Humankind is clearly different from every other species of animal, however you wish to define the difference. The difference is commonly defined as self-awareness, sapience or sentience (which are commonly used as synonyms, although they mean slightly different things). However, I believe that possibly the biggest thing which separates us from the rest of animal life is that humans are aware of the fact that they are going to die.
We can often see other animals acting in ways which will clearly postpone their deaths, such as eating, drinking and fleeing predators, but I would argue that these actions are merely due to inherited instinct (for example, rabbits with a genetic predisposition to fleeing dangerous predators will survive, and be able to pass down this predisposition), rather than through any actual awareness that they might die. We on the other hand, find it possible to conceive that there will be a time when we will no longer exist, and the fear of that, I believe, drives almost all of the actions which separate us from other animals. One of the main features common to almost all humanity, but completely devoid in the rest of the animal kingdom, is religious worship. As far as I can see, this is fairly easily explained by the fear of death. As far as I know, religion first emerged in the tribal stage of humanity, with people worshipping animal and nature spirits, but more importantly, great importance was placed on respecting the spirits of their dead ancestors, whom they believed watched over them. Humans at this point, with their newly-found awareness of death, would have found comfort in the belief that they would live beyond their deaths to watch over their progeny. Although religion has come a long way since then, a constant in every modern religion (and correct me if I'm wrong), is that they all propose some form of life after death, whether through a heaven/hell concept, or some other means. It seems to me very plausible that all religion has evolved from the foundational concept of life after death, which could easily have originated by our ancestors trying to find a way not to mind too much about death. I should mention here that I don't have a problem with people believing in any religion, but I, myself, am not a believer. I respect your right to believe everything I say and believe is wrong, and it might very well be, although I, personally, am fairly sure it isn't. The example of religion is probably the biggest, but it is only one of the ways in which the awareness of death is inextricably tied into the human psyche.
I've heard that when a Roman general was victorious in a particularly major battle, he would have a slave come up to him and say: "Memento mori," roughly translated to "Remember you are going to die." The importance of the awareness of death in human culture had gotten to the point where it seemed appropriate to remind someone of it whenever they achieve something so great that they just might forget it. Egyptian Pharaohs would be buried along with all of their greatest possessions and their slaves so they would be as rich in life as they were in death, showing that they were so invested in their concept of life after death that would happily deny their families wealth and sentence their slaves to death for it's sake. The First Emperor of China even spent most of his life having a terracotta army built to guard him in his death. In this way, his fear of death was so acute that it consumed the majority of his life, not to mention the countless slaves who were forced to work themselves to death in the process. Think what could have been achieved with the same determination and manpower if it had been applied to something which could have improved peoples lives, rather than one persons death. On a much smaller scale, I think we all spend too much time and effort building terracotta armies of our own.
The waste of peoples lives in this way is far from the only consequence to humankind's obsession with death. If indeed we can attribute most, if not all, of humanity's differences to other animals with our knowledge of death, then all the ways in which humans are worse than other animals can be attributed to this as well, and there are plenty. Humans are the only animals not to live in balance with their environment; instead we devour resources at an unsustainable rate. Humans aren't adapted to any environment other than the world we've created for ourselves; we are biologically dependent on cooked food, clothes and shelter. Furthermore, humans are the only animals who do not all have fairly equal living conditions. Consider mice: although some might get eaten by a fox, or something else involving similar suffering, up until that point all the mice in the world have around the same level of living conditions. However, humans live in vastly different conditions; at the two extremes people can live in the lap of luxury, barely suffering their entire lives, or without ever having enough to eat, or clean water to drink. Eventually, I believe that the causes of all of these problems boil down to awareness of death, although it may be a complicated chain of causes. That's why, although we may never be able to lose our awareness of death, it is vitally important that we try to focus on other things, although it frightens us. We must do more important things with our lives than build terracotta armies to console our fears, and instead of remembering that we are going to die:
Rule Two: Memento Animare: Remember to live.
Sunday 6 October 2013
Sunday 29 September 2013
Meaningless Pedantry
Around 300 million years ago the Earth was home to a family of insects called Meganeuropsis, ancestors of modern day dragonflies which could reach wingspans of almost a metre, and most other insect-like life was of similar monstrous proportions compared to today's more lightweight models. While, I'm sure, many people are relieved that no insects of this size remain today, at first glance it seems odd that they would undergo such a radical change. Considering at around the time of their shrinking they were entering a world inhabited by dinosaur behemoths, why would a reduction in size help them to compete for a rare chance at life? The answer is simple: they were forced into smaller bodies because the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere had greatly depleted, and the new, smaller amount could no longer sustain their size, given their ventilation systems consisted, and still consist, of nothing more than hollow tubes which allow oxygen to diffuse into the necessary areas. However, the most interesting, at least in my opinion (which, by the way, is right), thing about this is the way that the insects adapted to cope with their now much smaller bodies. Given that a smaller organism is usually going to lose the competition for food, and thereby life, to its larger peers, the insects were forced to group together to form hives and colonies, in which many individuals work together for a common purpose, allowing them to effectively regain their former proportions.
