It’s our final podcast on Foundation’s Edge as we discuss chapters 17 to 20!
“Once This Podcast is Attained All Sighs Become Sighs of Ecstasy”
My Mom, an unabashed fan of Joseph Campbell, frequently counseled me to “find my bliss.” I think I’ve done pretty well.
Collectively, though, we may have found our Bliss as we reach the closing chapters of our novel, “Gaia,” “Collision,” “Decision,” and “Conclusion.” Our heroes have arrived at Gaia, and all our principal characters are on the scene. Stuff is finally happening! This is as action-packed as an Asimov story can be!
And we finally, through Golan Trevize, learn the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Interregnum, and Everything! Spoiler alert: it isn’t “42.”
Let’s GO!
Stars End: A Foundation Podcast 
I was wondering, back when the readings got to about the middle section, if we were going to encounter the Gaia Hypothesis (& I then went ahead & finished the book but kept quiet about the end). This wonderful Foundation book has got several of the fashionable scientific controversies or fads of the late ”70’s – early ’80’s & I sure remember this one.
I was nearly derailed by the wretched chapter “Gaia” and fully prepared to despise Bliss – but I think what happened here is that Asimov decided to abruptly terminate our interest in the 3 or maybe 4 way story he’d been plotting and wrench us into Gaia. Which then turns out to be the master/mistress of the entire story (again, a female runs the whole show – whether it’s Bliss or the consciousness rep’d by Gaia, a female goddess). In any event, ample recovery and presumably the ending is no ending.
We already had dynamic systems theory and maybe catastrophe theory, and here we encounter a planet that has absorbed or co-evolved with a human contingent to create an enormous federated being. At the same time I read this chapter, this astounding podcast from the BBC program In Our Time showed up in the feed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vl96 describing panpsychism – I think this is much closer to what Asimov is describing than Gaia hypothesis. I didn’t realize panpsychism was still a current subject of interest (Leibnitz, maybe, but ancient Greek for sure) – listen for yourself. (It also mentions Chalmer’s Philosophical Zombie, which is from the ’90’s, but is sure a good description of Asimov’s advanced robots.) Asimov repeatedly has characters saying Gaia is not Earth which may be where he comes down on the Gaia hypothesis.
James Lovelock came up with the Gaia hypothesis after a stint at NASA working on sensors or something like that (he was some kind of biologist or chemist). About 1970 Lynn Margolis took up the Gaia idea, used it in one of her books, and together they developed the idea in the early ’70’s. Lynn Margolis -or maybe Lynn Sagan at the time, married to Carl Sagan for a while – came to be well known for her idea that the interesting organelles of eukaryotic organisms (like us) were symbiotic prokaryotic bacteria. She wrote a paper about this in the mid ’60’s and laid out a scheme for the origin of mitochondria, chloroplasts and a couple of others – the first two turned out to be right on, but it took decades to prove and a lot of advances in DNA work. Margolis, or Sagan, was ALSO a biology faculty member at Boston University starting in the mid ’60’s. It seems likely that Asimov and Margolis must’ve known about each other, given they were in similar departments and had some similar scientific interests, but perhaps not. Asimov was pretty disconnected from teaching by then and besides BU is a huge institution with multiple campuses. Margolis’ main interest was in various kinds of symbiosis and I don’t know that she stuck with Gaia particularly after the ’70’s. Still.
Finally- something else was bothering me, I was picking up some other influence but I couldn’t place it. The last chapters got to me – I think it’s the Lensman series. See if the last half of the Agent chapter or Table don’t seem familiar in that direction, assuming readers know this series too. I’ll have to reread one of the better ones sometime, maybe Gray Lensman … oh this is funny. I went and got In Memory Yet Green from the library (p 198):
That’s just too delicious a double coincidence to be a coincidence! (This auto-bio published about 1980)
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