Just take this as something to note about instead of to really believe in. It is Mother's day this coming Sunday, by the way, and we always treat our mother so dearly.
Our one and only known habitable planet in the Universe for now, and we have held so dear and precious, to be called our loving mother, our way of endearment, and so we called her Gaia. But geological evidences have shown that she can be Medea, killing her own children. This is another interesting hypothesis worth reading to broaden our understanding and knowledge.
| Quote: |
Swine flu? Global warming? Toxic oceans? Why does Mother Nature sometimes seem to be on the attack? According to the decades-old "Gaia hypothesis," it's because Earth is a self-regulating system that is responding to our own excesses. In a new book titled "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," British biologist James Lovelock says humanity is "Earth's infection."
"Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells. By analogy, Gaia's illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good," Lovelock writes. He says the cure won't come until the human tribe is trimmed back from its current 6.8 billion to, say, 1 billion people.
Now University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has proposed an alternate theory that suggests Earth is set up to kill off life when it spreads too widely. Humans wouldn't be the first victims of this periodic biocide. The dinosaurs may have been killed off by an asteroid, he says, but during the planet's other mass extinctions, millions of species were done in by good old Mom.... |
Complete article here:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/05/06/1924384.aspx 