Arrangements such as this can be seen in many organisms even beyond insects, such as coral and bacteria, and is, in my opinion (which is still right), one of the best examples of the ingenuity of evolution.
Wasn't that nice? Some solid science, all backed up by evidence and everything (well, not here, but it does exist, I've been assured), with a relevant quote from The Midwich Cuckoos, which, by the way, is a brilliant book, even if the quote was a little shoehorned in. Wouldn't it be nice if I ended it here, and didn't use this introduction as a tenuous ramp into a meaningless theory. Tough.
This colony model, called 'collective individualism' in The Midwich Cuckoos, seems very simple when you look at the larger animals, such as bees and ants, because we find it easy to class one bee, or one ant as an individual. However, when you move down to the level of bacteria, it gets a bit more complicated. Each individual single celled organism works as an essential part of the whole colony, and each bacterium would have no chance of survival without the rest of its colony. Our human bodies are comprised of many cells which are essential to the whole, and each cell would have no chance of survival on its own. Why then do we define a human body as an individuals made of lots of tiny parts, but a bacteria colony as a group formed from many individuals? People don't consider the idea of an individual a difficult concept, probably because most organisms at the level we can easily perceive fit comfortably into the traditional concept of an individual. For example, most people would be able to easily say where on elephant ends and where another begins. However, tucked away in the nooks and crannies of life lie many examples which serve to blur this concept.
Lichen, that stuff, a bit like moss, which grows on rocks and benches, was thought for a long time to be one species, presumably some time of plant, but relatively recently it was discovered that there were in fact two species in a form of symbiosis. Every 'species' of lichen is formed from a different combination of a fungal and an algal components. The fungus gives structure to the organism, and the algae provides energy for the partnership through photosynthesis. I don't know exactly where the scientific community stands on whether a patch of lichen is one, two or more individuals, but either way, it is obvious that it is difficult to tell. Other forms of symbiosis can also make individualism difficult to define. In our bodies, there are various colonies of bacteria which we could not live without, nor they without us. They may have a different genome to us, but can any organism truly be an individual if it is entirely dependent on another for every purpose? Probably, yes, given that every organism is dependent on every other by extension, and none can exist in a vacuum. However, allow me to give one more example. Animal cells contain mitochondria, small organelles which serve the purpose of producing energy for the cell. These organelles are unique in that they are smaller than most of the other parts of the cell, around the same size as a bacterium, but mostly in that they contain their own fragments of DNA, separate from the main DNA of the organism. It has been proposed, in a theory known as the endosymbiotic theory, that these mitochondria were once a separate organism to the animal cells, perhaps they were a colony already in symbiosis, but over the years they were assimilated into animal cell, until they could no longer be considered an organism in their own right. As a result of all of these cases, I think it is reasonably evident that the concept of an individual organism is a lot less simple than it originally appears, and at present, there is no appropriate way to define when one organism ends, and another begins.
It's not going too bad so far; I've pretty much stuck to established theories, presented some evidence. It sure would be a shame if I were to ruin it by proposing something new.
I hereby propose that, given the difficulty of defining the individual in the cases given above, and, since due the the variety of life I expect it will be impossible to find any other rule, there is no individual beyond an individual strand of genetic code. This individual DNA molecule will be able to replicate itself to pass on it's own structure, in the same way animals attempt to reproduce, and the DNA which codes for physical structures which prove advantageous to the colony of DNA (for example, what we would call a cat) will be able to continue it's line by reproducing with another colony (another cat), to found new colonies. Of course, although this may technically be the only way to define an individual which holds true for all life, it is clear, if only from the difficulty of phrasing the previous sentence that it is nigh on useless for almost all purposes, for example the describing process of evolution, as many individual DNA molecules will not actually be involved, at least directly, in traditional reproduction, only the ones which undergo meiosis to form gametes. Thus, I propose that it is necessary to form a second definition of individualism, a practical individualism as opposed to the previous technical individualism, which can be used for more general scientific and trivial purposes, while technical individualism may be used only for classification of individuals, or when someone wants to sound pretentious. As the main problem with technical individuals was that not all the individuals were directly involved in reproduction, causing difficulties with describing evolution, my suggestion for a definition of practical individualism is as follows: a pragmatic individual is a group of technical individuals (strands of DNA) which contribute towards a constant part of the groups acts of reproduction to form a similar groups.
