The ancient greeks called her earth goddess or Gaia. Gaia was Mother Nature, gentle, nurturing but also ruthless to those who crossed her. James Lovelock defines Gaia as a complex entity, involving earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil. In a cybernetic system that seeks the chemical and physical equilibrium.

In Earth’s atmosphere is an unusual and unstable mixture of many gases, thus life is present. Earth’s gas is not on chemical equilibrium, yet appeared it maintains in a constant state, this suggests a regulation of the planet’s atmosphere. The earth regulates, flows its energy and recycling of materials, energy from the sun is constant and unlimited, it’s captured by the earth as heat or photosynthetic processes and returned to space as a long wave of radiation.

The interaction of the atmosphere with the ocean is one mechanism. The release of cloud condensation nuclei, phytoplankton. When the sun is shining brightly, phytoplankton grows rapidly and produces air born particles. When water vapor in the atmosphere condenses or freezes around these particles or nuclei, clouds form. The increasing clouds, lowers the temperature on the earth but also blocks the sunlight to the phytoplankton, the phytoplankton grows more slowly, fewer clouds are formed and the temperature of the earth rises. Phytoplankton provide the base of the marine food web, they also help the planet to breathe, through photosynthesis, phytoplankton produces half of the oxygen on earth that all the animals and humans need to live.

Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, they exhibit a form of “distributed intelligence,” a system in which many individual agents with limited intelligence and information are able to pool resources to accomplish a goal beyond the capabilities of the individuals.

Our body temperatures are maintained by feedbacks between the brain and various organs and systems in the body. If it is too cold, our bodies produces heat by shivering, if it’s too warm, our body sweat and remove heat through evaporation. On earth, temperature is regulated in a similar fashion. Albedo refers to the color of the planet and its ability to absorb or reflect light. Dark areas absorb energy from the sun; light areas like clouds or polar ice caps reflect the sun’s energy away from the earth. Global temperature is regulated by clouds, if there are more clouds, more sunlight is reflected and the earth cools, fewer clouds, more sunlight reaches the surface and the earth warms.

While energy flows through the earth, matter cycles within the earth. Everything that happens on the planet, the life and death of the trees, the increasing or decreasing of emissions of carbon dioxide, the planting of croplands, all have an impact on the planet. The earth must recycle elements to make them available for other processes, otherwise the whole system would run down and the earth would be death as the moon. If the earth is not itself regulated, then will adjust to the impacts of the man. These adjustments may act to eventually decrease and limit our numbers or to exclude man, all together.

Gaia proposes an endless future for life.