Living Planets: The Gaia Hypothesis
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
00:00
The Gaia Hypothesis and the Effects of Planetary Feedback on Life
The Gaia hypothesis argues we have a homeostatic balance of conditions on Earth with the goal of keeping conditions optimal for life. Eat a planet with surface water up and it will get cloudier. Clouds also absorb infrared light from the surface and help retain it, and how high they are in the atmosphere controls which dominates. If Earth ran into a particularly bad ice age and just froze a little more across some threshold where too much sunlight got reflected and froze all the oceans,. The cooling effects snowball until the planet is locked in ice. This is the appropriately named snowball or theory.
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