-Caveat Lector- Hi Jean, Corrected Black light power URL: http://www.blacklightpower.com This group has had info on the web for a couple of years. Sure would be great if a product or process derived from this type of technology would "come to market". best, Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart -----Original Message----- From: jean hudon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 29, 1999 3:22 AM To: Jean Hudon Subject: Two Living Geniuses - Dr. Randell Mills who is helping to change forever thefuture of this world and James Lovelock who is helping us to see ourplanet as a living being -- Please see my comment in the otheracompanying email October 6, 1999 REPRINT FROM DOW JONES NEWSWIRES Researcher Claims Power Tech That Defies Quantum Theory By ERIK BAARD NEW YORK -- A researcher based in New Jersey is presenting to a gathering of chemists in Ontario, Calif., Wednesday the science that he says will underpin a multi-billion dollar energy and materials company. The catch is that his theory - that hydrogen atoms can be shrunk in a stable form - is an impossibility in the established understanding of quantum physics. Still, Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvard University-trained medical doctor who has done postgraduate studies in physics and chemistry, isn't going it alone. His start-up, BlackLight Power Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey, has received support and advice from utilities Conectiv (CIV) and PacifiCorp (PPW) and from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. (MWD). Other major companies are waiting in the wings, Dr. Mills claimed. "We have stayed supportive of this in the face of fairly significant scientists saying it can't be," a senior executive with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who asked that he not be identified, told Dow Jones Newswires. Pending further verification and commercial commitments, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter plans to usher BlackLight Power to an initial public offering within two years, the executive said. The investment bank will be an underwriter and hasn't put its own money into the start-up, the executive said, but another source close to the situation said Morgan Stanley Dean Witter had made an overture to that end. Dr. Mills claimed the process of transforming hydrogen atoms into smaller "hydrinos" by chemical catalysis will provide "a virtually unlimited supply of energy" through distributed power turbines. The hydrinos themselves combine with other elements, he said, to make compounds that could be the basis for batteries to power cars 1,000 miles at highway speeds before recharging; a plastic that conducts electricity and shares magnetic qualities with iron; and super-strong coatings, among other things. There could be "potentially thousands, if not millions" of novel compounds, he said. He also said that compounds such as the ones BlackLight Power is creating account for the more than 90% of the mass of the universe that scientists say is so far unobservable. Dr. Mills hasn't made acceptance easy for himself or his sponsors by claiming he has found the holy grail of a grand unified theory of classical quantum mechanics and that the effect of his work on humanity will be "bigger than fire." Indeed, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford University, said in September "it's extremely unlikely that this is real, and I feel sorry for the funders, the people who are backing this." Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at City College of New York cited another time-honored law that might apply to BlackLight Power investors: "There's a sucker born every minute." The American Chemical Society forum is the first open peer review of BlackLight Power's findings, while mainstream quantum mechanics, scientists point out, has evolved from decades of tests and analysis. BlackLight Power has sent its work out for numerous tests at independent laboratories over the past several years and has seen positive results, Dr. Mills said. Conectiv is "really on the optimistic side," albeit "cautiously" so, said David Blake, Conectiv vice president and BlackLight Power board member. "It's getting more and more difficult to argue with the results Dr. Mills is presenting and the validations he is starting to accrue," Blake said. Both Dr. Mills and Conectiv's Blake say "two major corporations" are currently testing crystals provided by the labs, but they declined to name them. "These folks are spending their time and energy, and the money it takes to pay technical people, on this. You don't do that unless you've got some inclination that you'd better look at this," Blake said. But are Conectiv and PacifiCorp making a "Hail Mary pass" in a once stolid industry thrown into turmoil by deregulation? "Utilities...especially on the second tier, like Conectiv and PacifiCorp, are really looking for edges because they don't have the size and scope" of mega-utilities that are forming through mergers all around them, said Robert Rubin, a utilities analyst with Bear Sterns Cos. in New York. Shareholders will forgive managers for making a few odd bets because "the payoff could be huge," Rubin said. Still, "there's a difference between investing $2.5 million and $250 million." "Randy has had no trouble raising the funds he needs," the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter executive said. Dr. Mills confirmed that the company had $10 million, largely from the two utilities, and equipment