfred Russel
Wallace lived a very long and full life
dying at the age of 90 at the age of 80
you he was still writing and in fact I
would argue his most important work was
published in 1904 in his eighth decade
and that’s the title page of it there
man’s place in the universe a study of
the results of scientific research in
relation to the unity or plurality of
worlds very very strange title indeed
but what this book really is is a
summary of Wallace’s understanding of
what the evolutionary mechanism had
created and being a holistic thinker his
field of endeavor was the entire planet
and this book is the foundation stone of
the science of astrobiology it compares
worlds quite literally and he posits the
theory that this planet is the only
living planet that the others wherever
they be in the universe are all dead
it’s also the forerunner of James
Lovelock’s work on Gaia theory he talks
in the book about the atmosphere the way
the atmosphere works the way that dust
which is often created by living things
is important in regulating Earth’s
climate system
it’s an extraordinary lucid what I say a
prescient work really that underpins
many aspects of current science
particularly holistic science like Earth
System science at Gaia theory and so
forth and what we learn from Wallace and
his work is that evolutions legacy is
not nasty brutish and short it’s not a
survival of the fittest world instead
this cruel animal
second ISM has led to a world of
extraordinary intricacy
interconnectedness and cooperation and I
just want to run through a few examples
of that cooperation this slide just
shows mitochondria there they’re small
organelles that exists in all of our
cells they’re the Power Packs for
ourselves it’s been realized in the last
30 years or so that these mitochondria
actually have nothing to do with us in
terms of their origin they originated as
free living bacteria a billion years ago
in an ancient ocean and they came to
cohabit the cells of our bodies much the
way algae cohabit with the coral polyps
on a coral reef but over a billion years
they have become so closely tied in with
ourselves and the symbiosis is so
intricate now that they can’t exist for
a millisecond without the cells that
they live within the cells of our body
and now our body our bodily cells cannot
survive without them and that’s just the
beginning really of the complexity of
the thing we call a human being you know
if I look at my skin I have hundreds of
species of bacteria virus and funky
living all over me and I do wash I
hasten to wait so don’t rush off it’s
it’s we’re all like that we are all we
are all ecosystems of near planetary
complexity you know if you took the
cells that are me and my mitochondria
away you would still have a shadow of my
entire body here because about ten
percent of my body mass ISM is made up
of other species all of the gut flora
and fauna in my intestines everything
covering my skin the special mites that
only survive in human eyebrows the other
species of mites that only survive at
the base of human eyelashes we are
ecosystems of planetary complexity and
what are we at the end of the day we are
ultimately just animated bits of Earth’s
crust for all of that complexity that’s
what the evolutionary process tells us
that’s what biochemistry tells us our
our chemical origin
the Earth’s crust dating back four
billion years when the spark of life
first sparked on our planet and of
course we’re the same today to draw a
line separation line between us and rest
of the planet is foolish in terms of
thinking so what is the big entity that
we are part of that we are part of the
crust of that’s it
there and the way I think about the
planet is simply information systems
organize matter so what is the
information system at work here it is
DNA which is a digital information
system which obviously it’s the
blueprint of our bodies and has created
our bodies but even more than that it
has created that entity that we see
today 4.5 billion years old nothing
going in but sunlight pretty much
nothing going out but heat and yet it’s
created this extraordinary entity I just
like to concentrate briefly on the three
organs of the planet because they tell a
tale of dramatic modification by life
itself by DNA the first is the crust
formed off two bits we’ve got the
oceanic crust here the continental crust
here in the very early stages of the
earth there was no continental crust
these rocks were made by the weathering
of these rocks and scientists have
recently come up with the rather
intriguing notion that the continents
will not exist without life and that’s
because we can calculate the energy
budget of the early Earth the primitive
earth we can work out rates of erosion
and are required to create the early
continents and the figures just don’t
add up there is an energy deficit so
where was the energy coming from to
create the erosion of oceanic rocks that
led to the continents being formed it
can only have come from one source it’s
been argued and that is life itself
life capturing energy from the Sun
creating acids and so forth these a very
primitive bacteria and
the primitive forms of life that helped
hasten the erosion of rocks and so
created the earth the ground beneath our
feet the ocean itself we know from
studies paleontological studies did not
resemble its current form two billion
years ago it was full of metals
dissolved metals heavy metals and so
forth and was very different was
inhospitable to life the atmosphere
didn’t resemble the modern atmosphere
James Lovelock argues that that very
thin layer about as thick as an onion
skin on an earth the size of an apple is
99% a creation of life that almost all
of the gases in the atmosphere with the
exception of the noble gases are made by
life itself for life’s own purpose so
there is a profound impact of life on
the system we can think of the earth
quite literally as a living planet but
what exactly is it and this is the
question at Lovelock and other earth
