Thanatia and the Crepuscular Earth Model - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 295

spheric CO 2 levels using anything ranging from relatively simple energy balances
to 3-D General Circulation Models (GCM). All are quantitative and most attempt
to predict local and global climate changes in the not so distant future. Very few
extend beyond a century with uncertainties increasing as time advances, especially
when multiple interactions are considered.
In contrast, biologists and palaeontologists look to the Earth's past for signs and
behavioural patterns with which a future scenario can be extrapolated, taking into
account man-planet interactions. They propose timeless but intended-to-be-certain
predictions about life on Earth or alternatively the future of mankind.
Arguably, one of the most widely recognised representations of the Earth is the
Gaia hypothesis as postulated by James Lovelock (Lovelock, 1972; Lovelock and
Margulis, 1974; Lovelock, 1979). Gaia, a self-regulating Mother Earth, is a single co-
evolutive organism, which contributes to the maintenance of those conditions needed
to sustain life on the planet, i.e. it is homeostatic 4 . It is an ecological hypothesis
in which the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth are integrated
into a complex and interacting system, which is decreasing in buffering capacity
(Lovelock, 2006). This capacity diminishes further every time mankind contributes
to the loss of rainforests and biodiversity, burns fuels increasing greenhouse gases
and in doing so contributes to the thermal expansion of the oceans.
In contrast to Gaia, the paleontologist Peter Ward proposes the Medea theory
(Ward, 2009), named after the raged and disgusted wife of Jason that kills her
own children. Accordingly, life on Earth instead of evolving symbiotically with its
environment is resources predatory and ultimately suicidal: “The inherent property
to evolve is also the source of the inherent suicidalness of life”.
Thus as Ward (2009) states life itself is the main threat to its own continuation.
This is based on past evidence of mass extinctions, whereby life systematically
destroyed all available resources until there was nothing left to predate. In contrast
to Gaia, there are no negative feedbacks but instead “biocidal” tendencies which
consume all the available resources. There is no “good mother” who nurtures life
nor the optimism intrinsic to the Gaian perspective that the Earth will eventually
recover from Man's destructiveness, since in Medea there is nothing but avid and
absolute devastation 5 .
Both the Medea theory and Gaia hypothesis share the common thread that they
predict an impending catastrophe (Lovelock, 2007, 2009), something which in turn
partially connects them to the Second Law. Gaia, particularly, has been the subject
of various thermodynamic studies (Swenson, 1988; Schwartzman, 2005; Volk, 1997;
Kleidon, 2004). Kleidon (2004) for instance, shows that “:::homeostatic behaviour
can emerge from a state of Maximum Entropy Production MEP associated with the
4 Homeostasis refers to an ability to self-regulate so as to maintain a stable, relatively constant
condition.
5 Rees (2003) also warns as to how humanity is running the risk of its own demise, exploring the
scenarios that science, technology, weapons, population, climate among others contribute to in
humanity's final hour.