and property bringing its capital up to about $30 million. BlackLight Power will present about 10 compounds to the American Chemical Society and "five papers that give explicit details and is absolutely reproducible," Dr. Mills said. "I have a unified field theory that's absolutely testable at every stage and on every item." "Thank God we're getting our day in court," Dr. Mills said. Also speaking at the meeting about the reported hydrogen energy release, in the form of visible and ultra-violet light, is Dr. Johannes Conrads, who retired last week as the director of the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany. The BlackLight Power research done at the institute was funded by the company, but "my research was completely independent," said Dr. Conrads, who has studied plasma since 1959 and has worked for NASA and taught at Princeton University. Dr. Conrads has flown to the society's meeting in California to report that he's seen "a few astonishing things" from the hydrino process, he said. "Something from the Mills cell is releasing energy, and remarkably high energy, that is clear," Dr. Conrads said. Equally compelling is that energy in the Mills cell decays at a rate independent of the removal of outside electricity, and the reaction works only with BlackLight Power's catalyst, he said. But Dr. Conrads stops short of vindicating the hydrino theory. "None of my experiments so far is falsifying Randy's theory, but unfortunately none of my experiments is verifying it, either," Dr. Conrads said. Dr. Conrads said he's taking his time to examine Dr. Mills' theory because "this is not for sensation. I am an old professor in physics." Dr. Conrad, who emphasized his lack of credentials as a materials scientist, said he has sought Dr. Mill's permission to invite peers at DaimlerChrysler AG (DCX) to examine the hydrino crystals. Dr. Conrads parts with Dr. Mills somewhat by standing with traditional quantum mechanics as it applies to the ground state that the Mills theory claims to breach. But Dr. Conrads says he could see Dr. Mills work as a chemical approach to the new science of non-ideal plasmas. This unusual plasma is composed of charged particles at low temperatures and as densely packed as a solid, he said. Indications are that in such an environment, conventional quantum rules might not apply, he said. With more sensitive equipment, however, he expects to find stronger evidence for "fractional" hydrogen, he said. "Everyone was telling us that heat was too nebulous," Dr. Mills said. To put his work on more solid ground, he manufactured hydrino-based crystals in mass, he said. "The hydride ion cracked the nut, right there, that did it," he said. BlackLight Power's laboratory cabinets are stacked with vials of crystals of varied colors and forms. Other scientists have been supportive. On the BlackLight Power board sits Dr. Shelby Brewer, a nuclear engineer and physicist who is also the former chief executive of ABB Combustion Engineering and an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy from 1981 to 1984. Dr. Melvin H. Miles, an electro-chemist researching batteries at the U.S. Navy facility in China Lake, Calif., said the BlackLight crystals put Dr. Mills "way ahead of cold fusion in that he has a tangible product to show people." "Randy Mills impressed me that he may also be brilliant. He talks off the top of his head in a way that other scientists can't. But that doesn't mean he's right. I think his results are right, but doesn't mean his theory is right," Miles said. ___ RESEARCHER UNVEILS UNIQUE NEW CLASS OF HYDRIDE COMPOUNDS Discoveries Point to New Source of Low Cost Energy, Longer-Life Batteries, Magnetic Polymers, Lighter-Weight Materials; All Based on BlackLight Power's Application of Dr. Randell Mills' "Grand Unified Atomic Theory" ONTARIO, Calif. - Oct. 6, 1999 - Dr. Randell Mills, CEO and chief researcher of BlackLight Power, unveils today, at the 1999 Pacific Conference on Chemistry and Spectroscopy, the results of his research into the area of novel hydrogen chemistry. The conference, with some 800 scientists and researchers in attendance, is co-sponsored by California-based sections of the American Chemical Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. During the meeting, Mills and his colleagues are reviewing BLP's ongoing research which indicates the discovery of a vast new energy source and a new field of hydrogen chemistry. Joining BLP's presenters today is Dr. Johannes Conrads, retired Chairman of the Board and past Director of INP, Greifswald, Germany, one of the world's foremost research centers for the study of low temperature plasma physics. Dr. Conrads will be discussing INP's independent study of Mills' theory, which has demonstrated the generation of extreme ultraviolet emissions at low temperatures from atomic hydrogen. "We are pleased to have Dr. Conrads join us today to report on his findings. In his 40 years as a researcher, he says he has never before observed the phenomena associated with the BlackLight Process," says Mills. Rather than heating hydrogen to extreme temperatures or using high voltage, Mills and Conrads have demonstrated the capability independently of using the release of energy from hydrogen by specific catalysts to cause a plasma in hydrogen which may be observed and recorded by its ultraviolet emissions. "Essentially, we have shown we can produce heat, and therefore electricity, in a hydrogen plasma without a power input. We have a chemical reaction that produces valuable