What doesn't kill Gaia makes her stronger

TL;DR

This paper uses the Tangled Nature Model to show that periods of environmental stress, while risky, can enhance evolutionary diversity and stability, influencing Earth's history and the search for extraterrestrial life.

Contribution

It demonstrates how environmental stress periods can promote evolutionary exploration and stability, extending the Entropic Gaia concept with new model insights.

Findings

Stress periods increase evolutionary exploration.

Survivors form more populous and stable states.

Refugia characteristics influence final evolutionary outcomes.

Abstract

Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called Entropic Gaia. Here we continue this exploration, working with the Tangled Nature Model of co-evolution, to understand how the evolutionary history of life is shaped by periods of acute environmental stress. We find that while these periods of stress pose a risk of complete extinction, they also create opportunities for evolutionary exploration which would otherwise be impossible, leading to more populous and stable states among the survivors than in alternative histories without a stress period. We also study how the duration, repetition and number of refugia into which life escapes during the perturbation affects the final outcome. The model results are discussed in relation to both Earth history and the search for alien life.