Abstract

BUNYARD FLS, Peter Paul. James Lovelock: la visión de un científico excepcional James Lovelock: the vision of an exceptional scientist. Rev. acad. colomb. cienc. exact. fis. nat. [online]. 2022, vol.46, n.180, pp.823-831.  Epub Sep 20, 2023. ISSN 0370-3908.  https://doi.org/10.18257/raccefyn.1771.

In the 1960s, James Lovelock, the inventor of the Electron Capture Detector, was asked by NASA to develop instrumentation to detect life on Mars. In considering how life would manifest itself, he realized that the Earth's atmosphere was orders of magnitude away from chemical equilibrium and that such disequilibrium could not be due purely to abiological processes but was maintained in a dynamically stable state by Life. At that time, spectrometric analysis of the atmosphere of Mars indicated that it was close to chemical equilibrium and Lovelock concluded that Mars was unlikely to harbour life. Since the Earth had had biological organisms within for at least 3.2 thousand million years, Lovelock concluded that life was responsible for planetary homeostasis in the sense of maintaining optimum surface conditions, hence his Gaia Hypothesis.

Keywords : Gaia; Spectrometry; Biotic pump; Endosymbiosis; Climate change.

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