scientists are asking the name Gaia
comes from the ancient Greek and the
ancient Greeks believed that the earth
was one whole and perfect living being
like a human being they believed it was
a living creature I don’t think in fact
no scientists today believes that that
is a tenable hypothesis because the
earth just is not as tightly integrated
nor is it as well-regulated as a living
creature such as ourselves and yet it
clearly has some self-regulating
capacity I want to talk a little bit
about hierarchies of organization
between an individual like ourselves and
the planet or an ecosystem for that
matter and the most important of those
hierarchies is a thing called the super
organism here is a great example of a
super organism
these are termites you can see that they
differ quite a lot one to the other yet
they’re all the same species
a superorganism is a a level of
organization that is between that of our
bodies and something like an ecosystem
or the planet as a whole
and it is action is mediated through
these things these these creatures
through pheromones perhaps the best way
to start thinking about the origin of
the social insects like termites is to
think where they came from 100 million
years ago these things were cockroaches
I mean they’re just there they are just
very specialized and modified
cockroaches but it was when cockroaches
discovered agriculture that they became
super organisms we think together like
that they’re always they same always
have the upper hand over us the
cockroaches don’t think they’re they
were 100 million years before us our
building building farms and cities and
look at that it’s like a skyscraper with
its own air conditioning system with its
own water security system with its own
gardens roads it’s a very complex entity
and the similarities between that
structure in our cities is striking
despite the fact that there are many
differences as well the other thing that
you see if you look at these super
organisms is that they tend to share a
particular point of view a philosophy if
you want a set of ideals and that is
another very important piece of glue I
think that holds our civilizations
together what happens when these super
organisms meet very very interesting
sure there’s a lot of disaster there is
warfare and so forth but there is also
an immense exchange because the bigger
the group is the greater the division of
labor the greater the benefits the
greater the opportunities of trade the
more amenity that is created
I know I’ve wandered a long way from my
initial question have we got a hope of
surviving climate change I want to
return to that with just that background
of our species and the planet there are
two ways really of thinking about about
this
and one comes from an understanding of
the evolutionary mechanism as elucidated
by Darwin and Dawkins which if fused
with a sense of our current impact on
the environment can lead one to despair
and that particular theory has been
really articulated most fully by Peter
Ward a paleontologist here his book the
Medea hypothesis he puts it up in
opposition to James Lovelock sky a
hypothesis the name comes from the
ancient Greek as well Medea the woman
who are slighted by her husband
slaughtered her own children and ward
uses that that name because he believes
that life is inherently destructive to
life that in a Malthusian world where
populations just continue to increase
and this capacity to feed them increases
arithmetic Li while the population
increases exponentially species are
destined to crash it’s a very dismal
view of the world it really is a
survival of the fittest view of the
world and in wards eyes humans and I
think special we are simply the
continuation of the great destructive
capacity of the planet and that within a
few generations we will lead to the
sixth great extinction and life will go
on without us as this suggests I have
quite a different view of that I think
that if we look and not just evolutions
mechanism but its legacy we see great
reason for hope we see the intricate
interrelatedness of life as a whole we
see that while our species has has
impacts the power of coevolution the
power of the division of labour leads to
hope for collaboration and a very
different relationship with life on
earth and I just want to explore that a
little bit with you and the Montreal
Protocol ratified in 1987 I think will
be celebrated one day as the
first global seller festival first
national or a truly global day of
celebration on our planet you can see
here where we were in terms of ozone
depletion so this is ozone here
relatively less ozone in 1974 a
depletion of ozone through to 94
continuing 2009 2020 still slightly and
of course these are projections of what
would have happened without Montreal
without the Montreal Protocol on this
side through to 2060 you are down to
very very low levels of ozone life can’t
exist on earth as we know it without
ozone because ultraviolet radiation
tears our DNA apart for every percentage
decrease or sorry every percentage
increase in ultraviolet radiation
there’s a percentage increase in a
failure for seeds to germinate in our
crops there’s a percentage increase in
blindness for any creature with eyes and
of course the problem is a a long-lived
one these chemicals that lead to ozone
depletion or banned under the Montreal
Protocol have a long lifetime in our
atmosphere so we needed to act well in
advance of of the worst manifestations
of the problem occurring thankfully we
did that and you see there over time
from 1980 to 2005 ozone concentrations
decreasing but then flattening out and
now just over the last couple of years
scientists have announced that they’re
confident that the ozone protection for
our planet is regrowing and by 2050 it
would be back at levels that it was
before we ever started releasing these
CFCs another great achievement for
Humanity acting as a whole every nation
had to agree to phase-out these
dangerous chemicals I think we are in a
