The visionary Earth scientist suggests two new big ideas: the first is that three hundred years ago, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine, he was unknowingly beginning ‘accelerated evolution’, 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 intelligent part of Gaia, the self-regulating Earth system whose discovery Lovelock first announced nearly 50 years ago.