Have you ever considered that the earth itself is alive?

A cell is not an organism, but a cell is alive.

Everybody agrees about that.

So why can't we extend that to things that are larger than organisms?

It's Wednesday, July 3rd and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm Seyfry producer Rasha Erredi. A new book called The Coming Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life,

by science writer Ferris Jabor, argues that life doesn't just exist on Earth's surface,

that we and all these critters and plants and microbes aren't just

hitching a ride around the galaxy on the space rock we call Earth. Instead, life itself is Earth. The book takes readers on adventures all across the world to learn how life transformed the planet and how we fit into the picture. Here's guest host, Anna Rothschild.

So Ferris, what do you mean when you say that Earth is alive?

So the fundamental concept of a living world or a living planet is really ancient.

You know, we find this in mythologies and religions going way back in time,

but within the history of Western science this concept of a living planet has been rather

controversial for a long time and it was really popularized by the Gaya hypothesis

introduced in the 1960s and 70s.

In the course of writing this book, I've come to see life not as something that simply exists on the surface of the planet,

but rather as a physical extension of the planet.

And I think that what we call life and the larger planetary environment together form a single highly interconnected living system.

So I've come to see all the organisms on the planet plus the planet itself as the largest

known living system, the largest living entity that we know of.

How did you arrive at this idea that Earth came to life?

For me, it began at least 10 years ago when I learned this incredible fact about our planet's largest

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