Novacene

Listening to a recent podcast on the topic of Posthumanism, I was made aware of the documentary Symbiotic Earth. This film describes the life and work of scientific rebel, Lynn Margulis, whose life was committed to revolutionary work on evolutionary biology. One of many fascinating scholars featured in the film was James Lovelock. Lovelock described how he refined and developed his Gaia hypothesis while working with Margulis. I marvelled at Lovelock being ninety years old at the time of the documentary being made. Looking up the series of books he wrote on his Gaia hypothesis, I marvelled even more when I discovered the most recent instalment, Novacene, was published in 2019, the year he turned one hundred years old. I have just completed reading Novacene and wanted to capture and consider some of the book’s key points. Validating some references, it was saddening to learn that Lovelock passed away last year on the day of his one hundred and third birthday. I have bookmarked an obituary to read later.

Lovelock argues that we are coming to the end of an era known as the Anthropocene and are now preparing to enter the Novacene, a term he has coined to describe the ‘coming age of Hyperintelligence’. That intelligence will take the form of cyborgs who will continue to evolve through Darwinian selection to extend human knowledge of the cosmos into a new era. This process has already started but will accelerate at the point of ‘singularity’ when computers self-generate their own code. For this to happen requires technological advancement to happen on a planet that can continue to sustain organic life. Climate change, Lovelock states, is as much of a threat to electronic life as it is to humans. The dynamic self-regulating ecosystem of Earth that Lovelock famously articulated as Gaia is currently imperilled. While Lovelock’s timelines for this technological achievement may be accurate, it remains to be seen to what extent self-writing code has any form of ‘awareness’ as part of an electronic ‘consciousness’. It will certainly be a busy time for theorists, philosophers and ethicists.

Lovelock believes we are alone in the cosmos and that it is highly unlikely there is any other intelligent life on the quadrillions of planets that satellite other stars. Human life on Earth, Lovelock believes, is the first to achieve knowledge of itself and the cosmos. Novacene starts with a description of Earth as ‘a very old planet’ that sustains life because the planet is kept cool by the planet’s ecosystem. The absence of a similar system on Mars is why Lovelock believes the idea of humans living on the red planet is ‘crazy’. An instrument he invented and built for NASA to proved this hypothesis still rests on the planet’s surface. Lovelock believes that any life form more advanced than our own is likely to be electronic. Lovelock’s articulation of our planet’s age was fascinating and his argument against life existing elsewhere in the cosmos felt entirely plausible.

In his theory of Gaia, Lovelock argued that Earth is a dynamic self-regulating system that is not well explained by conventional science (that traces back to Aristotle) of ’cause and effect’. Like reality, Lovelock explains, Gaia is non-linear and multi-dimensional. This led to many arguments with evolutionary biologists over the years but Lovelock’s ideas became ever more widely accepted and, as Lovelock delightedly points out, have been further developed by Bruno Latour. Regardless of the future for any electronic intelligence, it will be interesting to see how Margulis’ and Lovelock’s work is developed.

Before the development of speech and writing, all animals thought intuitively. Lovelock argues that civilisation took a bad turn when it denigrated intuition in favour of scientific rationality that assumes all problems can be solved through the application of ’cause and effect logic’. Lovelock reminds readers that cause and effect logic led astronomers to declare the existence of the planet Vulcan to explain the unusual orbit of Mercury (later explained by Einstein’s relativity theory) rather than accept their Newtonian logic was wrong. Lovelock was drawn to the work of Barrow & Tipler and their proposal of the ‘The Anthropic Cosmological Principle’. There is a controversial theistic reading of this but Lovelock was fascinated by the idea that the essence of the cosmos is “information” and was ‘designed’ (controversial theistic reading) to support knowing itself. In short, whether accidental or somehow purposeful, the cosmos supports, and will continue to support, knowledge. Lovelock’s core argument is that Darwinian evolution of homo sapiens has supported that principle with the knowledge now set to be inherited and evolved through intelligent electronic life. Is it possible that at the age of almost one hundred, Lovelock has seeded a hypothesis almost as controversial as Gaia? Many of us alive today may live long enough to see whether he is correct.