critical phase at the moment where the
new social media such as the internet
mobile phones and so forth causing our
species to cohere as a single global
intelligence where ideas are shared
instantly and where the
interconnectedness between individual
vigil is at an unparalleled level of
ease what these social media are also
doing is empowering individuals so we’re
seeing for the first time outside well
well not the first time but we’re seeing
had an accelerated rate particularly in
places like North Africa and the Middle
East people throwing off dictatorships
aided and empowered by these new social
media and it’s I think it’s an amazing
phenomenon I was watching the news
looking at what was happening in Syria
just a few nights ago and there was
these people who looked terribly alien
at first there was men dressed in these
Arabic costume you know the the thobe
and the headdress and and women dressed
in the hijab and they were talking in
Arabic well I listened to the rhythm of
the channelize what they were saying is
the people United will never be defeated
and it made me think you know this there
is a common humanity here there’s a
common series of aspirations we all have
that as we become empowered come to the
surface and as we become interconnected
become ever more transparent where’s all
of that heading it’s anybody’s guess but
what I think we’re seeing now is the
emergence of a truly global
superorganism which is capable in
principle at least of acting as an
intelligence for our planet and if you
look at Wallace’s legacy and Wallace’s
insights into coevolution you can see
that that is the way things that’s the
way that the information that organizes
the matter that’s us has always worked
command and control systems have been
thrown up again and again in nature our
brains are a great example maybe earth
is throwing up a command and control
system for itself in the form of this
emergent global superorganism people
saying that that can never be because
humans are greedy and selfish well I’ve
got news brains are also greedy and
selfish brains weigh about 2% of our
body mass yet they take in 20% of the
energy they use 20% of the energy that
our bodies take in so they’re greedy
they’re also incredibly self
as any doctor would know brains will cut
off supplies to almost every other part
of the body before they deprive
themselves for a second they’re very
very selfish just like us
so we’re greedy and selfish and it’s
interesting that 20% of the energy of
the planet humans are currently used
using something in excess of 20% of the
total bio capacity of the planet perhaps
we shall come back into balance but just
because we’re greedy and selfish doesn’t
mean we can’t form Earth’s control and
command system the other important thing
to realize about us of course is that
any command and control system has to be
self-regulating what’s stopping the
brain from taking even more resources it
has to live within the constraints that
its body offers it and we our species is
becoming self-regulating because we see
between the UN population projections
sure we’ve reach 7 billion people this
month on the planet but the projections
are that within just 40 years we will be
at a population perhaps of 9 billion and
starting to plateau out so within a
hundred and fifty years the entire human
species will have gone through the
demographic transition
that’s incredible in the 4 billion year
history of the planet there has never
been a species that’s escaped the trap
that Thomas Malthus described so
eloquently where the population expands
exponentially the means defeated expands
only arithmetic Li
we are the first species ever to escape
that trap and in doing so we have become
self-regulating at least in terms of our
numbers and that gives me great hope for
the future of our species and our planet
just to summarize what is our earth like
and where by analogy should we place it
James Lovelock the originator of the
Gaia theory has a particular view on
this he says that Gaia the earth system
is like an old lady who has to share a
house with a growing and destructive
group of teenagers Gaia grows angry and
if they don’t mend their ways
she’ll evict them in other words the
Medea hypothesis
I think that Lovelock’s wrong about that
I think that if you look at the earth
more objectively you see that Gaia is
much more like a newborn baby
because newborns have new formed brains
just like our earth now which is going
through this process of forming a global
superorganism intimately interconnected
nervous systems just as our satellite
surveillance systems or arguably nervous
systems for the planet and the many
natural systems that exist as well to
integrate us and the rest of nature and
bodies the game system as a whole but
these are yet to be fully integrated
just as our earth is today we have the
newly emergent consciousness we have the
technology but we have they yet to be
fully integrated so self-control and
self-awareness remained rudimentary as
the human species I would argue is today
it’s also axiomatic that infancy is the
most dangerous period of life so we are
going through a dangerous transition I
just like to revisit that idea that
information organizers matter in the
context of the life of our planet the
life of Gaia formed 4.5 billion years
ago out of a ball of atmospheric dust
life originating around about 4 billion
years ago many scientists now think very
very early in the history of our planet
by just after 3 billion years ago life
has taken control of Earth’s systems so
the chemical equilibrium that
characterizes dead planets is banished
and dramatic chemical disequilibrium is
enforced by the life system itself by
the enormous energy budget 100 terawatts
that life commands today by 3 billion
years ago that budget was sufficient to
take control of the systems
100 million years ago the cockroaches
discover agriculture become the first
super organism ten thousand years ago
the first intelligent superorganism
forms our own species and perhaps today