products," said Mills. Conrads' findings support and underscore the potential for revolutionary applications of the Mills Process in the fields of chemistry and energy. The world could have a new source of low-cost, renewable, pollution-free energy because these reactions can be harnessed to create electricity. When hydrogen transitions to these lower stable states, energy in the form of extreme ultraviolet light is released. Extraordinary compounds are formed as by-product. An early application of these products would be vastly improved high voltage batteries with at least 10,000 times the power of conventional batteries, charged and recharged with low-cost electricity. This could help usher in the age of the electric automobile. One new class of hydrogen polymers generated using the BlackLight Process has been shown to be conductive and ferromagnetic. Plastics capable of conducting electricity would have far reaching implications in electronic packaging and magnetic storage media. Compounds capable of having the flexibility, durability and lightweight properties of plastic but the strength and conductivity of metal would change how vehicles and aircraft are manufactured, producing lighter weight, more cost effective and more energy efficient modes of transportation. Mills and his colleagues from BLP are presenting four papers today at the conference discussing the synthesis and characterization of this unique new class of hydride compounds, and the experimental data proving their existence. Two of the papers have been accepted for peer-reviewed publication, one in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, published by the International Hydrogen Energy Association, and the other in Fusion Technology, published by the American Nuclear Society. Mills' work is based on his "Grand Unified Atomic Theory," published in 1995, stating hydrogen can exist in states lower than the ground state recognized by classical quantum physics. Mills' theory challenges long-held principles of quantum mechanics, but Mills has the data, products, evidence and confirmation from outside labs that his breakthrough theory is in fact correct. "I have kept the nature of this work confidential until now because I wanted to ensure we had the proper supporting data and corroboration by other researchers, such as Dr. Conrads, so my theory and its implications would receive serious consideration," said Mills. This controversial theory has potential applications reaching far beyond new hydrogen compounds. BlackLight Power and Mills are now attracting widespread attention both within the scientific community and among serious investors. BlackLight Power's most recent private offering was quickly oversubscribed, and the company has signed an agreement with Morgan Stanley to serve as its investment bank. Along with the financial backing of several major utilities and manufacturing companies, BlackLight is capitalized at more than $20 million. Mills is president and founder of BlackLight Power, and inventor of the BlackLight Process. He also has started several other companies, including Luminide Pharmaceutical. Mills graduated Harvard University Medical School with an M.D. in 1986, and did postgraduate work at MIT in physics and chemistry. Mills' book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, first published in 1995, details his theory which neatly stitches together quantum mechanics and relativity. "Most significantly, my theory and the research we've done gives rise to the possibility of an inexhaustible energy source," said Mills. BlackLight Power is expanding rapidly, with a major 53,000 square-foot research and development facility slated to house more than 100 researchers and supporting staff located in Cranbury, N.J., near Princeton, N.J. Mills has been awarded patents by Australia and South Africa within the past year, and has several patents pending in the United States. end Dr. Randell Mills is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Researcher of BlackLight Power, a company dedicated to discovering and developing new hydrogen compounds that are a by-product of a practically inexhaustible novel form of energy produced via the BlackLight Process. BlackLight Power is headquartered in Cranbury, N.J., near Princeton, N.J. * * * * * From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discovery October 1999 page 98 The idea that organisms collaborate to keep the planet habitable was once dismissed as New Age earth science. Now even skeptics are taking a second look. BY OLIVER MORTON The small crowd milling about an Oxford University courtyard on a sunny Easter afternoon is an unusual mix ~ part academic, part acolyte. Ron Williams, for example,a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto, is retired but still active, sharp of mind, neat in appearance, the sort of person you'd expect to find enjoying academic discussions at Oxford. Peter Horton, a few decades younger and trying his hand at living off the land in the south of France, is bearded, thick-sweatered, and direct. He has not been in formal education since he was a teenager. Still, he has come to Oxford for the same reason Williams has. And it's not a religious one, although it can seem that way. Williams and Horton are here because of James Lovelock. Eighty years old but quick and amiable as ever, Lovelock has for 30 years promoted the idea that Earth regulates itself as if it were one huge organism, not just a collection of millions of relatively independent life forms. Among Lovelock's