If Lovelock is correct then the purpose of the cosmos is to support and sustain intelligent life. Humans will pass their knowing to the next generation of ‘cyborgs’ who will be self-sufficient but made of engineered materials. These cyborgs will be subject to the same Darwinian evolutionary process as organic life. I thought of the ‘evolution’ of mobile phones and how selection favoured the touchscreen smartphone. We even call the first generation of those phones ‘dinosaurs’. This new species will be selected naturally for intelligence; a process that Lovelock argues will mark the end of the Anthropocene and the beginning of the Novacene. These inorganic beings will need to work with humans to keep the Earth cool. This need for mutual cooperation is a reason that Lovelock does not fear a traditional sci-fi apocalyptic battle between Man and Machine.

Lovelock takes a step back in the next section of the book to consider the outcomes and impact of human scientific progress. Thomas Newcomen’s early 18th century invention of the steam pump to remove water from flooded mines allowed humanity to leverage millions of years of concentrated solar energy locked up in coal. This development led to the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent transforming of the Earth’s surface by humans. The period of time from that transformation until the present day, for Lovelock, constitutes the Anthropocene. As an example of how progress accelerates, Lovelock compares the fifty million years of evolution required for a seagull to evolve from a lizard to the one hundred years required for a commercial airliner to evolve from a bi-plane.

Lovelock fears that our continued use of fossil fuels is an act of auto-genocide. Nuclear war, Lovelock argues, resulted in humans being afraid of nuclear energy which could have prevented the ongoing heating of the planet. A cool Earth supports more life and to support Gaia in achieving this humans should have switched to nuclear fission and eventually to nuclear fusion. Lovelock explains that Earth is an older, more fragile, planet compared to the period when dinosaurs became extinct following a meteor strike. Lovelock does not believe that the Earth could recover from a similar type of shock today and that if life were wiped out then a hot planet could not support the restoration of life. This is because Earth is already in a warmer interglacial period and the use of fossil fuels threatens to overheat the planet, overwhelming Gaia’s ability to maintain a cool atmosphere.

Lovelock is at pains to point out that the developments of the Anthropocene are not entirely negative and that conditions have improved since the time he was born when electricity was something only the rich could afford. Lovelock’s view may hold true for those in the global North but the benefits of progress have been far from evenly distributed. Lovelock criticises the Greens for wanting to ban CFCs before there was an alternative which would have resulted in there being no fridges and he extends that argument to today’s climate activists (while fundamentally agreeing with the problem). Lovelock does not outline a method other than switching to nuclear for combatting warming and appears to have more faith in the cyborgs to understand and remedy the problem. With the singularity he describes still several decades away, the question is whether Earth and humanity can withstand the impact until that time.

The book concludes with Lovelock outlining his theory on the progression of the Novacene. Describing the accomplishments of AlphaGo, which was four hundred times faster at thinking than humans, Lovelock argues that machines will eventually be ten thousand times faster at thinking. This is the same differential as humans who are ten thousand times faster at thinking than plants. Lovelock supposes that cyborgs may consider humans as slow moving as they consider plants. Self-making machines will progress with natural selection replaced by ‘intentional selection’. Cyborgs could not have evolved by chance or evolution without humans as an evolutionary stage. Once again, Lovelock’s logic makes some assumptions about the ‘awareness’ of these future machines and the extent to which humans allow or intervene during this period of autopoiesis (self-making). Lovelock discusses Information Theory now being at the centre of mathematics and computer science, furthering his argument that information may be the basis of the cosmos. Lovelock’s big hypothesis here is that ‘the bit’ might be the fundamental particle from which the universe is formed.

In Lovelock’s imagined future, for a period of time humans and cyborgs will work together to maintain the life required for Earth to support both organic and inorganic species. At temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, neither would survive. Longer term, although cyborgs would still face challenges of physics when travelling beyond our galaxy, a planet like Mars might be more hospitable to electronic life. Cyborgs might geo-engineer or ‘terraform’ Earth to better suit electronic life. Lovelock considers that the current development of AI for war and the manufacturing of autonomous weapons is an immediate threat to the survival of all species.

Lovelock signs off by returning to his original hypothesis:

• We are alone in the cosmos
• The cosmos is designed to attain consciousness It is both exciting and alarming to consider that the next fifty years of our lives will provide a window through which we may come to understand whether Lovelock’s warning and predictions materialise. I hope that somewhere other scientists and thinkers, such as Bruno Latour, will continue to develop his thinking and sizeable legacy.