Visualisation of the Gaia theory of James Lovelock: See our home, the earth, breathing like a living organism. The seasons are pumping oxigen and CO-2. A video installation by Raymond Brouwersc compilated from NASA satelite images of the world The Gaia hypothesis was first scientifically formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist James Lovelock, as a consequence of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars. He initially published the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in the early 1970s followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. The hypothesis was initially, according to Lovelock, a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested detecting such combinations in other planets’ atmospheres as a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life, which many biologists opposed at the time and since. Later, other relationships such as sea creatures producing sulfur and iodine in approximately the same quantities as required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the theory. Rather than invent many different theories to describe each such equilibrium, Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire …