NOT content with discovering dinosaurs in The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger later set out to prove that the Earth was a vast organism. He dropped a dart down a mine shaft and “through every vent and every volcano she voiced her indignation”, reports the narrator of , his 1929 short story. Organism or not, the Earth is proving surprisingly sensitive to interference (see “Bury the carbon and set off a quake”). We would be well advised to show more caution than the brusque Professor Challenger when we poke into it.
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