This doesn't seem to be clear, so I'll give some examples. But firstly, to make things clearer, I'm going to put forward a quick code to make things less confusing with three different types of individualism floating around. I should have done this ages ago. Here goes. From here on, a 'c-human' refers to a human with conventional individualism (one person), a 't-human' refers to a human with technical individualism (a strand of human DNA), 'p-human' refers to a human with practical individualism and 'human' on its own refers to the human species. Since c-humans can reproduce with more than one other c-human in their life, the only constant group of t-humans which are involved in the reproductive process of humans are those in one c-human. Therefore, a p-human is the same as a c-human. The mitochondria found in a human cell do not undergo individual reproduction (they do replicate within cells, but the only ones which are propagated are the ones present in human gametes), so they are considered part of the p-human. However, the other colonies of c-bacteria present in the human body can, and do reproduce separately to the c-human, so they are not considered to be part of the p-human. As for the c-bacteria themselves, each c-bacterium (in most species of bacteria that I know of that is; I'm sure there are examples where this is not true) can self replicate, so the only constant group of t-bacteria in a c-bacterium's reproductive acts are those in one c-bacterium. Therefore, a p-bacterium (at least for those which self replicate independently) is the same as a c-bacterium. As can be seen, in many cases, practical individualism will yield the same results as traditional individualism. However, this is not always the case. For example, in a colony of c-ants, as far as I understand, the vast majority of the c-ants will not, or in some cases are not even capable of reproducing themselves, so one c-ant of this kind clearly cannot be a p-ant. Furthermore, as in each colony there is only one queen c-ant, the only female capable of reproduction, and as there is no interbreeding between colonies as far as I know, the entire colony's chances of reproduction are inexorably tied together, or in other words, all of the t-ants in the colony of c-ants are constants in all of its acts of reproduction, directly or indirectly, the colony of c-ants is only one p-ant. Some species of ant, when fighting colonies of other species, capture their pupae and raise the young c-ants to be their own slaves, which also work enthusiastically towards the, eventually, reproductive goals of their community, without breeding themselves. These c-ants, due to these conditions, would also form part of the p-ant, and let this act as a clarification: a practical individual can be composed of more than one species of technical individual. The example of ants also serves to show why I feel that practical individualism is a more accurate way to classify life, due to the following. In c-ant colonies, female c-ants which are sterile are very regularly produced, which, while they form an important part of the colony, does not seem to make evolutionary sense, as surely a c-ant which is sterile would not be able to pass down the genes which make it sterile. However, based on the pragmatic model of individualism, the sterile c-ant has the same relationship to the queen c-ant as a human arm or leg does to human reproductive organs; while not directly involved in the process of reproduction, it does aid it to get into a position where it is able to reproduce, and therefore, it makes just as much sense for a fertile c-ant to have the genes to regularly produce sterile ants as it does for human genes to contain the information to build arms and legs, as oppose to solely reproductive organs. All in all, pragmatic individualism would have to be applied separately to each species, taking into mind it's reproductive habits, but I do find it can be more helpful to explain some aspects in the areas where it differs from conventional individualism.
Well, if you got through all of that, you should: a) offer yourself a hearty handshake in congratulation (which, if successful, would itself be worthy of merit), and b) reconsider your priorities in life (which, by the way, is a joke; reading things I write is an excellent use of time). In conclusion, since I feel the current method of distinguishing between individuals is flawed, I have proposed a new method, technical individualism, which works for all life has uses for classification of species (I'll expand on that another time) and being pretentious, but is not so useful for studying evolutionary processes and the like, for which I have proposed practical individualism, which likely will not work for all of life, but appears more useful than either conventional or technical individualism for some purposes. Of course, if by some crazy, random, happen-stance these ideas were ever to become widely accepted, they would be almost unique among accepted scientific theory in that they mean absolutely nothing, given that all life pretty much exists as one big squishy-mushy mess, and humans trying to put labels on certain parts of it is nothing more than meaningless pedantry.
A number of forms that appear at first sight to be individuals turn out to be colonies - and many forms cannot survive at all unless they create colonies which operate as individuals.
The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham
Arrangements such as this can be seen in many organisms even beyond insects, such as coral and bacteria, and is, in my opinion (which is still right), one of the best examples of the ingenuity of evolution.
