Earth is a 4.5-billion-year transformation is driven by physical, chemical, and biological processes. The richness of the world around us is due, in large part, to the miracle of self-organization. The Earth is a highly complex system formed by a large variety of sub-systems (biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, as well as social and economic systems etc.), which interact by the exchange of matter, energy and information. Most processes in the system Earth are characterized by complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Earth is a complex system because it instantiates life—and therefore an autopoietic, metabolic repair organization—at a planetary scale. Earth’s complexity has formal equivalence…
We have pushed our species (and many others) to the brink of extinction by misguided actions informed by a limited point of view. This epistemological blind-spot created by an exclusively quantities-focused science informed a technologically driven civilization measuring success through inadequate economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while externalizing the qualitative damage to human communities, ecosystems and the biosphere from the balance sheets. There is an international consensus that our generation is facing a convergence of multiple crises and that the same mindset that has created this convergence is incapable of solving it. Paradigms evolve and shift when the prevailing frameworks are unable…
In physics that which is called a complex system is the one that exhibits a large range of spatial scales, and modelled as exhibiting non-linear chaotic response dynamics, turbulence, and power-scaling laws. Complex systems have characteristic emergent properties that cannot be predicted and therefore are impossible to control. They are novel characteristics of the system that emerge out of interactions and relationships which are governed by non-linear, iterative processes that drive the behavior of complex systems; the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. In general, complex systems, man-made or…
The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. It is generally agreed that the Earth system is complex and that this complex character must be appreciated when modelling it and taking decisions that may influence its evolution. The Earth’s complexity resides in its causal organization, which is self-referential. The road to demonstrating that the Earth qualifies as a complex system thus passes through a consideration of the Gaia hypothesis: that the Earth is an instance of life…