very end of the line we can see the
birth of a new integrated gayer perhaps
taking place where humans at least have
the potential to act as a commanding a
trial system on the planet much as our
brain does for our bodies when might
guerre be said to have reproduced I
would argue that the moment we colonize
another heavenly body another planet we
can think of Gaia as having reproduced
Alfred Russel Wallace my great
scientific hero said at the very end of
his book man in the universe that
perhaps it was human destiny to fulfill
the human spirit in the vastness of the
universe it’s a thought that really
struck with me for two reasons one is
that if you look sorry if you look at
the time scales involved in planetary
travel even at the rate we can travel
through space today that only take us
five million years to colonize the whole
galaxy and that’s oh and from a
paleontological perspective that’s quick
it’s amazing I think but secondly as
well because it highlights just how very
much is that stake for this generation
this decade at this this is the moment
of decision it’s an enormous privilege I
think to be born and to be alive here
and now because we’re the generation
that will actually make the decisions
about this will decide whether we’re
into it too difficult to wean ourselves
off the fossil fuels and move to cleaner
energy and thereby precipitate a global
crisis that might destabilize food
systems and lead to the demise of this
global superorganism that has only now
taken shape the way I think about the
options before us are really framed by a
one of my other scientific heroes a man
called Enrico Fermi he was a an Italian
physicist and one day one evening he
looked up into the heavens and knew that
there were billions of stars there and
asked a very simple question why the
great silence why aren’t we hearing from
other intelligences out there in the
vast nursin
universe and there really are only two
satisfactory explanations to Fermi’s
paradox I think as that question has
become known one is that intelligent
super organisms that exist at the global
scale carry within themselves the seeds
of their own destruction
so that soon after birth they inevitably
die and therefore the great silence
persists in the universe the second
possibility however is that we genuinely
are the first now on the face of it that
might seem incredibly unlikely but if
you look at the time scale of the
universe so extend that back another 10
billion years you realize that it takes
three generations of stars to create the
heavy elements that make life even
possible so that’s taking up to here
before you can even think about having
life in the universe because you don’t
have carbon you don’t have any of the
other heavy elements that have to be
born in the hearts of stars over three
generations and then of course it takes
all of evolutionary time to create an
intelligent global superorganism so
maybe just maybe we are the first and
maybe Wallis’s right that we will go on
to perfect the human spirit in the
vastness of the universe thank you very
much
Oh
cockroaches discover agriculture become
the first super organism ten thousand
years ago the first intelligent
superorganism forms their own species do
intelligent super organisms that exist
at the global scale carry within
themselves the seeds of their own
destruction have we got a hope of
surviving
what I’m going to do this evening is
really talk to you about my latest book
the book came out of my attempt to
answer a question that I was asked very
frequently when I was talking about
climate change particularly after I’d
written the weather makers in 2005 and
that question was what are our chances
really of surviving this the shifting
climate that’s looming and that we we
are causing and the only way I could
think of to answer that question was to
really go back to the scientific
fundamentals to go back to the process
that created us and our planet and of
course look at the intersection between
our species and this thing that we call
planet Earth because it’s at that
intersection that the issue of
sustainability arises and I couldn’t
think a better way really of starting to
look at the issue than to go back to the
work of that man there the reason I
wanted to start with Darwin was because
he’s the man who really explained to us
how what would the process that made us
and the process that made our earth and
his idea his great idea was an extremely
simple one it was simply that in every
generation there is variation between
individuals and that some of those
individuals are more likely to survive
and reproduce than others and that over
the vastness of time that people were
just becoming aware of the history of
the earth in the mid 19th century that
that must tell on heritability on those
which are on the shape of species as a
whole as he put it so as a very very
simple idea but Darwin being a very wise
man I think a very perceptive person
decided to sit on that idea
for twenty years and it was only when I
went to Darwin’s house in Kent that I
really understood a little bit more
about why he waited so long before he
announced this fundamental idea that
that changed our view of the world just
outside his house he built a little
thing that he called the the sand walk
and that’s it there it’s actually a
pebble walk I don’t know why he called
it the sand walk but there you go
even great men can do odd things and
every day of his life at downe house he
would walk for several hours around that
sand walk and people have wondered why
he did it what was he thinking about
what was he doing as he walked around
that racetrack really it’s just a loop
around the forest there I think what
Darwin was doing as he wandered the sand
walk was metaphorically fingering his
worry beads he was thinking about the
implication of his theory for religious
belief in his country for the shape of
civil society and other deep matters I
guess
at base what he was worried about was
