Is Humanity the Earth’s Symbiotic Parasite or its Harmful Pathogen?
At one point in my career, I worked in a division of HP (now part of Agilent Technologies) that made gas chromatographs and other exotic chemical analysis equipment. Gas chromatographs have many uses such as analyzing compounds in the chemical processing industries and for testing air and water quality.
There was a man who would visit our division periodically by the name of James Lovelock. In exchange for providing him with equipment to measure atmospheric concentrations of gases, he would provide us with fascinating lectures on his findings and theories. James Lovelock is perhaps best known for his Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is a living organism, governed by the same feedback mechanisms that govern plants and animals. In our own solar system, the earth appears to be the only living planet, that is, one that supports species of plant and animal life. It’s possible other planets in the solar system may have lived at one time but now appear to be dead because they have temperatures and atmospheres that would not support life as we know it.
When I was a student at Penn State, I had the good fortune to take some computer simulation classes from a professor who had written several general purpose simulation languages. A simulation language can be used to predict a state of a dynamic system over time. For example, if you’re trying to determine optimal timing of traffic signals for series of intersections, you can describe the signal timing mathematically and traffic arrivals statistically. This will allow you to adjust the timing and algorithms to see the effects it has on the overall flow through the system and determine whether you may experience traffic congestion or grid lock. Generally speaking, computer simulations are used to describe the behavior of systems too complex to describe with a simple set of mathematical equations.
Not long after the first computer simulation languages appeared, people began using them to describe the behavior of ecosystems. For example, you could simulate the state of a pond that contained only plants and herbivores and how the populations of each species would change as dissolved gases and nutrients were introduced in the water as the seasons changed. Then you could see what happened to the population of the plants and herbivores if you introduced a change to it such as the introduction of carnivores. Sometimes a simulation model would predict the complete destruction of the ecosystem after such a change. If so, it could be that the model was correct, and if you performed the actual experiment and confirmed that it did in fact occur, then you know the model was accurate. But if you ran the actual experiment and the outcome was different than the simulation, then you could assume that the simulation model was flawed. Not content to work with small ecosystems, ambitious researchers began to attempt to simulate the earth’s entire ecosystem. The main problem they ran into was that they could never come up with a model that did not eventually show the complete annihilation of the planet. Even if they took their models and ran them during a period of history, the model would predict an outcome that we could tell from the historical record did not actually occur. This outcome suggests that there are feedback mechanisms at work in our planet that we don’t fully understand. In other words, it gives credence to the Gaia hypothesis.
For any dynamic system to achieve stability, one or more negative feedback mechanisms are required. A negative feedback mechanism is the name for using one or more output parameters of the system to control its state. For example, the thermostat in your house forms part of a negative feedback system since as the temperature rises above a setpoint, it shuts off the furnace, which causes the temperature to fall. At some threshold value, the falling temperature causes the furnace to come back on again. This is what’s meant by negative feedback, that is, a regulating mechanism ordering the opposite of what caused a condition to occur in order to achieve some stable set point. All living organisms have negative feedback mechanisms that are necessary to ensure the organism’s health and survival. For example, when a person is hungry, it causes him to eat. When a person has had enough and feels full, he eventually stops eating. Without this feedback mechanism, he'd either starve or eat himself to death. Similarly, your body temperature is controlled by a negative feedback loop to maintain it at a very constant temperature despite changes in the environment’s temperature.
In addition to negative feedback loops, there are also positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are usually considered bad, because they cause the system to become unstable and ‘run to the rail’ in engineering parlance, and that usually ends in some cataclysm. Wealth accumulation appears to be its own positive feedback mechanism, because the more you acquire, the easier it is to get more of it. Similarly, the less you have, the more likely you are to remain in that state. Taxes help to reverse this condition today in a slightly more civilized manner than periodic revolutions and the overthrowing of monarchs did in the Middle Ages. Therefore, taxation is a form of negative feedback to achieve some acceptable limits on wealth accumulation and poverty.
It appears that the Earth does have a number of interacting feedback loops that work to regulate the life on the planet and we are not completely sure how they all interact. A major concern today is that human behavior of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels that have been sequestered for millions of years could be straining these feedback mechanisms in a way that will eventually turn the earth into a place that can no longer sustain the human species. If we push the limits of these regulating mechanisms too far, some fear we may turn the earth into a dead planet, unsuitable for life of any kind and not even another billion years of evolution would cause humans or some similar intelligent species to reappear. This could happen if the negative feedback loops are no longer able to cope with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When a negative feedback mechanism fails, it usually causes a system to enter into a regime where a positive feedback loop arises and ‘runs to the rail’, so to speak. We don’t have a way to know if we’re in the process of doing this or if we may have already done it and just don’t know it yet due to time lags in the system.
