Yay for written thought...

The Gaia hypothesis is fascinating. Well, when you're revising it, it's not so fascinating, because everyone always uses ridiculously scientific terms. I might not have even got the right name =P What I'm talking about is the concept that everything involving the earth is inter-linking. That the whole planet is a system which restores balance and corrects mistakes.

Think about it - Things die, right? When they die, they only decompose because of the existence of other organisms - detrivours/decomposers, which break down the dead organic material to sustain their own lives. Some of that organic matter ends up back in soil - and provides important nutrients for plants - which in turn, provide nutrients for animals. Which in turn, are hunted and eaten - providing yet more nutrients.

A few obvious examples:

• The Greenhouse Effect. It's great, in fact without it, we wouldn't exist at all, and the earth would be roughly thirty degrees colder. The gases keep some of the radiation trapped at just the right temperature for life to flourish - and if things start to change (i.e. climate change) the earth has feedback mechanisms in place to stop it - or accelerate it. There are both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. The positive ones are the ones human's should worry about.
• If the earth warms up a few degrees - it could get warm enough for permafrost to melt in siberia. Whoosh, ridiculous amounts of methane escape into the troposphere. Methane being a gas roughly twenty times stronger a greenhouse gas then Co2, this is bad. The earth further warms up.
• Also, seas expand. The warmer it is, the more the sea will expand, and the more volume it has. It's also worth noting that the sea releases greenhouse gases when heated as well which would again, accelerate the enhanced greenhouse effect.
• Then, there are the negative mechanisms: That a warmer climate would mean increased evaporation from oceans - which would mean more clouds - increasing the earths albedo as more light reflects off lighter surfaces. This may have a cooling effect.
• But if you think about it hard, you could perhaps consider that the postive mechanisms are maybe yet another defensive mechanism that the earth has.

As a race, human beings are a threat to the planet. There are so many of us, doing such stupid things we are actually tipping the very careful balance that the earth has, so we threaten life itself. We're just not natural, we don't seem to fit in on the earth. If it gets so warm that some of us die out, we'll stop causing surplus greenhouse gases to drift off, and perhaps it would return to normal. Perhaps a heck of a lot of the human population would disappear, and the earth would be safe again for awhile.

Same with the Ozone layer - the fact something is sitting in the stratospere filtering out UV rays. Again, if we tamper with that with our chemicals we'll probably get ZAPPED (really technical word there) and partly/entirely die out, so that the earth can rebuild itself again. There's so many other things as well.

So another reason why it amazes me, there are so many levels to it. Not only the intricacies of the entire planet, the reliance everything has on everything else. It's beautiful.

I don't want to spoil it :( I believe in God, I mean, how else could there have been such an extreme, extreme coincidence to make something so huge, so interconnected and clever that we'll never fully understand it? And I guess unless we try and undo are mistakes REALLY quickly the earth will try and erase us, which is kind of sad. But I might be completely wrong, after all, what do I know xD?