the deep he destroyed faith by showing
that we were not the unique creation of
a loving and caring God but instead
we’re the result of a an amoral and
utterly cruel process that by destroying
faith he might destroy hope and charity
as well and have a very adverse impact
upon his society he may never have
published his theory if it hadn’t been
for this man here in 1858 20 years after
Darwin first stumbled on the idea of how
we and every other living thing on the
planet was was made this man here Alfred
Russel Wallace was working in Indonesia
he was a man 20 years younger than
Darwin he was a working-class lad
self-made went to the tropics to collect
biological specimens and while he was
there on the island of Turin arte he had
a malarial attack
and as a result of that malarial
attackers he was highly fevered the idea
came to him that perhaps species were
created by exactly the same mechanism
that Darwin had chanced upon 20 years
earlier when he recovered enough from
his malaria to write he wrote a note to
Darwin in great excitement outlining his
theory and asked Darwin if he wouldn’t
mind transmitting it to one of the
journals to be published in bringing a
when Darwin received the letter he was
horrified he said you know Wallace
couldn’t have made a better precis or
summary of my work if he’d had my notes
in front of him and he thought perhaps
that his whole life’s work was about to
be stolen by this upstart this working
class later as it was he appealed to his
friends particularly those who looked
after journal publications and so forth
including Charles Lyell the great
geologist and as a result of their
intervention both pieces of work would
Co published in July 1858 both Darwin’s
and Wallace’s and it is extraordinary
how similar they are it was like a squib
going off in British society no one took
any notice in fact the man who was in
charge of publishing the Journal of a
professor Bell who was an expert on the
store guide Crustacea wrote in his
summary of the year 1858 that there’d be
no significant scientific discoveries
really published in a journal that year
nothing that would revolutionize the
department of science that they bear
upon of course he couldn’t have been
more wrong and that was showed the
following year in 1859 when Darwin
published his book on the origin of
species and then as Darwin perhaps
feared with the theory unleashed upon
his society everything began to change
within five years Herbert Spencer had
coined the term to survival of the
fittest and social Darwinism had been
born so I as I was beginning to look at
the process that created us read reread
Dawkins
selfish gene reread Darwin and began to
despair that perhaps we were selfish
short-sighted ruthless entities forged
by an amoral and utterly cruel process
but it was this man here that really
gave me hope that that may not
necessarily be the case Alfred Russel
Wallace lived a very long and full life
dying at the age of 90 at the age of 80
you he was still writing and in fact I
would argue his most important work was
published in 1904 in his eighth decade
and that’s the title page of it there
man’s place in the universe a study of
the results of scientific research in
relation to the unity or plurality of
worlds very very strange title indeed
but what this book really is is a
summary of Wallace’s understanding of
what the evolutionary mechanism had
created and being a holistic thinker his
field of endeavor was the entire planet
and this book is the foundation stone of
the science of astrobiology it compares
worlds quite literally and he posits the
theory that this planet is the only
living planet that the others wherever
they be in the universe are all dead
it’s also the forerunner of James
Lovelock’s work on Gaia theory he talks
in the book about the atmosphere the way
the atmosphere works the way that dust
which is often created by living things
is important in regulating Earth’s
climate system
it’s an extraordinary lucid what I say a
prescient work really that underpins
many aspects of current science
particularly holistic science like Earth
System science at Gaia theory and so
forth and what we learn from Wallace and
his work is that evolutions legacy is
not nasty brutish and short it’s not a
survival of the fittest world instead
this cruel animal
second ISM has led to a world of
extraordinary intricacy
interconnectedness and cooperation and I
just want to run through a few examples
of that cooperation this slide just
shows mitochondria there they’re small
organelles that exists in all of our
cells they’re the Power Packs for
ourselves it’s been realized in the last
30 years or so that these mitochondria
actually have nothing to do with us in
terms of their origin they originated as
free living bacteria a billion years ago
in an ancient ocean and they came to
cohabit the cells of our bodies much the
way algae cohabit with the coral polyps
on a coral reef but over a billion years
they have become so closely tied in with
ourselves and the symbiosis is so
intricate now that they can’t exist for
a millisecond without the cells that
they live within the cells of our body
and now our body our bodily cells cannot
survive without them and that’s just the
beginning really of the complexity of
the thing we call a human being you know
if I look at my skin I have hundreds of
species of bacteria virus and funky
living all over me and I do wash I
hasten to wait so don’t rush off it’s
it’s we’re all like that we are all we
are all ecosystems of near planetary
complexity you know if you took the
cells that are me and my mitochondria
away you would still have a shadow of my
entire body here because about ten
percent of my body mass ISM is made up
of other species all of the gut flora
and fauna in my intestines everything
covering my skin the special mites that
only survive in human eyebrows the other
species of mites that only survive at
the base of human eyelashes we are
ecosystems of planetary complexity and
what are we at the end of the day we are
