Comments on: When Gaia Goes Wrong

By: Anton Sherwood

Anton Sherwood — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:27:02 +0000

Craig: huh? Our word media is the plural of medium which is (or ought to be) cognate to middle; it is that which lies between the speaker and the hearer.

By: Teri

Teri — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:42:07 +0000

I absolutely agree with Craig. Sort of a Yin/Yang version of Gaia. The dark and the light must coexist in order to be known.

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:23:26 +0000

It’s nice Idea, but I wish it had been given a different name. The “evil” Medea is just one of many versions of that myth. It’s one of the older greek stories/fables and was old by the time of the trojan war. The name Medea means “to ponder” or “cunning”. It is the root word for our word, media. It’s also a beautiful sounding name.
Sadly, thanks to Euripedes (sp?) Medea has been regulated to the status of child-killer. Other versions of the myth have Medea leaving Greece and starting kingdoms in Persia.
In any case, is this idea really in opposition to the Gaia theory? Seems to me you can’t have a system that regulates something unless there is a reason to regulate it… This sounds more like the other half of the Gaia theory.

By: Denis Drew

Denis Drew — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:39:34 +0000

There have been 10 mass extinctions over the last 260 million years — as far back as the fossil record goes (the day of the trilobite) — likely attributable to some kind of cyclical comet of asteroid hits. That could make for well over 100 such since life evolved. The dinosaur extinction made way for our furry ancestors to evolve into us.

Intelligent life might take more than the 10 billion year life span of our sun to evolve by random drift mutation alone. Cyclical wipe outs from the heavens (or whatever) could have speeded up evolution on this planet enough to make a rare exception to that evolution rule: one possible answer to Fermi’s question “Where are they?”
******
One look at a $500 LCD screen and Fermi would have answered his own question. Project 100 more years communications progress and there will be absolutely no need to hurl you body across the emptiness. Un-sentient creatured probes may arrive however.

By: Nix

Nix — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:24:04 +0000

As I understand it the organisms didn’t need *warmth* per se.

Most of these events happened after a supercontinent had just split up: there was lots of new continental shelf, which is one of the most productive of environments. There were many more photosynthetic organisms there than there otherwise would be, and, of course, being plants, they wanted CO2. So they sucked so much of it out of the air that we had an anti-greenhouse effect and everything froze over. (Remember, the Sun was cooler then, too.)

(Personally I find the ’sulphidic floor’ a more impressive thing. Oceans filled with poison gas for billions of years! Daring raids by Our Boys with Nuclei to drive the evil Prokaryotes out! High-jinks and reduction chemistry!)