Is Earth a self-regulating organism? New study suggests our planet has a built-in climate control - Salon

But somehow, despite being pummeled by asteroids and space radiation, life on this planet has kept on keeping on for almost four billion years.

As our planet enters a Sixth Mass Extinction, driven by a wave of human activity that has wiped out thousands of species, the question of how this works — particularly, how the Earth seems to bounce back from large-scale disasters, or extreme changes in atmosphere or climate — becomes even more pressing.

New research in the journal Science Advances suggests that Earth can self-regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years.

Constantin Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, two researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, crunched the data from multiple datasets documenting the global temperature for the last 66 million years.

The two MIT scientists found a strong pattern suggesting that Earth employs feedback loops to keep its temperatures within a range where life can thrive.

However, this happens on a timescale over hundreds of thousands of years, so while it implies our planet will bounce back from anthropogenic climate change, it won't happen soon enough to save us.

"One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said?

One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said.

He called this the Gaia hypothesis, which explains how Earth and its biological systems formed feedback loops that keeps our planet favorable for living organisms.

And it would make sense that if these feedback loops exist on our planet, they may also exist in other galaxies, informing the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said.

"There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said.

Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for the further development of organic life on Earth," Lovelock wrote in his 2019 book "Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence." "The output of heat from our star is too great for life to start again as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archean Period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago.