# James Lovelock

In existographies, James Lovelock (36- BE) (1919- ACM) (SPE:47|66AE) (CR:26) (LH:3) (TL:29) is an English earth scientist, noted for []

## Overview

In 1965, Lovelock, while working at NASA, as a consultant for a planned voyager mission to Mars, suggested that to be able to detect “life” on Mars, one would have to “look for an entropy reduction” and or analyze the “chemical composition of a planetary atmosphere” to look for the “equilibrium chemistry” products associated with life.[1]

In 1975, Lovelock, in his “Thermodynamics and the Recognition of Alien Biospheres”, intermixed Boltzmann entropy, Shannon information entropy, and chemical thermodynamics entropy, to argue that the “information”, or information content, of a system, the system in mind here being an “alien biospheric system”, could be defined, in a “thermodynamic sense”, according to Lovelock by the following formula:[2]

${\displaystyle I=S_{0}-S}$

where S0 is the "entropy of the system whose components are at equilibrium" and S is the "entropy of the system when assembled".

### Gaia hypothesis

A visual of cover from Lovelock's 1979 book Gaia Hypothesis.

In 1974, Lovelock, in his "Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis" article, co-authored with Lynn Margulis, introduced their so-called "Gaia hypothesis", the conjecture that the "earth is alive", and that the atmosphere is kind of like the lungs of the "living earth".

In 1979, Lovelock, in his Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, summarized his "living earth" theories, in a lay public way.[3]