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GAIA HYPOTHESIS:

The idea of the planet as a single ‘super-organism’ might come across to many as speculation without any real scientific basis and as such the work of James Lovelock on Gaia theory is heavily debated by scientists. (12) However it seems that a consideration of the planet, inclusive of all earth sciences, would be extremely valuable in view of recent global changes. The first public articulation referring to the planet as a living entity was by a scientist, James Hutton, who stated in 1785 that the earth is a superorganism and its appropriate study should be through physiology. (7) Lovelock took this idea and formulated a hypothesis based on the interactions between systems within the biosphere. Specifically the idea that biomass itself sustains the conditions of the physical environment that are optimal to maintain life. This is identified by Lovelock as full homeostasis. (3) The simplest example of this equilibrium, which is widely accepted by scientists, is when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increase, photosynthetic species’ biomass production increases. (7)

The Emergence of Gaia:

Entropy is the quantity representing the amount of unavailable thermal energy in a system that is used for mechanical work, or the total amount of thermal energy added to a system, divided by the apparent temperature. (7) A universal trait of physical systems is a continuous increase in entropy, the energy in molecules that make up abiotic objects will always lose thermal energy. It can also be expressed as the degree of disorder in a system, rivers flow down mountains into the ocean following an increasingly unpredictable path. This ever-increasing entropy ultimately leads to equilibrium, the total inactivity of the system. (7) A planet like mars has high entropy, as all the potential chemical reactions have already taken place leaving it in a state of chemical equilibrium. Why as earth, and the miraculous...