A radical vision of humanity's future as the thinking brain of our Earth-system, from the great scientific visionary of our age James Lovelock, who has been hailed as 'the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin' (Independent), continues in his 95th year to be the great scientific visionary of our age. This book introduces two new Lovelockian ideas. The first is that 300 years ago the invention of the steam engine unknowingly began a process which is bringing about change on our planet roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution. The second is that as part of this process, humanity has the capacity to become the directing intelligence of Gaia, the self-regulating Earth system whose discovery Lovelock first announced nearly 50 years ago. In addition, Lovelock gives his reflections on how scientific advances are made, and his own remarkable life as a lone scientist.