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ET Phone Carl Sagan and James Lovelock

“The worst blindness is mental blindness, which makes us not recognize what lies ahead.”

José Saramago

 

I became saddened by the death of James Lovelock.

Looking back on his life's work and personality, it's impossible not to remember the fantastic Carl Sagan, who challenged the scientific community, publishing the Gaia Hypothesis in the Icarus journal, of which he was the editor. The rejection of the almost poetic theory of Lovelock and Lynn Margulis -who, by the way, was married to Carls Sagan- was such that it was only in 1990 that a journal of the caliber of Nature published it: https://www.nature.com/ articles/344100a0.

And as one thing leads to another, I began to think about Sagan and his passionate defense of extraterrestrial life.

I find it quite impressive that from the moment Neanderthal Petey raised his head and saw the sky until the late 1970s, one of the most discussed topics in the scientific community was the possibility that we are not alone in the Universe. In 1975, the symposium, Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man was attended by renowned scientists: Dr. Richard Berendzen, Dr. Ashley Montagu, Dr. Philip Morrison, Dr. Krister Stendahl, Dr. George Wald, and, of course, Dr. Carl Sagan.

In a very bright and humorous conversation, the debaters delighted the audience. The interesting thing to note is that, from the 1980s onwards, the theme began to lose strength; NASA's space program was losing steam until the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011.

I believe there is a precise moment that decreed the death of our curiosity related to life on other planets, and this instance is –by the irony of ironies- the basis of the Gaia Hypothesis.

In 1963, Lovelock was working at Jet Propulsion Laboratories on a project to build instruments that would detect life on Mars. Faced with the mechanical difficulties he encountered, Lovelock wondered why the way of life -if there were any on Mars at all- would fit into our model. And from there on, this fortunate intellect sought a scientific understanding of what we call life. At first, he observed that the most comprehensive feature of what we might call life involves a vesicle, where something goes in, that something is processed, and another something comes out. If that was the case at the micro level, Lovelock understood it interesting to explore the macro perspective. With Dian Hitchcock, he began to study the atmosphere of Mars, looking for similarities with the Earth's atmosphere. It must have been a moment of ecstasy when they realized that Earth and Mars have atmospheres composed of O2 and CO2. What changes – and changes a lot – are the concentrations of these gases. The unreservedly brilliant conclusion that Lovelock reached was that the Martian atmosphere does not admit the possibility of what we understand as life, for all possible chemical reactions on that planet have already occurred since there is total equilibrium.

Manifestly, this scientific conclusion took its time until it settled comfortably in our reality.

In 2024, Artemis 2 will take four astronauts back to lunar orbit, and, perhaps, we will return to debating the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Wouldn't it be interesting if, instead of Lovelock's proposition, as a definition of life, we adopted consciousness (or sentience or awareness) as a principal premise? Undoubtedly, everything would be more straightforward: instead of traveling light-years away, looking for solutions through wormholes, we would use our minds. It would be good. It has been a long time since we have dared to use our minds.

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