earliest audiences for this idea was the Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding. During walks through the Wiltshire countryside, Lovelock would tell Golding about how plankton control the greenhouse effect and about how forest fires regulate oxygen levels. Golding, intrigued, suggested he call this system Gaia (pronounced GUY-ya), after the ancient Greek earth goddess. And so Lovelock did. Is the Earth alive? When the public first heard about Gaia it liked the message. At a time when people could talk about the Age of Aquarius without grinning, the notion of Earth as a single living being, not quite-what Lovelock proposed, but not inaccurate either, seemed to fit. Academic scientists, on the other hand, were not impressed. And the quasi-religious name didn't help. But worst of all was the concept itself - the Earth in some way alive? Today, 30 years after Lovelock gave his first seminar on the idea to a nonplussed audience in Princeton, New Jersey, Gala has made sonic progress. While to many mainstream researchers Gaia remains out-of-bounds, some ideas that flowed out of Lovelock's Gaian thinking have been proven correct, even if their provenance is forgotten or hushed up. And a growing number of scientists" have decided to center their work on the Gaian concepts. Some are gathered here at Oxford for the third meeting of the Gaia Society, which sponsors this sort of research. But there's still a problem. Even among believers, there's no real consensus as to what Gaia is or how it really works. Oxford zoologist William Hamilton, perhaps the world's most eminent evolutionary biologist and a man no one would have expected to take an interest in Gaia a few years ago, puts it this way: "Lovelock is a figure like Copernicus." Copernicus came to believe in a strange phenomenon that his contemporaries rejected: The Earth moves around the sun. But he never came up with a proper explanation for it; that was left to Newton. As far as Hamilton is concerned, "Jim's still waiting for his Newton." Lovelock, like Copernicus, started off by looking at the planets. Because he had invented some of the most sensitive chemical measuring devices ever, Lovelock was asked by NASA in the 1960s to help design life detecting instruments for Mars missions. After thinking the problem through, Lovelock decided that the best way to detect life on another planet was to look at the atmosphere. If a planet had life like Earth, its atmospheric composition would reflect it. The proof, he argued, is in every breath you take. Earth, abundant with life, has an atmosphere composed of an unstable mixture of gases. If you bottled a sample of Earth's atmosphere for a million years, the mingled gases would react with one mother. But strangely, if the mixture is left outside the bottle, it stays reasonably stable because life forms absorb some of the gases and replenish others. Lovelock surmised that if Mars had life, its atmosphere would show similar characteristics. The fact that it didn't, he concluded, meant that Mars was dead and therefore not worth the cost of sending spacecraft to look for life. This was not the answer NASA wanted, although all subsequent studies have tended to support it. Lovelock went on to look at other ways in which life might shape the development of Earth. For example, we know that when the solar system was formed the sun was dim and that it has heated up ever since. Yet Earth wasn't too cold for life in the beginning, and it isn't too hot for life now. That's because the composition of the atmosphere has changed. Huge amounts of warming carbon dioxide have conveniently been absorbed by little planktonic shellfish and used to make shells. When the animals die, the carbon dioxide is locked up as their remains turn into chalk or limestone. Then there is sulfur, which has to be recycled from the sea to the land for life to go on. Lovelock suggested that this recycling was done by living creatures rather than by inorganic processes. He was proven right. Plankton pump more sulfur into the atmosphere than all the world's volcanoes. Lovelock started to think that Earth was in some sense alive, its various cycles part of a great physiology. Of all those who objected to the idea, no group was more vehement than evolutionary biologists. They don't believe in free lunches. They believe creatures are out to help themselves and their relatives survive, not to help strangers. The idea that some creatures waste effort making the world a better place for others didn't make sense to them. As for global self-regulation, the complex physiological systems of living beings do not come about by chance. They evolve. Many different versions are tried out; only the best leave descendants. That's natural selection. And natural selection cannot apply to a whole planet, which has no competitors or ancestors. To convince the evolutionary biologists, Lovelock needed a way of demonstrating how organisms could act selfishly yet still interact to control the planet. His solution was to invent a computer model called Daisyworld. Imagine, he said, a cold planet with a dim young sun. On this planet are two kinds of daisies, black and white. The black daisies begin to spread across the face of the world, soaking up sunlight and warming themselves. In doing so, they take the chill from the ground and warm the air. But as the sun slowly grows warmer, Daisyworld's temperature remains stable because the white daisies begin spreading around the world, reflecting the sun's rays back into