ultimately just animated bits of Earth’s
crust for all of that complexity that’s
what the evolutionary process tells us
that’s what biochemistry tells us our
our chemical origin
the Earth’s crust dating back four
billion years when the spark of life
first sparked on our planet and of
course we’re the same today to draw a
line separation line between us and rest
of the planet is foolish in terms of
thinking so what is the big entity that
we are part of that we are part of the
crust of that’s it
there and the way I think about the
planet is simply information systems
organize matter so what is the
information system at work here it is
DNA which is a digital information
system which obviously it’s the
blueprint of our bodies and has created
our bodies but even more than that it
has created that entity that we see
today 4.5 billion years old nothing
going in but sunlight pretty much
nothing going out but heat and yet it’s
created this extraordinary entity I just
like to concentrate briefly on the three
organs of the planet because they tell a
tale of dramatic modification by life
itself by DNA the first is the crust
formed off two bits we’ve got the
oceanic crust here the continental crust
here in the very early stages of the
earth there was no continental crust
these rocks were made by the weathering
of these rocks and scientists have
recently come up with the rather
intriguing notion that the continents
will not exist without life and that’s
because we can calculate the energy
budget of the early Earth the primitive
earth we can work out rates of erosion
and are required to create the early
continents and the figures just don’t
add up there is an energy deficit so
where was the energy coming from to
create the erosion of oceanic rocks that
led to the continents being formed it
can only have come from one source it’s
been argued and that is life itself
life capturing energy from the Sun
creating acids and so forth these a very
primitive bacteria and
the primitive forms of life that helped
hasten the erosion of rocks and so
created the earth the ground beneath our
feet the ocean itself we know from
studies paleontological studies did not
resemble its current form two billion
years ago it was full of metals
dissolved metals heavy metals and so
forth and was very different was
inhospitable to life the atmosphere
didn’t resemble the modern atmosphere
James Lovelock argues that that very
thin layer about as thick as an onion
skin on an earth the size of an apple is
99% a creation of life that almost all
of the gases in the atmosphere with the
exception of the noble gases are made by
life itself for life’s own purpose so
there is a profound impact of life on
the system we can think of the earth
quite literally as a living planet but
what exactly is it and this is the
question at Lovelock and other earth
scientists are asking the name Gaia
comes from the ancient Greek and the
ancient Greeks believed that the earth
was one whole and perfect living being
like a human being they believed it was
a living creature I don’t think in fact
no scientists today believes that that
is a tenable hypothesis because the
earth just is not as tightly integrated
nor is it as well-regulated as a living
creature such as ourselves and yet it
clearly has some self-regulating
capacity I want to talk a little bit
about hierarchies of organization
between an individual like ourselves and
the planet or an ecosystem for that
matter and the most important of those
hierarchies is a thing called the super
organism here is a great example of a
super organism
these are termites you can see that they
differ quite a lot one to the other yet
they’re all the same species
a superorganism is a a level of
organization that is between that of our
bodies and something like an ecosystem
or the planet as a whole
and it is action is mediated through
these things these these creatures
through pheromones perhaps the best way
to start thinking about the origin of
the social insects like termites is to
think where they came from 100 million
years ago these things were cockroaches
I mean they’re just there they are just
very specialized and modified
cockroaches but it was when cockroaches
discovered agriculture that they became
super organisms we think together like
that they’re always they same always
have the upper hand over us the
cockroaches don’t think they’re they
were 100 million years before us our
building building farms and cities and
look at that it’s like a skyscraper with
its own air conditioning system with its
own water security system with its own
gardens roads it’s a very complex entity
and the similarities between that
structure in our cities is striking
despite the fact that there are many
differences as well the other thing that
you see if you look at these super
organisms is that they tend to share a
particular point of view a philosophy if
you want a set of ideals and that is
another very important piece of glue I
think that holds our civilizations
together what happens when these super
organisms meet very very interesting
sure there’s a lot of disaster there is
warfare and so forth but there is also
an immense exchange because the bigger
the group is the greater the division of
labor the greater the benefits the
greater the opportunities of trade the
more amenity that is created
I know I’ve wandered a long way from my
initial question have we got a hope of
surviving climate change I want to
return to that with just that background
of our species and the planet there are
two ways really of thinking about about
this
and one comes from an understanding of
the evolutionary mechanism as elucidated
by Darwin and Dawkins which if fused
with a sense of our current impact on
the environment can lead one to despair
and that particular theory has been
really articulated most fully by Peter
Ward a paleontologist here his book the
Medea hypothesis he puts it up in
opposition to James Lovelock sky a
hypothesis the name comes from the
