“Chris, I think you will enjoy this.” It was December 1986, and those were the prophetic words of a colleague as he passed me the latest copy of New Scientist magazine. We academics read countless articles, most of which are of fleeting interest. But every so often a piece hits the “Aha” button and changes the way one thinks. So it was with the article; “Gaia: the world as living organism” (Lovelock 1986a). It was my first encounter with the mind of Jim Lovelock. At the time I was leading a rapidly growing research group dedicated to the study of the Earth from space. Using instruments on polar orbiting spacecraft, we were opening up new windows on the planet, revealing how the ice, oceans, atmosphere, and land interact. It was a thrilling time – an Aladdin’s cave of new opportunities to piece together a picture of the Earth system as an integrated whole. But as a physical scientist, with limited knowledge of biology, my focus on the biosphere was minimal. Jim’s paper argued that living organisms play an active – even dominant – role in keeping the planet fit for life. He presented his Daisyworld model to demonstrate that homeostasis through biological cybernetic feedbacks can be an emergent property. The study of the Earth system could as much ignore the role of life as it could deny the influence of atmospheric chemistry or the Sun. I was shaken. I prided myself on spotting and developing fertile connections across academic silos. It was disturbing to realize that my “biological blind spot” was a significant gap. I very much wanted to meet Jim, to explore his ideas further, but could think of only flimsy excuses. The task of developing and exploiting the early series of European polar orbiting satellites kept us busy, and so the prospect slipped to the back of my mind.