space. They cool themselves, the ground beneath them, and the air above. The black daisies, on the other hand, bake to a crisp and die out. So the planet's surface grows ever whiter, and its overall temperature stays the same. The charm of this parable is that the daisies didn't set out to keep the planet's temperature stable, but still they did so. The rigors of the environment controlled the daisies' fate, and the temperature regulation came free. Evolutionary biologists still didn't buy it. William Hamilton, who has done more than anyone else to understand how genes can, in some circumstances, make the creatures that bear them nice to one mother, saw Daisyworld as rigged. He pointed out that if the daisies had been allowed to evolve, rather than forced to sit with the same temperature preferences they started out with, they would adapt themselves to the sun's ever-increasing heat and allow the environment to go to hell. "It doesn't account for how the phenomenon [large- scale stabilities in the environment] appears," says Hamilton. "That's what we're still waiting for." Which brings us back to what Gaia is supposed to be. Is it a system, a property of a system, a process, a thing? All those views could have found support at the Oxford meeting. New York University biology professor Tyler Volk, for example, calls Gaia a thing: a system comprising Earth's soils, oceans, atmosphere, and biomass. For Volk, Gaian studies show how things circulate through this system. No need for Daisyworlds, no need for anything but natural selection. On the other hand, Lee Klinger, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, thinks there's more to Gaia. To him, it's basically similar to all sorts of other complex phenomena, from atoms in magnetic fields to gamblers playing the stock market. For the hard core, Gaia is about biology, not earth science or complex systems. Their battle cry is symbiosis, the many varied ways that creatures have of coming to depend on one mother. That's something Gaians think traditional evolutionary biologists don't know how to deal with. Hamilton disagrees with that. But he agrees that there seem to be long-term stabilities in the environment that he and his colleagues may have under-played. This intrigues him deeply--and that may help bring Gaia a new respectability. Hamilton first began investigating Gaian ideas while working with a young protege' of lovelock's, Tim Lenton, now at Edinburgh's Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. They were thinking about the plankton that release a kind of sulfur into the ocean, where it reacts and forms dimethyl sulfide. Some of this gas escapes into the atmosphere, interacts with oxygen, and forms little acidic particles. The particles help form cloud droplets, and more droplets mean thicker, whiter clouds. Bob Charlson, a professor of atmospheric sciences and chemistry at the University of Washington who collaborated with Lovelock, reckons that if the ocean did not release dimethyl sulfide, the number of droplets in the most common marine clouds would be less than half of what it is today. So if it weren't for sulfur-producing plankton, the planet might be much hotter. The plankton's product could conceivably be changing the nature of the clouds enough to cool the planet by as much as m degrees Celsius. Gaians take this as evidence that these plankton are part of Earth's way of staying cool. But why should the plankton bother? That was the question that struck Hamilton. As an evolutionary biologist, he tended to think organisms are mostly interested in improving their odds of reproduction. He couldn't accept that plankton cooled the world with no benefit for themselves. So he enlisted Lenton's help in looking for a payoff. Their answer was strange but appealing: Plankton encourage clouds because clouds help plankton spread their genes around. Hamilton and his colleagues showed that dispersing some of your seeds always makes sense, even if their chance of thriving wherever they end up is tiny. If this is true, then contributing to the release of dimethyl sulfide may be one way plankton can move to new territory. Producing dimethyl sulfide, in short, could help create winds that whip up whitecaps and loft plankton into the air. If plankton somehow get into the clouds, they could travel significant distances - hundreds or even thousands of miles - before coming down. It's a nice idea, one you could expect natural selection to favor. It may even be true, though no one has yet caught the astronaut algae on their way to the clouds. But does it support Lovelock's theory? The fact that the clouds are being made by the plankton is interesting. The possibility that these clouds are significantly cooling the planet is important. But these insights don't prove the Gaian theory that life and the environment come together to form a self-regulating whole. To try and get a better take on Gaia at that most basic level, Hamilton and ecologist Peter Henderson are trying to build a more realistic model to replace Daisyworld. They want a model that shows a suite of organisms whose interactions stabilize the environment in ways that don't depend on the parameters the model starts with. Their fast stab at an answer, presented at the Oxford conference, could be called Damworld. Imagine Damworld as a basin ringed by mountains, in which a single species of algae lives. The rain that falls into Damworld can leave only through one narrow outlet. Living in the outlet are creatures that feed on the algae. These