Real scientists got caught up in the mysticism as well. In 1965 a chemist designing life-detection instruments for NASA’s Viking mission to Mars had a revelation: the entire Earth, he became convinced, its atmosphere and forests and seas and creatures, is a single organism perfectly and mysteriously tweaked to produce life—what he called “the Gaia hypothesis,” Gaia being his name from Greek mythology for “this creature.” He proceeded to develop the idea in collaboration with a microbiologist, publishing scientific papers and then in the 1970s a popular Oxford University Press book called Gaia:
...more
