More than planetary-scale feedback self-regulation: A Biological-centred approach to the Gaia Hypothesis

Abstract

Recent appraisals of the Gaia theory tend to focus on the claim that planetary life is a cybernetic regulator that would self-regulate Earth’s chemistry composition and climate dynamics, following either a weak (biotic and physical processes create feedback loops), or a strong (biological activity control and regulates the physical processes) interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis. Here, we contrast with the regulator interpretation and return to the initial motivation of the Gaia hypothesis: extending Schrödinger’s question about the nature of life at the planetary scale. To this end, we propose a relational and systemic biological approach using autopoiesis as the realization of the living and the (M,R)-system as the formal theory of biological systems. By applying a minimum of key categories to a set of interacting causal processes operating on a wide range of spatial time scales through the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere of the Earth system, we suggest a one-to-one realization map between the Gaia phenomenon and (M,R)-Autopoiesis. We show that metabolic molecular self-production by closure to efficient causation on a planetary scale is plausible. This suggests that the Gaia phenomenon may be the embodiment of Life itself in the planetary domain, a sui-generis biological unity and thus more fundamental than self-regulation by feedback mechanisms. Formulating the Gaia theory in biological terms provides a formal basis for the claim that planetary biology elsewhere in the universe must involve and have a formal equivalence to a self-referential physical process which cannot be implemented by a Turing machine and, therefore, has a non-computable character.

GAIA 5.0 – A five-dimensional geometry for the 3D visualization of Earth' climate complexity

“…[...] Hence, self-production by closure to efficient causation is more fundamental than self-regulation by feedback mechanisms." (Rubin & Crucifix, 2019) This opposes the viewpoint of a necessity of a "Gaia 2.0" as claimed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour and the British earth system scientist Timothy Lenton, who claim, "Gaia has operated without foresight or planning on the part of organisms, but the evolution of humans and their technology are changing that" (Lenton and Latour, 2018).…”

“…The higher-dimensional geometry for the Earth is presenting an unifying view and thus contributing to current problems of representation in meteorology where scientists are calling for accurate maps of large regions of the sphere. The space model in GAIA 5.0 proposes 3-dimensional sub-spaces for the depiction of Gaia in contrast to current planar geoscience models which let them "keep shifting the tangent planes" as Rubin & Crucifix (2019) suggested it. For the first time Gaia is depicted as a hypersphere ( fig.…”

Earth’s Complexity Is Non-Computable: The Limits of Scaling Laws, Nonlinearity and Chaos

“…Numerous authors agree that autopoiesis is a plausible scenario for the instantiation of life organization on a planetary scale [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. Recent work showed that this is plausible in a formal syntactic framework, using a proof-of-concept based on the chemical organization theory and the zero deficiency theorem applied on a simple but representative Earth molecular reaction network [ 18 ].…”

Climate as a complex, self-regulating system

“…This is fitting for a mechanism that collects and distributes heat energy. of Gaia tend to make life the active participant that acts on climate but have largely limited that to cybernetic control (Rubin and Crucifix, 2019). The strong biological version of Gaia is guided internally by a regenerative network that leads to autopoiesis -self regeneration.…”