creatures anchor themselves to the sediments and tend to build up a dam, like coral polyps build up a reef. The third species is one that breaks down dams for food. If the dam rises, the lake behind it swells, creating a larger supply of sunlight-warmed, nutrient rich water in which various organisms thrive. If you have just those three species, then the dam's height oscillates fairly regularly. When it gets big, there's more for the dam-busters to work on and the dam starts to crumble. When it crumbles, the dam-busters starve and the builders make the dam bigger again. But Henderson and Hamilton aren't content with just three species. Each time the model runs, they add new species to the original three. These species are similar to the originals, but with randomly assigned food and habitat preferences that are just different enough to make things interesting. Sometimes the newcomers cooperate with the established species; sometimes they compete. Each time the model runs, the result is different. But over many runs, some statistical trends emerged. Worlds with tall dams, on average, accumulate more species and richer ecosystems than those with shorter dams. What's more, they also resist shocks better. They're not without problems, but they are robust. In damless worlds, the model often ends with everything going extinct after the introduction of some vicious new species. While total extinction can happen in worlds with big dams, it is much rarer. What seems to matter most in the model is how much control the various species gain over the physical aspects of their world. The more profound the links between what's alive and what isn't, the more stable things seem to get. Big changes can still occur in such systems, but they are not necessarily irreversible. Damworld seems to suggest that the more intimately life intermingles with its physical environment, the more the two may together move toward stability. But it offers no certainty. Sometimes dammed ecosystems are unstable. That Gaia-like properties develop in the Damworld model only sometimes, not always, could point toward another concept of Gaia. This concept was voiced at the Oxford conference by Andrew Watson, a professor of environmental science at the University of East Anglia. Maybe, he said, Gaia is an accident. Watson, one of Lovelock's first disciples and his co-author on the original Daisyworld paper, argues that with just one Earth to study, you simply can't say much about Gaia. Just because life persists on this planet despite all sorts of change doesn't mean that it had to. Yes, some nice, big, simple feedback loops involving atmosphere and organisms may have done a lot to make the planet livable, but that doesn't mean these interactions were a necessary outcome of life being there in the first place. Maybe we just got lucky. And that brings us back to where Lovelock began: looking at the atmospheres of other planets. Although NASA didn't much like Lovelock's theory that the Martian atmosphere proved the planet lifeless, it has adopted his theory for finding life outside the solar system. When planets the size of Earth are found, the next order of business will be studying their atmospheres through spectroscopy to see whether they are deathly stable, like those of Mars and Venus, or alive and kicking like Earth's. The extraordinary space telescopes needed to make such measurements are in the works. If the search turns up living planets, Watson's accident theory, and the general credibility of Gaia, could be tested. If the sustainability of life on planets is a matter of luck, life will be most common around young stars, where its luck hasn't yet been tested. But if life makes its own luck, as Gaia would have us believe, then there will be life on planets around stars of all ages. We could know within a few decades. And what does Lovelock make of this? He's happy that Gaia is still alive, still attracting interesting people, still provoking new fines of thought. If not all of it accords with his own ideas, well, fine. Lovelock didn't present any new hypotheses or results at the Oxford conference. But he did kick off the proceedings with what he styles as a sermon, and that was where he made his contribution to the debate: "Gaia is a theory of science and is therefore always provisional and evolving. It is never dogmatic or certain and could even be wrong. Provisional it may be but, being of the palpable Earth, it is something tangible to love and fear and think we understand. We can put our trust, even faith, in Gaia, and this is different from the cold certainty of purposeless atheism or an unwavering belief in God's purpose.... I have put before you the proposition that Gaia, in addition to being a theory in science, offers a worldview for agnostics. This would require an interactive trust in Gaia, not blind faith. A trust that accepts that, like us, Gaia has a finite life span and is provisional. " That may sound like a best-of-both-worlds cop-out. But you could also read it as the words of a wise old man who knows that a powerful metaphor never relies on only one mewing, who wants broad-minded scientists in a broadminded world to keep asking the questions he has asked, and not to be put off by criticism or seduced by dogma. These could be the words of a man who knows that science never exists in a moral vacuum, but rather in a pre-existing atmosphere, and who wants that atmosphere to be off balance and alive, not stuck in a dead equilibrium. 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