In 2020 james lovelock told the Observer, a British Sunday paper, that “the biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives”. He was wrong about himself, by a factor of about two: he died on July 26th, his 103rd birthday.

Dr Lovelock was one of the most influential scientific minds of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was best known for the Gaia hypothesis, which captured the imaginations of the scientifically minded and mystically inclined alike with its proposal that life on Earth behaves like a mega-organism. He argued that all living things combine, through their interactions with each other and the physical systems around them, to regulate the planet’s temperature and chemistry in such a way that keeps conditions relatively stable and suitable for their persistence. “Life at an early stage of its evolution acquired the capacity to control the global environment to suit its needs,” he wrote in a short note published in 1972, in which he described “the sum total of species” as “a large creature” possessing “properties greater than the simple sum of its parts”...

The Economist: Farewell to James Lovelock

The Guardian: James Lovelock, creator of Gaia hypothesis, dies on 103rd birthday