Wasn't that nice? Some solid science, all backed up by evidence and everything (well, not here, but it does exist, I've been assured), with a relevant quote from The Midwich Cuckoos, which, by the way, is a brilliant book, even if the quote was a little shoehorned in. Wouldn't it be nice if I ended it here, and didn't use this introduction as a tenuous ramp into a meaningless theory. Tough.
This colony model, called 'collective individualism' in The Midwich Cuckoos, seems very simple when you look at the larger animals, such as bees and ants, because we find it easy to class one bee, or one ant as an individual. However, when you move down to the level of bacteria, it gets a bit more complicated. Each individual single celled organism works as an essential part of the whole colony, and each bacterium would have no chance of survival without the rest of its colony. Our human bodies are comprised of many cells which are essential to the whole, and each cell would have no chance of survival on its own. Why then do we define a human body as an individuals made of lots of tiny parts, but a bacteria colony as a group formed from many individuals? People don't consider the idea of an individual a difficult concept, probably because most organisms at the level we can easily perceive fit comfortably into the traditional concept of an individual. For example, most people would be able to easily say where on elephant ends and where another begins. However, tucked away in the nooks and crannies of life lie many examples which serve to blur this concept.
Lichen, that stuff, a bit like moss, which grows on rocks and benches, was thought for a long time to be one species, presumably some time of plant, but relatively recently it was discovered that there were in fact two species in a form of symbiosis. Every 'species' of lichen is formed from a different combination of a fungal and an algal components. The fungus gives structure to the organism, and the algae provides energy for the partnership through photosynthesis. I don't know exactly where the scientific community stands on whether a patch of lichen is one, two or more individuals, but either way, it is obvious that it is difficult to tell. Other forms of symbiosis can also make individualism difficult to define. In our bodies, there are various colonies of bacteria which we could not live without, nor they without us. They may have a different genome to us, but can any organism truly be an individual if it is entirely dependent on another for every purpose? Probably, yes, given that every organism is dependent on every other by extension, and none can exist in a vacuum. However, allow me to give one more example. Animal cells contain mitochondria, small organelles which serve the purpose of producing energy for the cell. These organelles are unique in that they are smaller than most of the other parts of the cell, around the same size as a bacterium, but mostly in that they contain their own fragments of DNA, separate from the main DNA of the organism. It has been proposed, in a theory known as the endosymbiotic theory, that these mitochondria were once a separate organism to the animal cells, perhaps they were a colony already in symbiosis, but over the years they were assimilated into animal cell, until they could no longer be considered an organism in their own right. As a result of all of these cases, I think it is reasonably evident that the concept of an individual organism is a lot less simple than it originally appears, and at present, there is no appropriate way to define when one organism ends, and another begins.
It's not going too bad so far; I've pretty much stuck to established theories, presented some evidence. It sure would be a shame if I were to ruin it by proposing something new.
I hereby propose that, given the difficulty of defining the individual in the cases given above, and, since due the the variety of life I expect it will be impossible to find any other rule, there is no individual beyond an individual strand of genetic code. This individual DNA molecule will be able to replicate itself to pass on it's own structure, in the same way animals attempt to reproduce, and the DNA which codes for physical structures which prove advantageous to the colony of DNA (for example, what we would call a cat) will be able to continue it's line by reproducing with another colony (another cat), to found new colonies. Of course, although this may technically be the only way to define an individual which holds true for all life, it is clear, if only from the difficulty of phrasing the previous sentence that it is nigh on useless for almost all purposes, for example the describing process of evolution, as many individual DNA molecules will not actually be involved, at least directly, in traditional reproduction, only the ones which undergo meiosis to form gametes. Thus, I propose that it is necessary to form a second definition of individualism, a practical individualism as opposed to the previous technical individualism, which can be used for more general scientific and trivial purposes, while technical individualism may be used only for classification of individuals, or when someone wants to sound pretentious. As the main problem with technical individuals was that not all the individuals were directly involved in reproduction, causing difficulties with describing evolution, my suggestion for a definition of practical individualism is as follows: a pragmatic individual is a group of technical individuals (strands of DNA) which contribute towards a constant part of the groups acts of reproduction to form a similar groups.
