Final Conclusion

Having reached a final conclusion on this matter (overpopulation), I hasten to make it known.

The human population issue appears much differently when one takes Gaia into account. The problem does not disappear, but primary responsibility for it is transferred. If The Gaia Hypothesis and my extensions to it are a valid representation of life on our planet, then Gaia has been strategizing and adjusting to such issues for millions if not billions of years.

This is not to say that the people concerned with this issue should forget it. They are Gaia's instruments and part of her solution. But, this realization reduces the anxiety others may feel, to the extent they find it believable.

In general, The Gaia Hypothesis leads to the conclusion that Gaia is responsible for terraforming the earth and that she controls the makeup of the atmosphere by adjusting the number of plankton floating on the surface of the world's oceans and other strategies. I am of the belief that Gaia is directly responsible for our feelings and therefor she is also responsible for the fact that we are returning the CO2 to the atmosphere, from whence it came over the millennia. This will, no doubt, change our environment in some dramatic ways, may even destroy us, but, we must conclude that we are the novices here, and Gaia's reasons are certain to be compelling.

Most things must run in cycles, what goes up must come down. That being the case, it is only reasonable to guess that Gaia has found a need to return CO2 to the atmosphere after millennia of removing it and storing it in places where it cannot readily be recycled. That, indeed, our whole purpose in being is to perform that task and that only a human could be imagined to be capable of it.

In fact, if you imagine Gaia about 10 million years ago, reaching the conclusion that her days were numbered unless she found a way to recycle CO2, and that she concluded that humans were the answer, the right kind of respect for her begins to dawn on one.

What effect is this strategy likely to have? I guess our world is likely to be transformed into a jungle planet. The existence of all of that plant life will gradually, once again, remove the CO2 and, eventually the kind of climate we are used to will return. We, likely will not have continued in our current form, most likely we will have followed many predecessors to the oceans and become whales. Eventually, a new problem will arise with CO2 and a new race of humans will be required to recycle it.