Kindred Skies: Ancient Greeks and Aboriginal Australians saw Constellations in Common.Gaia: The Greek Earth Goddess Had No Tolerance for Cruel Family Members.Life, he reasoned, must be what keeps our unusual atmosphere in balance. Though our atmosphere was far out of chemical equilibrium and should have died eons ago, Earth’s balance was somehow maintained. While a death knell for Mars, the revelation spoke volumes about Earth. All the reactions that could have taken place have the active and volatile gases (like oxygen) that would indicate biological life were long ago converted to more inert compounds. Unfortunately for Mars, its atmosphere is largely dead (at least to our type of life form). If Mars has active life processes, then its atmosphere, like ours, should be in a state of chemical imbalance with gases in constant circulation. The next step for Lovelock was to examine the atmosphere of Mars and compare it to Earth’s. We breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, while plants reverse the process, constantly returning the generally volatile and reactive gases (oxygen and nitrogen) back to the atmosphere. This is exactly the case on Earth, where most of us would agree that a great deal of life does exist. He further theorized that the atmosphere of a life-sustaining world would be in a continual state of chemical imbalance, with life constantly consuming some gases and discarding others into the atmosphere.

One of the most basic characteristics of life, he reasoned, was that it consumes energy and matter, converts them and then discards the remainder as waste. Lovelock began to consider what exactly constitutes life and what sort of global or planetwide effects it might have. Specifically, they were interested in Mars.

James Lovelock was approached by NASA to develop systems and methods that could be used in determining whether or not a planet harbored life.

Pattern living earth shoulders