What’s more frightening: that we humans will lay waste to the world, or that the world will go on quietly without us?

I’ll bet that to the collective unconscious, the second one is more frightening. After all, if it’s the first one, there’s sort of a terrible greatness about our implosion. “The very rock we stand on crumbles beneath our power; if we die we’ll take the biosphere down with us! So the rest of you animals can wipe that smirk off your face and start hoping that we stay safe and happy.” Like King Herod ordering that on his death, the best of his subjects be killed, so that someone would mourn.

Bill Joy, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, is worried about the first kind of apocalypse, that because we won’t limit ourselves, that we’ll unleash some nanotech nightmare on the Earth that could well turn it into a barren rock. He could be right. You play with one little match, you can burn the whole house down.

But those who hold to Professor James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” believe that it is just as likely that Earth will evict us, that the rest of the biosphere may vote us off the island, as it were. The Gaia hypothesis says that one can look at the entire Earth as a single organism that regulates itself, and that Earth is life-prone, meaning that although individual species might arise or go extinct, that Earth will always have life on it. What this means is that if some species, say humans for example, start making Earth a less life-prone place, that Earth will work to restore the balance—which might mean giving the boot to humans.

Professor Lovelock is worried. One quote from the linked article that gave me pause was this: “In the late 1930s when I was a student we knew that war was imminent, but there was no clear idea of what to do about it. I find a marked similarity between attitudes over 60 years ago and those now towards the threat of global [climate] change.” Here’s someone who both lived history and is learning from it. Lovelock has shocked people by making a call to move to nuclear power as soon as possible, that the global warming caused by fossil fuel use is bringing us to the brink of being evicted by Earth.

Are we, like the dinosaurs, Gaia’s next ex? So big, so terrible, so grand, so…over, with nothing but our buried skeletons to remember us by.