While contemplating these feedback loops, I realized that the earth naturally sequesters its carbon in the form of oil and coal, and that this is not a sustainable long term behavior because all living species need to exchange carbon for survival. If the earth sequesters carbon for a long enough time, it will be likely to cause the planet to die and remain dead like the other planets in our solar system. I wondered if there were any mechanisms the earth used for returning sequestered carbon to the surface to insure it doesn’t all get buried eventually. Nature’s only other way get carbon buried in the earth back to the surface is volcanic activity. However, volcanoes don’t move very much carbon back to the atmosphere. In fact, the estimates are that they only release a small fraction of sequestered carbon in comparison to human activity. Humans are responsible for 200,000 times more carbon release to the atmosphere than volcanoes.
For the first time in history, a species has evolved on earth that can reverse this sequestration of carbon by digging it up and burning it. It made me wonder if humans have arrived on the scene to perform this necessary task. After all, we are the only force of nature capable unburying massive amounts of carbon. Are humans helping the earth replenish atmospheric carbon levels to insure the survival of life on earth? Is our seeming inability to conceive of a way to stop using fossil fuels all part of this plan? If this is the case, what would be the eventual outcome of the human species when the job is done? Perhaps we will find out. If we are on a course to make the planet inhospitable for mankind, it should take only a few decades to find out. The peak oil theory states that we’ve already extracted about half of the petroleum there is to find and have put it back into the atmosphere. Even if we were able to curtail the growth in fossil fuel consumption levels to get back down to 1990 consumption rates, we’ll still continue to put the rest of the accessible sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in just a century or two. This is a blink of an eye in geological time.
I realize how far-fetched this theory must sound. But it may not be that much of a stretch to those who find the Gaia hypothesis plausible in the first place. Examples of long term symbiotic relationships between parasites and hosts are numerous, even essential, in nature. But so are examples of hosts that eventually succumb to pathogens.
The human population explosion that has occurred in the last few centuries can be traced in part to our ability to understand and deal with pathogens that had historically limited human population growth. Another important factor has been the discovery of energy in the form of fossil fuels that allows us to inexpensively feed and sustain this growing population. This begs the question of whether the rise of humanity is a net asset to the viability of the planet and other species on it or if we are a new pathogen that has grown too clever and too quickly for the earth to survive us.
There was a man who would visit our division periodically by the name of James Lovelock. In exchange for providing him with equipment to measure atmospheric concentrations of gases, he would provide us with fascinating lectures on his findings and theories. James Lovelock is perhaps best known for his Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is a living organism, governed by the same feedback mechanisms that govern plants and animals. In our own solar system, the earth appears to be the only living planet, that is, one that supports species of plant and animal life. It’s possible other planets in the solar system may have lived at one time but now appear to be dead because they have temperatures and atmospheres that would not support life as we know it.
When I was a student at Penn State, I had the good fortune to take some computer simulation classes from a professor who had written several general purpose simulation languages. A simulation language can be used to predict a state of a dynamic system over time. For example, if you’re trying to determine optimal timing of traffic signals for series of intersections, you can describe the signal timing mathematically and traffic arrivals statistically. This will allow you to adjust the timing and algorithms to see the effects it has on the overall flow through the system and determine whether you may experience traffic congestion or grid lock. Generally speaking, computer simulations are used to describe the behavior of systems too complex to describe with a simple set of mathematical equations.
Not long after the first computer simulation languages appeared, people began using them to describe the behavior of ecosystems. For example, you could simulate the state of a pond that contained only plants and herbivores and how the populations of each species would change as dissolved gases and nutrients were introduced in the water as the seasons changed. Then you could see what happened to the population of the plants and herbivores if you introduced a change to it such as the introduction of carnivores. Sometimes a simulation model would predict the complete destruction of the ecosystem after such a change. If so, it could be that the model was correct, and if you performed the actual experiment and confirmed that it did in fact occur, then you know the model was accurate. But if you ran the actual experiment and the outcome was different than the simulation, then you could assume that the simulation model was flawed. Not content to work with small ecosystems, ambitious researchers began to attempt to simulate the earth’s entire ecosystem. The main problem they ran into was that they could never come up with a model that did not eventually show the complete annihilation of the planet. Even if they took their models and ran them during a period of history, the model would predict an outcome that we could tell from the historical record did not actually occur. This outcome suggests that there are feedback mechanisms at work in our planet that we don’t fully understand. In other words, it gives credence to the Gaia hypothesis.
