Photo courtesy of J. Adam Fenster/University of Rochester
Astrophysicist Adam Frank is terrified for our future. He believes the climate crisis will wipe out much of humanity unless we take drastic steps to curb its impact. But he also says there’s an emerging scientific worldview that can help lead us out of this mess. It’s based on recent discoveries showing that all life on Earth is interconnected, and there’s even an underlying intelligence on a planetary scale.
Frank, a University of Rochester professor and co-founder of the NPR blog 13.7, built his reputation by studying star formation and black holes. But in recent years, he became disillusioned with the direction of contemporary physics — especially mathematical pursuits like string theory and what he calls “the God’s-eye view” of reality. He felt something was missing. It seemed like physicists were trying to understand the cosmos as if the lived experience of humans had no role in it.
“I found it really dissatisfying as a scientist, and I started thinking about a physics of life,” he said. “What is sentience? What is this thing that happens with life?”
Frank became fascinated by astrobiology — the science investigating the conditions that make life possible on Earth or other planets. He also wondered how a new scientific framework might help address some of our most pressing global problems and lead to fresh thinking about how to restructure society. Frank recently co-authored an article proposing this concept of planetary intelligence. He also spoke about the idea at a small think tank in Italy called the Island of Knowledge, where scientists and philosophers gathered to talk about different forms of intelligence.
Steve Paulson interviewed Frank at this meeting in Italy for “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Steve Paulson: You and some other scientists have developed a theory about what you call “planetary intelligence.” Back in the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia theory, which described the Earth as a living organism. How close is your concept of planetary intelligence to what they talked about?
Adam Frank: Their work was foundational for me. James Lovelock, who was a polymath, had this insight that Earth’s atmosphere has been utterly transformed by life. There would be no oxygen in the atmosphere without it. And I realized that the atmosphere is actually the life detector. If you looked at an atmosphere from a great distance, you would be able to tell whether there was a biosphere there.
There are feedback mechanisms so that if, say, the sun had a flare and suddenly the temperature of the sun went up, the biosphere would react to it by belching out chemicals, which would then actually increase the reflectivity of the Earth, so some of that sunlight bounces off. The main idea is that just as our bodies are kept at 98.6 degrees as part of the process of regulating our temperature, the biosphere does the same thing for the Earth.
SP: What are the implications of this theory? If our planet is a self-regulating system, what’s the science that can help us get through the climate crisis?
AF: The Gaia theory said that the biosphere is self-regulating. Back then, many scientists said this is crazy; it’s “new age crap.” But the main idea was right. It just got rebranded as Earth Systems Science, which is the foundation of climate science. The challenge here is not to save the Earth. That is the wrong metaphor. Even if we disappear, the Earth is going to be just fine.
SP: So even if billions of people die because of nuclear war or climate catastrophe, the Earth is going to regenerate.
AF: Yeah, the biosphere has been through a lot worse than us. We have the wrong metaphor for the planet. It’s not a furry little bunny, which demands our attention. It’s a goddess or a god. Our job is not to save it, it’s to not piss it off. Climate change is about us. What we’re trying to save is global civilization — without which somewhere around 9 billion of us are going to die. We’d be left with what we had before, which is maybe half a billion people on the planet.
SP: We generally think of sentience as something that individual animals have, or maybe a collective like a beehive. Talking about planetary intelligence seems like an entirely different kind of sentience.
AF: Well, it is and it isn’t. David Grinspoon, Sara Walker and I wrote a speculative paper about what we called “planetary intelligence.” We were trying to imagine how you would think about this. We don’t mean consciousness. It’s not like the Earth is awake. So the path here is to define planetary intelligence.
Let me talk about the history of the Earth. The planet is about 4.5 billion years old. Life forms somewhere around 4 to 3.5 billion years ago. And in the beginning, life is thin on the ground. There’s an emergent biosphere, but there are no feedback loops yet. It’s all microbes in the beginning, but pretty quickly, there are enough communities of microbes that you begin to get those feedback loops. So if there’s a perturbation from the sun or a comet impact, you may start to see some microbes respond — not consciously, but in a way that pumps out some kind of gas, which other microbes then pick up and pump out another kind of gas, so that life can continue. I would call the first phase of life on Earth an “immature” biosphere. It’s immature in the sense that it has not established the feedback loops that eventually would be able to exert controls on the planetary systems. Within a billion years, it’s mature.
So that’s the new idea. A mature biosphere is a dense web of species and life forms that have these feedback loops. We’re arguing that a mature biosphere has knowledge in those biological networks of interaction. Even if it’s not conscious, it has a sentience in some sense that responds to changing conditions. There’s now a concept called “liquid brains,” which are distributed intelligences. And we know there are lots of examples, like beehives and ant hives.
SP: We’ve also discovered that tree roots are intertwined with mycelial networks, and this leads to all kinds of connectivity within a forest.
AF: People may have heard about the “wood wide web,” describing the fungal networks running through forests. There’s evidence that if one part of the forest is stressed, another part of the forest will send it nutrients, which means you have a distributed intelligence over hundreds of miles. Slime molds, which are lots of individual cells working together, can solve mazes. You can put a slime mold in a maze, and it will figure out the maze. So we’re just saying you have a distributed cognition on a planetary scale.
SP: You’ve also talked about the immature and the mature “technosphere.” What is a technosphere?
AF: Just as a biosphere is the sum total of all life interacting together, a technosphere is what happens when something like us shows up. It’s the sum total of the products of thought, which are all the air conditioners, all the radios, all the cell phones, all the containerships. We listed five things that were important to have a mature biosphere.
One of them is a concept called “autopoiesis,” which means self-creating and self-maintaining. If you take the same immature/mature idea and bring it to technospheres, you can see exactly what the problem is. We have a technosphere that’s super powerful. It’s a complex system. It has lots of attributes like a mature biosphere, except for one thing. It’s not autopoietic. In fact, it’s degrading the conditions that it needs to survive. So what do we have, maybe another couple hundred years left? This is just not going to work anymore.
SP: Before civilization is no longer sustainable.
AF: Yeah. I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but the next generation or two will be difficult. We’re going to go through some hard times. But human beings are very resilient, and they’re very creative. Out of this difficulty, we will eventually respond in a lot of ways. There will be parts of the world that may not be inhabitable anymore. I would say, sorry, Texas or Arizona. Nobody can predict the future, but I imagine that in 2070 those kinds of places are going to have a much harder time holding together.
So there could be quite dramatic reorganizations of just where we live and what we do. It will mean we’ll find new energy systems. I think there will be a fundamental change in how we think about political economy. Right now, we have a political economy — whether it’s capitalist, communist, or socialist — that just doesn’t see the planet. In these economic systems, the planet is just kind of this empty space where you dump the tailings of industry. So what has to emerge is a whole new way of how we inhabit the planet. Whatever political economy we have is going to have the word “planetary” in it. People will respond to that, and eventually, cultures will respond to that. History is long and human beings are very good at learning. I’m hopeful that we’ll learn and then build the kind of technosphere that’s really mature.