ancient Greek as well Medea the woman
who are slighted by her husband
slaughtered her own children and ward
uses that that name because he believes
that life is inherently destructive to
life that in a Malthusian world where
populations just continue to increase
and this capacity to feed them increases
arithmetic Li while the population
increases exponentially species are
destined to crash it’s a very dismal
view of the world it really is a
survival of the fittest view of the
world and in wards eyes humans and I
think special we are simply the
continuation of the great destructive
capacity of the planet and that within a
few generations we will lead to the
sixth great extinction and life will go
on without us as this suggests I have
quite a different view of that I think
that if we look and not just evolutions
mechanism but its legacy we see great
reason for hope we see the intricate
interrelatedness of life as a whole we
see that while our species has has
impacts the power of coevolution the
power of the division of labour leads to
hope for collaboration and a very
different relationship with life on
earth and I just want to explore that a
little bit with you and the Montreal
Protocol ratified in 1987 I think will
be celebrated one day as the
first global seller festival first
national or a truly global day of
celebration on our planet you can see
here where we were in terms of ozone
depletion so this is ozone here
relatively less ozone in 1974 a
depletion of ozone through to 94
continuing 2009 2020 still slightly and
of course these are projections of what
would have happened without Montreal
without the Montreal Protocol on this
side through to 2060 you are down to
very very low levels of ozone life can’t
exist on earth as we know it without
ozone because ultraviolet radiation
tears our DNA apart for every percentage
decrease or sorry every percentage
increase in ultraviolet radiation
there’s a percentage increase in a
failure for seeds to germinate in our
crops there’s a percentage increase in
blindness for any creature with eyes and
of course the problem is a a long-lived
one these chemicals that lead to ozone
depletion or banned under the Montreal
Protocol have a long lifetime in our
atmosphere so we needed to act well in
advance of of the worst manifestations
of the problem occurring thankfully we
did that and you see there over time
from 1980 to 2005 ozone concentrations
decreasing but then flattening out and
now just over the last couple of years
scientists have announced that they’re
confident that the ozone protection for
our planet is regrowing and by 2050 it
would be back at levels that it was
before we ever started releasing these
CFCs another great achievement for
Humanity acting as a whole every nation
had to agree to phase-out these
dangerous chemicals I think we are in a
critical phase at the moment where the
new social media such as the internet
mobile phones and so forth causing our
species to cohere as a single global
intelligence where ideas are shared
instantly and where the
interconnectedness between individual
vigil is at an unparalleled level of
ease what these social media are also
doing is empowering individuals so we’re
seeing for the first time outside well
well not the first time but we’re seeing
had an accelerated rate particularly in
places like North Africa and the Middle
East people throwing off dictatorships
aided and empowered by these new social
media and it’s I think it’s an amazing
phenomenon I was watching the news
looking at what was happening in Syria
just a few nights ago and there was
these people who looked terribly alien
at first there was men dressed in these
Arabic costume you know the the thobe
and the headdress and and women dressed
in the hijab and they were talking in
Arabic well I listened to the rhythm of
the channelize what they were saying is
the people United will never be defeated
and it made me think you know this there
is a common humanity here there’s a
common series of aspirations we all have
that as we become empowered come to the
surface and as we become interconnected
become ever more transparent where’s all
of that heading it’s anybody’s guess but
what I think we’re seeing now is the
emergence of a truly global
superorganism which is capable in
principle at least of acting as an
intelligence for our planet and if you
look at Wallace’s legacy and Wallace’s
insights into coevolution you can see
that that is the way things that’s the
way that the information that organizes
the matter that’s us has always worked
command and control systems have been
thrown up again and again in nature our
brains are a great example maybe earth
is throwing up a command and control
system for itself in the form of this
emergent global superorganism people
saying that that can never be because
humans are greedy and selfish well I’ve
got news brains are also greedy and
selfish brains weigh about 2% of our
body mass yet they take in 20% of the
energy they use 20% of the energy that
our bodies take in so they’re greedy
they’re also incredibly self
as any doctor would know brains will cut
off supplies to almost every other part
of the body before they deprive
themselves for a second they’re very
very selfish just like us
so we’re greedy and selfish and it’s
interesting that 20% of the energy of
the planet humans are currently used
using something in excess of 20% of the
total bio capacity of the planet perhaps
we shall come back into balance but just
because we’re greedy and selfish doesn’t
mean we can’t form Earth’s control and
command system the other important thing
to realize about us of course is that
any command and control system has to be
self-regulating what’s stopping the
brain from taking even more resources it
has to live within the constraints that
its body offers it and we our species is
becoming self-regulating because we see
between the UN population projections
sure we’ve reach 7 billion people this
month on the planet but the projections
