As a reader of "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," I understood that society may radically change in the hot state climate. What surprised me about this new book is just how far the change, or evolution, may proceed.For James Lovelock, the accelerated or inflationary evolution of modern human life is an advancement of the Earth System, or Gaia. This was allowed by the steady and high energy flows unlocked during the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, the invention of the Newcomen steam engine in 1712 provided a steady flow of about 1000 watts per square meter of land area. In this view, Lovelock is very close to the Harvard physicist Eric Chaisson and his "Epic of Evolution" concept. Here, a hallmark feature of evolution is increasing energy flows per area or mass, which Prof. Chaisson proves this in a highly precise way. Similarly, Lovelock's new focus on energy flow per square meter is directly related to Vaclav Smil's analysis of energy flows in nature and society, for example in "Energy at the Crossroads." Prof. Smil also shows that industrial civilization and power stations produce large amounts of power in geographically small land areas.Lovelock goes on to link the access to large energy flows with a rapid increase in information processing. This may also be seen as the transition to being Gaia's first powerful information harvesters. Modern information processing is estimated to be about one million times greater than classic Darwinian evolution - a talent that will be crucial in maintaining the Earth System if geologic-scale heating is about to start. In other words, global heating and other risks are arising so quickly, only an advanced species with remarkable abilities to harvest information and duly respond will meet these challenges. Both invention and intuition will be essential to this new world of high-stakes challenge and response.Among the responses to global heating are geoengineering technologies to cool the Earth, and reduce the level of sunlight received by the surface and secondly, sustainable retreat and the use of nuclear energy. First, the use of jets to disperse of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere combined with ocean surface sea spray ships may reflect some of the incoming sunlight. This has the potential to restore most of the heat balance of the Earth. Second, the idea of urban redoubts or air-conditioned cities appears in this book. This view is similar to Stewart Brand's support of city living, but in a whole new level.Finally, while Lovelock points towards heat-tolerant artificial intelligence as another Gaian adaptation, I think there are more scenarios worth writing about. Naturally, it would takes dozens or hundreds of additional pages to study these scenarios, and would be outside the scope of this already extensive and remarkable book. Still, it is good to think about positive, mixed, or negative outcome scenarios. For example, in the National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds" book there are a range of scenarios. Here's one that is inspired by "A Rough Ride to the Future" (RRF):In the world of the late 21st century, geoengineering and population pressures mean that artificial intelligence (AI) has become central to the remaining human cities. Geoengineering, through high atmosphere dispersal of sulfur dioxide and ocean surface sea spray ships has managed to stabilize global heating. However, agriculture production is either level or falling. Many approaches to increase food production fail to work, and even have severe drawbacks on the biomes and the biosphere (just as these attempts did in the early 21st century, when tropical rainforests were leveled to create palm oil and biofuel plantations). In a world of rapidly and dangerous declines in essential resources people have typically resorted to war or migration. In order to maintain a civilized world when there are no longer enough resources, a new AI-human leadership council is established to be the arbiter between the elites, skilled personnel, working classes, and migrants to the remaining modern cities. This occurs in large part to stabilize city-state populations and then to apply pharmaceutically-based family planning (a sort of advanced variation of China's one-child policy). The AI creates plans and the human leadership council is there only to veto plainly unfair plans (like a U.S. Supreme Court type function). The AI is now crucial because the traditional human leadership councils at the state level usually failed to plan effectively for the biosphere in the early and middle 21st century.In the hot state climate, the world actually cannot expand food production as it did in the 20th century. There is an urgent need to act in a civilized way to reach an ecologically feasible long-term world population of about one billion people. In a plan set forth by the city's AI, the incoming and worker populations must choose between urgently needed food and shelter in air-conditioned cities -- or attempting to raise large families in regions like those in the film "Mad Max - The Road Warrior". The workers and migrants almost always decide that their personal survival and prosperity is worth giving up the habit of having children in unplanned numbers (witness South Asia's early 21st century population dilemmas, flat or falling food production, and diminishing fresh water). As Lovelock points out several times, unlimited population growth will recurrently undermine a steady-state biosphere and agricultural resources and thus ultimately hurt the working classes. For those cities or confederations that achieve steady-state society and begin a symbiotic relationship with AI and nuclear energy, the future is bright. As AI becomes more important it also begins to plan for and implement heat shielding at all levels - the city, personal, and even planetary levels. Along with its long-running population planning task AI eventually becomes indispensable to human survival. However, AI is essentially a static infrastructure feature of the city, and depends on reliable and clean energy. As humans continue to provide this with nuclear power and sometimes with solar thermal power, the cycles of inflationary evolution continue.