Gleiser: Science can inspire reconnection with nature – 03/29/2024 – Science

It’s hard to believe that the same human being who contemplates and deciphers the deepest mysteries of the Universe is the one who despises nature and destroys his own world. “The Awakening of the Conscious Universe” (Record, 252 pages), Marcelo Gleiser’s newest book, seeks to realign these two opposing perspectives, trying to instill in its readers habits and ideas that help us live in harmony with the planet that shelters us and nourishes.

The work of the Brazilian physicist based in the United States, where he teaches at Dartmouth College, is self-declared in the subtitle as “a manifesto for the future of humanity” and his proposal is good, although limited and difficult to implement.

Like Jack, let’s go in parts.

In the book, Gleiser gives a historical recap of Copernicanism, a revolution that began in the 16th century when the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus presented the thesis that the Earth would not be the center of the Universe, but rather the Sun, relegating our world to the category of just another of the various planets that orbit around it.

By navigating the consolidation of this vision, accompanied by the scientific revolution and Enlightenment philosophy that mark the beginning of the modern era, the physicist rescues reasons why humanity treats the nature around it as something it can dispose of at will.

For him, the root of the current attitude of immeasurable devastation, which in current times is causing the climate crisis and the sixth great extinction of species known to science (the last one wiped out the dinosaurs), lies in this way of thinking about the world, placing the human being at the top of a hierarchy, with everything else just an object of subjugation.

With his poetic and humanist verve, Gleiser sees humanity in a condition of privilege, as the only entity in the terrestrial biosphere capable of abstract thought – capable of telling stories, including that of the emergence and evolution of the Universe itself, thanks to the development of science .

In the evolution of telling this story, by the way, he takes the bold (perhaps even foolhardy, for reasons we will soon discuss) attitude of proposing a post-Copernican philosophy. The physicist admits that there were good reasons to bet on the notion that the Earth is just another planet and, by extension, that the Sun is just another star, and each star has its family of planets, and that the Sun joins Hundreds of billions of stars in our neighborhood form the Milky Way, our galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies spread across the cosmos – which makes the Earth, on a cosmic scale, reduced to a speck of dust. This is all actually true.

However, for him, advanced studies carried out on both the planets of the Solar System and those located around other stars show that Earth is far from being an ordinary place. In the vicinity of the Sun, there is no other planet with a thriving and long-lasting biosphere like Earth’s, although the existence of life (past or present) on Venus, Mars or on the icy moons of the gas giant planets cannot yet be ruled out.

Adding the idiosyncrasies of our own planet (axis tilt, presence of a large Moon, tectonism, etc.), Gleiser leans towards the Rare Earth hypothesis, originally advanced by Donald Brownlee and Peter Ward, according to which life, in order not to Talking about intelligence would be an extremely infrequent occurrence in the Universe.

From this, Gleiser defends the exchange of Copernicanism for biocentrism, in which life (and by extension the Earth) would gain a central and privileged space – a philosophy that would make us return to values ​​cultivated by our distant ancestors, who promoted (on other bases) a “sacralization” of the Earth.

The idea of ​​valuing life is, in fact, the best thing about the work. But the support base is shaky. It is too early to proclaim the victory of the Rare Earth hypothesis. We still don’t know if Mars and Venus were habitable in the past – while we already know that Earth will be uninhabitable in the future (about 1 billion years). We do not know whether Europa and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, harbor life in their subsurface oceans. As for exoplanets, we have barely begun to characterize them – all we know about them, so far, is that their existence generally reinforces the Copernican principle, placing the emergence of the Earth itself in somewhat special circumstances.

Gleiser argues that we have already discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets and none have so far turned out to be similar to Earth. However, it does not mention that our detection methods favor worlds with orbits and sizes generally different from those of Earth and that we have barely passed the point where we have only identified the orbit, size and approximate composition (whether rocky or gaseous) of these worlds.

It could very well be that the Earth is indeed very rare, as is life. However, the most honest stance at this point would be to admit that the jury is still out with that verdict. By associating humanity’s renegotiation with the Earth to the rarity hypothesis, the physicist runs the risk of seeing it expire in a relatively short period, as science has a greater understanding of what awaits us on the billions of potentially habitable planets spread across the Via Dairy.

Fortunately, your proposal doesn’t have to strictly depend on this. Even if the Universe is full of life, nowhere will it follow exactly the same evolutionary paths that it followed here, which makes the Earth’s biosphere something really special, particularly for us, who evolved from it.

“This is a revolution dedicated to the spiritual awakening of humanity, [grifo dele] a spirituality without a specific denomination, centered on the reconnection of each of us with the earth and with the collective of life to which we belong.” Note that life and our planet do not need to be rare for this to be valid – which is great.

Gleiser ends with three principles that he would like to see the reader follow: that of less, which involves consuming less critical resources, such as water and energy; the more, which involves rapprochement with the natural world; and awareness, when purchasing products and goods, demanding ecologically correct attitudes from the companies that supply them.

It is a simple recipe, based on individual actions (something clearly insufficient to solve crises such as the unrestrained consumption of fossil fuels), which has a certain naivety, but is also full of good intentions.

It would indeed be good if it were possible to solve all our environmental problems and support 8 billion inhabitants (soon to be ten) by saving on steak or electricity bills. It is not. But actions like these will help create something that Gleiser considers essential in this fight: a movement that infects all of us, in establishing a new pact with nature and with our own planet.