From an interview I read a couple of years ago, this part stuck out (paraphrased, from memory).
The interviewer asked something like "Are you optimistic about human survival?" and Lovelock's reply was, roughly - "Oh yes, I am optimistic. I mean, there might be a bottleneck of the population down to a few thousands, but long term we will survive".
Talk about the large-scale view.
Re:James Lovelock has died
by quickthrower2 on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @05:18PM
(#32257112)
Surely “humans” are very unlikely to survive long term precisely because of evolution. Intelligent life probably will. But it might need to reboot from closer to the soup again.
Lovelock ultimately agreed with you. From The Guardian:
> Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle).
It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming.
I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.