That is why the astronaut's view of the Earth was so disturbing. The sense of reality comes from matching our personal mental image of the world with that we perceive by our senses. That vision of stunning beauty that dappled white and blue sphere stirred us all, no matter that by now it is just a visual cliché. When we saw a few years ago those first pictures of the Earth from space, we had a glimpse of what it was that we were trying to model.
It was all too easy to lose sight of the picture in the searching and sorting of the pieces. To understand the world was a task as difficult as that of assembling a planet-size jigsaw puzzle.
There was so much information to be gathered and sorted. It became the province of the expert, and there was little good to be said about interdisciplinary thinking. Science was developing rapidly and soon fragmented into a collection of nearly independent professions. This wholesome view of our planet did not persist into the next century. Hutton went on to make the analogy between the circulation of the blood, discovered by Harvey, and the circulation of the nutrient elements of the Earth and of the way that sunlight distills water from the oceans so that it may later fall as rain and so refresh the earth. McIntyre (1963), James Hutton, often known as the father of geology, said in a lecture before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the 1790s that he thought of the Earth as a superorganism and that its proper study would be by physiology.
Before the nineteenth century even scientists were comfortable with the notion of a living Earth. The ancient Greeks gave her the powerful name Gaia and looked on her as a goddess. The idea that the Earth is alive may be as old as humankind.
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