This doesn't seem to be clear, so I'll give some examples. But firstly, to make things clearer, I'm going to put forward a quick code to make things less confusing with three different types of individualism floating around. I should have done this ages ago. Here goes. From here on, a 'c-human' refers to a human with conventional individualism (one person), a 't-human' refers to a human with technical individualism (a strand of human DNA), 'p-human' refers to a human with practical individualism and 'human' on its own refers to the human species. Since c-humans can reproduce with more than one other c-human in their life, the only constant group of t-humans which are involved in the reproductive process of humans are those in one c-human. Therefore, a p-human is the same as a c-human. The mitochondria found in a human cell do not undergo individual reproduction (they do replicate within cells, but the only ones which are propagated are the ones present in human gametes), so they are considered part of the p-human. However, the other colonies of c-bacteria present in the human body can, and do reproduce separately to the c-human, so they are not considered to be part of the p-human. As for the c-bacteria themselves, each c-bacterium (in most species of bacteria that I know of that is; I'm sure there are examples where this is not true) can self replicate, so the only constant group of t-bacteria in a c-bacterium's reproductive acts are those in one c-bacterium. Therefore, a p-bacterium (at least for those which self replicate independently) is the same as a c-bacterium. As can be seen, in many cases, practical individualism will yield the same results as traditional individualism. However, this is not always the case. For example, in a colony of c-ants, as far as I understand, the vast majority of the c-ants will not, or in some cases are not even capable of reproducing themselves, so one c-ant of this kind clearly cannot be a p-ant. Furthermore, as in each colony there is only one queen c-ant, the only female capable of reproduction, and as there is no interbreeding between colonies as far as I know, the entire colony's chances of reproduction are inexorably tied together, or in other words, all of the t-ants in the colony of c-ants are constants in all of its acts of reproduction, directly or indirectly, the colony of c-ants is only one p-ant. Some species of ant, when fighting colonies of other species, capture their pupae and raise the young c-ants to be their own slaves, which also work enthusiastically towards the, eventually, reproductive goals of their community, without breeding themselves. These c-ants, due to these conditions, would also form part of the p-ant, and let this act as a clarification: a practical individual can be composed of more than one species of technical individual. The example of ants also serves to show why I feel that practical individualism is a more accurate way to classify life, due to the following. In c-ant colonies, female c-ants which are sterile are very regularly produced, which, while they form an important part of the colony, does not seem to make evolutionary sense, as surely a c-ant which is sterile would not be able to pass down the genes which make it sterile. However, based on the pragmatic model of individualism, the sterile c-ant has the same relationship to the queen c-ant as a human arm or leg does to human reproductive organs; while not directly involved in the process of reproduction, it does aid it to get into a position where it is able to reproduce, and therefore, it makes just as much sense for a fertile c-ant to have the genes to regularly produce sterile ants as it does for human genes to contain the information to build arms and legs, as oppose to solely reproductive organs. All in all, pragmatic individualism would have to be applied separately to each species, taking into mind it's reproductive habits, but I do find it can be more helpful to explain some aspects in the areas where it differs from conventional individualism.
Well, if you got through all of that, you should: a) offer yourself a hearty handshake in congratulation (which, if successful, would itself be worthy of merit), and b) reconsider your priorities in life (which, by the way, is a joke; reading things I write is an excellent use of time). In conclusion, since I feel the current method of distinguishing between individuals is flawed, I have proposed a new method, technical individualism, which works for all life has uses for classification of species (I'll expand on that another time) and being pretentious, but is not so useful for studying evolutionary processes and the like, for which I have proposed practical individualism, which likely will not work for all of life, but appears more useful than either conventional or technical individualism for some purposes. Of course, if by some crazy, random, happen-stance these ideas were ever to become widely accepted, they would be almost unique among accepted scientific theory in that they mean absolutely nothing, given that all life pretty much exists as one big squishy-mushy mess, and humans trying to put labels on certain parts of it is nothing more than meaningless pedantry.
Sunday 22 September 2013
Primordial Soup
So, I decided to write a blog. I've got a fairly good idea of where I want it to go, and what I want to say in it, but absolutely no idea how to start it, cause just posting something out of the blue with no introduction seems a bit abrupt, but all introduction-y things I can think of seem too formal somehow, so if you could all read this as if you know what's happening, and what sort of stuff this is going to be about, that would be great. You don't of course, but you will soon. Hopefully. Hang on to your metaphorical hats. Unless you're wearing an actual hat. Then hold on to that.
I have no idea how life started on this planet. I've heard that it all happened in something called 'primordial soup', which I can only assume is a magma like mix of molten minerals, water and the like, but I have no idea what actually happened to make things change from being not alive to being alive. As far as I know, no-one else really knows either, but I assume that there are lots of people out there with a much better idea of it than me. For some reason, I've never actually done much research into it. Honestly, I think it's because I'm scared of what I might find out. Right at the core of my belief system is the belief that life as a whole is special, and that a very clear line can be drawn between things which are alive, and things which aren't, but I expect that if I ever had a look around the internet, all the evidence would point towards chemical reactions slowly becoming more and more complex until eventually they were life, without any way to pinpoint exactly where they became so. That frightens me a little. What's more, I really don't know what I want the answer to be, so I try not to think about it. It's not a very scientific viewpoint, nor one I'm proud of, but there you have it.