For any dynamic system to achieve stability, one or more negative feedback mechanisms are required. A negative feedback mechanism is the name for using one or more output parameters of the system to control its state. For example, the thermostat in your house forms part of a negative feedback system since as the temperature rises above a setpoint, it shuts off the furnace, which causes the temperature to fall. At some threshold value, the falling temperature causes the furnace to come back on again. This is what’s meant by negative feedback, that is, a regulating mechanism ordering the opposite of what caused a condition to occur in order to achieve some stable set point. All living organisms have negative feedback mechanisms that are necessary to ensure the organism’s health and survival. For example, when a person is hungry, it causes him to eat. When a person has had enough and feels full, he eventually stops eating. Without this feedback mechanism, he'd either starve or eat himself to death. Similarly, your body temperature is controlled by a negative feedback loop to maintain it at a very constant temperature despite changes in the environment’s temperature.
In addition to negative feedback loops, there are also positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are usually considered bad, because they cause the system to become unstable and ‘run to the rail’ in engineering parlance, and that usually ends in some cataclysm. Wealth accumulation appears to be its own positive feedback mechanism, because the more you acquire, the easier it is to get more of it. Similarly, the less you have, the more likely you are to remain in that state. Taxes help to reverse this condition today in a slightly more civilized manner than periodic revolutions and the overthrowing of monarchs did in the Middle Ages. Therefore, taxation is a form of negative feedback to achieve some acceptable limits on wealth accumulation and poverty.
It appears that the Earth does have a number of interacting feedback loops that work to regulate the life on the planet and we are not completely sure how they all interact. A major concern today is that human behavior of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels that have been sequestered for millions of years could be straining these feedback mechanisms in a way that will eventually turn the earth into a place that can no longer sustain the human species. If we push the limits of these regulating mechanisms too far, some fear we may turn the earth into a dead planet, unsuitable for life of any kind and not even another billion years of evolution would cause humans or some similar intelligent species to reappear. This could happen if the negative feedback loops are no longer able to cope with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When a negative feedback mechanism fails, it usually causes a system to enter into a regime where a positive feedback loop arises and ‘runs to the rail’, so to speak. We don’t have a way to know if we’re in the process of doing this or if we may have already done it and just don’t know it yet due to time lags in the system.
While contemplating these feedback loops, I realized that the earth naturally sequesters its carbon in the form of oil and coal, and that this is not a sustainable long term behavior because all living species need to exchange carbon for survival. If the earth sequesters carbon for a long enough time, it will be likely to cause the planet to die and remain dead like the other planets in our solar system. I wondered if there were any mechanisms the earth used for returning sequestered carbon to the surface to insure it doesn’t all get buried eventually. Nature’s only other way get carbon buried in the earth back to the surface is volcanic activity. However, volcanoes don’t move very much carbon back to the atmosphere. In fact, the estimates are that they only release a small fraction of sequestered carbon in comparison to human activity. Humans are responsible for 200,000 times more carbon release to the atmosphere than volcanoes.
For the first time in history, a species has evolved on earth that can reverse this sequestration of carbon by digging it up and burning it. It made me wonder if humans have arrived on the scene to perform this necessary task. After all, we are the only force of nature capable unburying massive amounts of carbon. Are humans helping the earth replenish atmospheric carbon levels to insure the survival of life on earth? Is our seeming inability to conceive of a way to stop using fossil fuels all part of this plan? If this is the case, what would be the eventual outcome of the human species when the job is done? Perhaps we will find out. If we are on a course to make the planet inhospitable for mankind, it should take only a few decades to find out. The peak oil theory states that we’ve already extracted about half of the petroleum there is to find and have put it back into the atmosphere. Even if we were able to curtail the growth in fossil fuel consumption levels to get back down to 1990 consumption rates, we’ll still continue to put the rest of the accessible sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in just a century or two. This is a blink of an eye in geological time.
I realize how far-fetched this theory must sound. But it may not be that much of a stretch to those who find the Gaia hypothesis plausible in the first place. Examples of long term symbiotic relationships between parasites and hosts are numerous, even essential, in nature. But so are examples of hosts that eventually succumb to pathogens.
The human population explosion that has occurred in the last few centuries can be traced in part to our ability to understand and deal with pathogens that had historically limited human population growth. Another important factor has been the discovery of energy in the form of fossil fuels that allows us to inexpensively feed and sustain this growing population. This begs the question of whether the rise of humanity is a net asset to the viability of the planet and other species on it or if we are a new pathogen that has grown too clever and too quickly for the earth to survive us.
What is Biodiesel?
Perhaps you've seen it. Perhaps you haven't. A local gas station opens a new pump offering E85 a new, environmentally friendly and renewable fuel source! Naturally, you think of filling up at that pump instead of the usual grades of gas. Word of warning: DON'T DO IT! Unless you're one of the few people driving the right car, called a flex-fuel vehicle, that is.In addition to E85, which is a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, another biofuel is becoming available at some filling stations. It is called 'biodiesel'. Although both E85 and biodiesel are made from biomass, there...Headlines:
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