are that within just 40 years we will be
at a population perhaps of 9 billion and
starting to plateau out so within a
hundred and fifty years the entire human
species will have gone through the
demographic transition
that’s incredible in the 4 billion year
history of the planet there has never
been a species that’s escaped the trap
that Thomas Malthus described so
eloquently where the population expands
exponentially the means defeated expands
only arithmetic Li
we are the first species ever to escape
that trap and in doing so we have become
self-regulating at least in terms of our
numbers and that gives me great hope for
the future of our species and our planet
just to summarize what is our earth like
and where by analogy should we place it
James Lovelock the originator of the
Gaia theory has a particular view on
this he says that Gaia the earth system
is like an old lady who has to share a
house with a growing and destructive
group of teenagers Gaia grows angry and
if they don’t mend their ways
she’ll evict them in other words the
Medea hypothesis
I think that Lovelock’s wrong about that
I think that if you look at the earth
more objectively you see that Gaia is
much more like a newborn baby
because newborns have new formed brains
just like our earth now which is going
through this process of forming a global
superorganism intimately interconnected
nervous systems just as our satellite
surveillance systems or arguably nervous
systems for the planet and the many
natural systems that exist as well to
integrate us and the rest of nature and
bodies the game system as a whole but
these are yet to be fully integrated
just as our earth is today we have the
newly emergent consciousness we have the
technology but we have they yet to be
fully integrated so self-control and
self-awareness remained rudimentary as
the human species I would argue is today
it’s also axiomatic that infancy is the
most dangerous period of life so we are
going through a dangerous transition I
just like to revisit that idea that
information organizers matter in the
context of the life of our planet the
life of Gaia formed 4.5 billion years
ago out of a ball of atmospheric dust
life originating around about 4 billion
years ago many scientists now think very
very early in the history of our planet
by just after 3 billion years ago life
has taken control of Earth’s systems so
the chemical equilibrium that
characterizes dead planets is banished
and dramatic chemical disequilibrium is
enforced by the life system itself by
the enormous energy budget 100 terawatts
that life commands today by 3 billion
years ago that budget was sufficient to
take control of the systems
100 million years ago the cockroaches
discover agriculture become the first
super organism ten thousand years ago
the first intelligent superorganism
forms our own species and perhaps today
very end of the line we can see the
birth of a new integrated gayer perhaps
taking place where humans at least have
the potential to act as a commanding a
trial system on the planet much as our
brain does for our bodies when might
guerre be said to have reproduced I
would argue that the moment we colonize
another heavenly body another planet we
can think of Gaia as having reproduced
Alfred Russel Wallace my great
scientific hero said at the very end of
his book man in the universe that
perhaps it was human destiny to fulfill
the human spirit in the vastness of the
universe it’s a thought that really
struck with me for two reasons one is
that if you look sorry if you look at
the time scales involved in planetary
travel even at the rate we can travel
through space today that only take us
five million years to colonize the whole
galaxy and that’s oh and from a
paleontological perspective that’s quick
it’s amazing I think but secondly as
well because it highlights just how very
much is that stake for this generation
this decade at this this is the moment
of decision it’s an enormous privilege I
think to be born and to be alive here
and now because we’re the generation
that will actually make the decisions
about this will decide whether we’re
into it too difficult to wean ourselves
off the fossil fuels and move to cleaner
energy and thereby precipitate a global
crisis that might destabilize food
systems and lead to the demise of this
global superorganism that has only now
taken shape the way I think about the
options before us are really framed by a
one of my other scientific heroes a man
called Enrico Fermi he was a an Italian
physicist and one day one evening he
looked up into the heavens and knew that
there were billions of stars there and
asked a very simple question why the
great silence why aren’t we hearing from
other intelligences out there in the
vast nursin
universe and there really are only two
satisfactory explanations to Fermi’s
paradox I think as that question has
become known one is that intelligent
super organisms that exist at the global
scale carry within themselves the seeds
of their own destruction
so that soon after birth they inevitably
die and therefore the great silence
persists in the universe the second
possibility however is that we genuinely
are the first now on the face of it that
might seem incredibly unlikely but if
you look at the time scale of the
universe so extend that back another 10
billion years you realize that it takes
three generations of stars to create the
heavy elements that make life even
possible so that’s taking up to here
before you can even think about having
life in the universe because you don’t
have carbon you don’t have any of the
other heavy elements that have to be
born in the hearts of stars over three
generations and then of course it takes
all of evolutionary time to create an
intelligent global superorganism so
maybe just maybe we are the first and
maybe Wallis’s right that we will go on
to perfect the human spirit in the
vastness of the universe thank you very
much
Oh
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