Nonetheless, one thing about the origin of life is clear to me; it was very, very lucky. Whatever it was that happened all those billions of years ago, as far as we can tell it hasn't happened again on Earth since, nor on any other planet we've been able to observe. In spite of this, there must be other planets somewhere out there in the sky with the potential to harbour life, whether or not (and I'm sure the answer for most, if not all is 'not') they actually have developed it. There are just too many stars and galaxies for there not to be many other places which fulfil the conditions, which, as far as I know, basically boil down to having sufficient mass to sustain an atmosphere, not being to close too a star, not being too far away from a star, and having water present. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that, but regardless, other planets which life could survive on must exist. Put this somewhere in the back of your head for a second, we'll be back to it later.
Okay, quick intermission. As you've probably all noticed, I clearly don't know much about anything I'm saying. This is because I don't know everything. What's more, I don't know many things. If you compared all the things I do know against all the things I don't know, the things I do know would show up as a statistical anomaly. Mathematically speaking, you should ignore them. It's one of my main goals in life to learn as much as I possibly can about the world around me, but for each thing I mention here, I can't possibly research properly, because each one is vast enough to easily fill a lifetimes worth of research. Also, I'm quite lazy. So for now, we're going to have to settle with assumptions, analogies and 'as far as I know's, the three 'A's of blogging. Yeah, I'm making up rules about blogging before I even finish my first post. Sue me.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that life is incredibly special, which I hope to expand upon at sometime in the future, but for now, I'll leave it there. Also, as far as we know, our planet could be the only place in the universe where this life exists, which is bad, because in eight billion years, this planet is going to be swallowed up by the sun. Sure, it sounds like a long time away now, but I bet it'll come sooner than you think. I know by that time humanity will have long gone anyway, but it seems like a shame that the rest of life won't be able to live on past then. Except, I think that maybe it doesn't have to be. Although I generally see humanity as a bit of a dead end as far as evolution is concerned, maybe we can help to push forward life in ways other species cannot. Some of the species on this planet are incredibly resilient, for example, Deinococcus radiodurans, a species of bacteria able to withstand up to one thousand times more radiation than a human, by piecing back together the pieces of its shattered genome time and time again. This species, and many others with similarly amazing adaptation, could, I'm sure, colonise some of the previously mentioned life-support capable planets, but they have no possible way to reach them, so they're doomed to be consumed by the sun. However, surely we could build lots of tiny space vessels, fill them with various species of resilient bacteria, and send them off randomly into every corner of the sky, in the hope that one of them would reach somewhere it can found a population, and maybe, in eight billion years time, just as the Earth is being consumed, flora and fauna like life will begin to emerge on the new colonised planets. Surely it wouldn't be too expensive, we send things into space all the time, and it shouldn't require any propulsion once it leaves Earth's gravity.
My first assumption for a problem with this idea would be, considering the vast amount of time the arc would have to be floating through space, there's nothing we could possibly do to keep the bacteria alive the entire way, as food and other resources would eventually run out. However, technically the Earth is a closed system with finite resources, however since pretty much all of life, bar humans, lives in balance with the environment, the finite resources can sustain a limited population indefinitely. Furthermore, it is possible to make a bottle garden, a sealed bottle with plants inside, which can last indefinitely with a small amount of water and nutrients, as the plant population will quickly stabilise to form a perfect balance with the resources available. If small, lightweight and airtight bacterial bottle gardens could be perfected, they could be propelled into space in all directions, where eventually one of them might collide with a planet where the bacteria could colonise and eventually evolve into a more complex ecosystem, like the one we have on Earth today. There are plants which, once mature, grow seed pods which will swell to huge sizes, until they explode, scattering their progeny over the surrounding environment, which can grow to maturity themselves before releasing more exploding seed pods. Perhaps the intergalactic survival of life could work as a macrocosm of this; if a bacterial arc arrived on a planet, eventually through evolution, a civilised species like mankind could arise, which could create it's own arcs and release them into space, and so the process would go on, meaning that life would be able to far outlive the timespan of any single planet.
