What is the main focus of Gaia hypothesis?

Gaia hypothesis mainly emphasizes that the biosphere is like a superorganism, and everything is interrelated.

It takes 90 minutes to travel around the world on the International Space Station. In this short time, everything passed before our eyes. Every astronaut who has had this experience once said that looking down at our blue earth, the boundaries between deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, cities and ecosystems have almost disappeared. We are connected with each other and are all part of nature.

1974, British biologist James Lovelock and American biologist Lynn margulis proposed that the biosphere should be regarded as a single life.

Gaia hypothesis holds that the biosphere is like a superorganism, and everything is interrelated. If there is a problem in one part of the earth, it will compensate or adjust the other part, just like different organs of a body work synchronously.

At that time, many scientists and other serious thinkers thought that these two men were possessed. But their ideas are not new: the traditional knowledge of many nationalities has long believed that nature is an interrelated and interdependent system. From small to large, from local to global, these interrelationships interact all the time.

Prochlorococcus is a bacterium only one millionth of a millimeter in size. It is so small that we didn't find it until 1988, but it is one of the richest creatures on earth.

There are about 20 thousand kinds of such bacteria living in a drop of seawater. Protococcus uses sunlight in shallow water to convert carbon dioxide and nutrients in seawater into energy, and releases oxygen in the process to make a living. This process is similar to what plants on land do: photosynthesis.

Land plants, our forests and grasslands, produces only half of the oxygen we breathe. The other half of the oxygen on the earth comes from the ocean, from algae on our coast, micro-plants in the ocean, and microorganisms like Prochlorococcus.

A small bacterium that we only knew about 30 years ago, and other marine creatures that most people don't know, provide oxygen with every breath. These microbes may be the smallest on our planet, but they are one of the most important basic species. As we know, the foundation of life is small but strong.

The baleen whales in the ocean, such as fin whales and blue whales, feed on small animals such as krill and small fish living in shallow waters. Toothed whales such as sperm whales feed on giant squid deep in the ocean.

Some fishermen think that whales eat too much krill and fish, so they should be killed to ensure that we humans can eat more fish. But it turns out that the situation is not so simple. The decrease of whales does not mean the increase of krill and fish. In fact, as the number of whales decreases, the number of krill is also decreasing.