Novaceno

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has created an amazing and novel theory about the future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene -the era in which humans acquire technologies on a planetary scale- is coming to an end after three hundred years. A new era, the Novaceno, has already begun. New beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think ten thousand times faster than we do and they will see us as we see plants today: as creatures that act and think with exasperating slowness. But it won't be about the cruel and violent takeover of the planet by machines envisioned by science fiction writers and filmmakers. These hyper-intelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need as much as we do for Gaia's planetary cooling system to defend them from the increasing heat of the Sun. And Gaia is dependent on organic life. We will be allies in this project. In Lovelock's view, it is crucial that Earth's intelligence survive and thrive. He does not believe that intelligent aliens exist, so we would be the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that ultimately leads to intelligence permeating the cosmos in its entirety. At the age of one hundred, James Lovelock has created the most important and compelling work of his life.