Of course, according to most theories, the universe is set to end at some point, and anyway, even if this process worked for a while, at some point it would likely fail, by pure chance of no arcs reaching an appropriate harbour, so the entire process is effectively just delaying the inevitable. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. If you think about it, every organism has to die at some point, so every time it wards off death by eating, or breathing, or fighting off a competitor, it is merely delaying the inevitable. However, if the first tiny microbe which came into existence had just given up, because really, what's the point, we wouldn't even exist. Similarly, evolution is entirely propelled by delaying the inevitable. If animals didn't struggle do survive, despite the knowledge they were going to die anyway, the fitter among them wouldn't be able to supersede the weaker, and life would never have been able to progress beyond single-celled blips. However, the main reason why delaying the inevitable is never pointless, is because our tiny human minds are completely incapable of deciding when something is without hope or not. We know nothing, and every last extra second of existence we can scrape gives us a slightly better chance for something completely incomprehensible and brilliant to happen. If you take one thing away from this post (and I would be ecstatic if anyone did), it is this:
Rule One: Always delay the inevitable.
Dang straight I'm doing rules. I like to think that there are things that I can contribute towards ethics, and this is it. Does it make me sound conceited, self important and a bit of a twit? Probably. Am I conceited, self-important and a bit of a twit? Definitely. Ignore all this stuff if you want, but if there's anyone who wants to listen, I'll be here talking. Well, typing. Or, tapping at a screen. Mind you, those phone keypads are tiny. I'll stick with my laptop.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure we're nigh on the end of this post, mainly because I feel like I'm beginning to outstay my welcome in your cerebral cortex, assuming you didn't kick me out somewhere around the first intermission. In conclusion, I think the idea for a bacterialarcspewingexplodingseedpod model of life is a plausible one, and it doesn't even have to have started on Earth. I'm trying not to come across as a conspiracy theorist here, and say aliens put us all here, but it's not entirely impossible that all life on this planet originated from a stray bacterium like organism sent here in a bottle from a planet light years away. We could be at the second, third, or five hundred and ninety second stage of the seed pod model for all we know. Maybe that's an explanation for life coming into being on this planet that I could live with. I'm aware it doesn't really seem to help at all, it's merely delaying the inevitable point where I'm going to have to consider how the first microbe came into being, in some primordial soup on a rock floating through space millions of light years away, but, you know, Rule One.
Full circle!
I have no idea how life started on this planet. I've heard that it all happened in something called 'primordial soup', which I can only assume is a magma like mix of molten minerals, water and the like, but I have no idea what actually happened to make things change from being not alive to being alive. As far as I know, no-one else really knows either, but I assume that there are lots of people out there with a much better idea of it than me. For some reason, I've never actually done much research into it. Honestly, I think it's because I'm scared of what I might find out. Right at the core of my belief system is the belief that life as a whole is special, and that a very clear line can be drawn between things which are alive, and things which aren't, but I expect that if I ever had a look around the internet, all the evidence would point towards chemical reactions slowly becoming more and more complex until eventually they were life, without any way to pinpoint exactly where they became so. That frightens me a little. What's more, I really don't know what I want the answer to be, so I try not to think about it. It's not a very scientific viewpoint, nor one I'm proud of, but there you have it.
Nonetheless, one thing about the origin of life is clear to me; it was very, very lucky. Whatever it was that happened all those billions of years ago, as far as we can tell it hasn't happened again on Earth since, nor on any other planet we've been able to observe. In spite of this, there must be other planets somewhere out there in the sky with the potential to harbour life, whether or not (and I'm sure the answer for most, if not all is 'not') they actually have developed it. There are just too many stars and galaxies for there not to be many other places which fulfil the conditions, which, as far as I know, basically boil down to having sufficient mass to sustain an atmosphere, not being to close too a star, not being too far away from a star, and having water present. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that, but regardless, other planets which life could survive on must exist. Put this somewhere in the back of your head for a second, we'll be back to it later.
Okay, quick intermission. As you've probably all noticed, I clearly don't know much about anything I'm saying. This is because I don't know everything. What's more, I don't know many things. If you compared all the things I do know against all the things I don't know, the things I do know would show up as a statistical anomaly. Mathematically speaking, you should ignore them. It's one of my main goals in life to learn as much as I possibly can about the world around me, but for each thing I mention here, I can't possibly research properly, because each one is vast enough to easily fill a lifetimes worth of research. Also, I'm quite lazy. So for now, we're going to have to settle with assumptions, analogies and 'as far as I know's, the three 'A's of blogging. Yeah, I'm making up rules about blogging before I even finish my first post. Sue me.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that life is incredibly special, which I hope to expand upon at sometime in the future, but for now, I'll leave it there. Also, as far as we know, our planet could be the only place in the universe where this life exists, which is bad, because in eight billion years, this planet is going to be swallowed up by the sun. Sure, it sounds like a long time away now, but I bet it'll come sooner than you think. I know by that time humanity will have long gone anyway, but it seems like a shame that the rest of life won't be able to live on past then. Except, I think that maybe it doesn't have to be. Although I generally see humanity as a bit of a dead end as far as evolution is concerned, maybe we can help to push forward life in ways other species cannot. Some of the species on this planet are incredibly resilient, for example, Deinococcus radiodurans, a species of bacteria able to withstand up to one thousand times more radiation than a human, by piecing back together the pieces of its shattered genome time and time again. This species, and many others with similarly amazing adaptation, could, I'm sure, colonise some of the previously mentioned life-support capable planets, but they have no possible way to reach them, so they're doomed to be consumed by the sun. However, surely we could build lots of tiny space vessels, fill them with various species of resilient bacteria, and send them off randomly into every corner of the sky, in the hope that one of them would reach somewhere it can found a population, and maybe, in eight billion years time, just as the Earth is being consumed, flora and fauna like life will begin to emerge on the new colonised planets. Surely it wouldn't be too expensive, we send things into space all the time, and it shouldn't require any propulsion once it leaves Earth's gravity.
