GAIA

Our reading offers us that, "The ability to recover from mass extinctions is strong evidence for Gaia." This idea still strikes me like a blow to the face. That the extinction of all life is said to be confirmation of how supportive of life our planet is seems, well, outlandish. This feels, to me, like a failure to imagine what such a thing (biophilia?) might actually look like than the earthly instantiation of it. Is this not something like saying antibacterial soap or rubbing alcohol ("kills 99.99% of bacteria and viruses") promotes microbial life or that condoms ("99.9% effective") spread disease and induce pregnancy?

I could see this argument making sense if some (or even just one) of those extinct species (maybe 10 billion) ever returned. Sure. Maybe then. But they do not. That’s what “extinct” means. Very different organisms eventually returning, only after some tens or hundreds of millions of years, seems to me very much NOT supportive of life (even one species never mind any branch of the Tree of Life.)

And then there are those periods when no global mass extinction events are taking place, in which huge swathes of the globe (all of Canada, for example) are merely buried under a block of ice as thick as the ocean is deep. Is that also supportive of life? I don’t see how.

Then when the ice recedes – during inter-glacial periods, every 50-100 thousand years or so – and all of the species that adapted to life in the cold then go extinct (those mammoths and mastodons, woolly rhinos and camels, scimitar cats, giant beavers, cave bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas, etc…) Is that also a period of life support?

That Gaia attempts suicide incessantly and with occasional outside help – but has so far failed, though only by freakish luck – does not compel me to think of her as anything but a grim and cadaverous system (and, thus, living humans the first real, though exquisitely faint, opportunity for any life at all to escape her cold death-grip.)