My first assumption for a problem with this idea would be, considering the vast amount of time the arc would have to be floating through space, there's nothing we could possibly do to keep the bacteria alive the entire way, as food and other resources would eventually run out. However, technically the Earth is a closed system with finite resources, however since pretty much all of life, bar humans, lives in balance with the environment, the finite resources can sustain a limited population indefinitely. Furthermore, it is possible to make a bottle garden, a sealed bottle with plants inside, which can last indefinitely with a small amount of water and nutrients, as the plant population will quickly stabilise to form a perfect balance with the resources available. If small, lightweight and airtight bacterial bottle gardens could be perfected, they could be propelled into space in all directions, where eventually one of them might collide with a planet where the bacteria could colonise and eventually evolve into a more complex ecosystem, like the one we have on Earth today. There are plants which, once mature, grow seed pods which will swell to huge sizes, until they explode, scattering their progeny over the surrounding environment, which can grow to maturity themselves before releasing more exploding seed pods. Perhaps the intergalactic survival of life could work as a macrocosm of this; if a bacterial arc arrived on a planet, eventually through evolution, a civilised species like mankind could arise, which could create it's own arcs and release them into space, and so the process would go on, meaning that life would be able to far outlive the timespan of any single planet.
Of course, according to most theories, the universe is set to end at some point, and anyway, even if this process worked for a while, at some point it would likely fail, by pure chance of no arcs reaching an appropriate harbour, so the entire process is effectively just delaying the inevitable. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. If you think about it, every organism has to die at some point, so every time it wards off death by eating, or breathing, or fighting off a competitor, it is merely delaying the inevitable. However, if the first tiny microbe which came into existence had just given up, because really, what's the point, we wouldn't even exist. Similarly, evolution is entirely propelled by delaying the inevitable. If animals didn't struggle do survive, despite the knowledge they were going to die anyway, the fitter among them wouldn't be able to supersede the weaker, and life would never have been able to progress beyond single-celled blips. However, the main reason why delaying the inevitable is never pointless, is because our tiny human minds are completely incapable of deciding when something is without hope or not. We know nothing, and every last extra second of existence we can scrape gives us a slightly better chance for something completely incomprehensible and brilliant to happen. If you take one thing away from this post (and I would be ecstatic if anyone did), it is this:
Rule One: Always delay the inevitable.
Dang straight I'm doing rules. I like to think that there are things that I can contribute towards ethics, and this is it. Does it make me sound conceited, self important and a bit of a twit? Probably. Am I conceited, self-important and a bit of a twit? Definitely. Ignore all this stuff if you want, but if there's anyone who wants to listen, I'll be here talking. Well, typing. Or, tapping at a screen. Mind you, those phone keypads are tiny. I'll stick with my laptop.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure we're nigh on the end of this post, mainly because I feel like I'm beginning to outstay my welcome in your cerebral cortex, assuming you didn't kick me out somewhere around the first intermission. In conclusion, I think the idea for a bacterialarcspewingexplodingseedpod model of life is a plausible one, and it doesn't even have to have started on Earth. I'm trying not to come across as a conspiracy theorist here, and say aliens put us all here, but it's not entirely impossible that all life on this planet originated from a stray bacterium like organism sent here in a bottle from a planet light years away. We could be at the second, third, or five hundred and ninety second stage of the seed pod model for all we know. Maybe that's an explanation for life coming into being on this planet that I could live with. I'm aware it doesn't really seem to help at all, it's merely delaying the inevitable point where I'm going to have to consider how the first microbe came into being, in some primordial soup on a rock floating through space millions of light years away, but, you know, Rule One.
Full circle!
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