Polynomial

The way life seeded is only a very vague sensation for me… One that I can only begin to recall in moments of stillness and solitude. But none the less… Time and effort has rekindled a flame of Knowing within, and having been fortunate enough to have been provided with a sound understanding of much of the pertinent biochemistry and scientific knowledge that is required to understand the mechanisms of Life, much of which was provided through a diligent education here on Earth, these crinkled instinctual flashbacks have now been washed and hung out to reveal a vibrant and colorful array of silk garments… Garments that are now blowing breezily in the winds of time… Drying into their light and natural flowing fabric for all of us to don and enjoy.

For the sturdy frames of empricial evidence that hold them for the moment, fit more aptly to the facts and memories we all hold inside than any fantasy that I could have hoped to conjoure up by myself. And as the very notion of empiricism proclaims, these are deductions based on a sound evidence supported by datum that any person can easily rediscover for themselves, given the time and inclination to do so…

So in this essay I will attempt to bring to the surface the basis of these recollections that stir deep within my intuition, for they have remained dormant in the very core of my being for long enough, awaiting to emerge as a caterpillar does after it has rested and metamorphosed into what it is was born to be.

Again, I will not attempt to cover every aspect of the complex cascade of biological and biochemcial interactions that make up what we know as Life here on Earth today… For that would take almost a life time of effort from us both… And also, perhaps I feel that this effort might only serve to baffle readers who do not have a firm grasp of chemistry. And as clairty is my main aim… I’d rather present just one notion of how the complex structure of a cell can easily come about in nature, without any divine help… Something that only requires a pin’s head of basic chemistry. But more so, it appropriately demonstrates how some of the basic physical properties of atoms and their respective molecules can give rise to seemingly complex organic structures that can “seem” to suggest divine intervention. But all it is, is really an extended game of that childhood favorite… Namely “Tag” or “It”. For if we were to journey back through time, we would all find that we have all engaged in a long line of intimate physicial contact with forefathers… Contact that immdiately joins back to our mothers, and then our mothers’ mothers, back to their mothers, etc… AND this will stem all the way back to the very first organisms present here on Earth!!! THINK ABOUT IT!!! What a game, eh? What a game…

While it would no doubt be a bonus to have at one’s command some basic chemistry to understand how the flow of this monumentous game of “tag” evolved from humble biochemical beginnings into what we now call Life, it is not essential… For once the basis of how complex forms can very easily arise in nature has been grasped, I trust you will begin to see how obvious Life is, and that it might well be more of a common and Universal occurence than some of us care to admit.

In many ways, this carries on directly from where I left off with “On The Formation Of Suns And Their Planets“… And rather than being the definitive version of events, it is more like a vague recollection that a grandson remembers of his grandfather relaying a day that he, as a child, spent by the seaside in his adolescent youth… A memory that harks back from a lifetime of experience, which is filled with and clarified through conjecture, inference and theory, about what any seaside visit was, is and would be like today… Thus remaining markedly true to the essence of what the experience is like.

K.R.

Before life grasped its first foothold on the ladder of evolution’s rise after the monumental forces that came into play during accretion (the process that forged this solid spherical body that we know as Earth), most of the planet’s surface was probably still only a thin layer of rock lying over a sea of molten magma, much like heated milk in a pan develops a thin skin over it’s hot surface.

No doubt the Earth’s surface was also still being heavily bombarded by debris left in the heavens above. Meteors must have come colliding into this brittle mantle, with forces beyond that of what the strongest atomic weapons can muster, leaving scares like craters similar to those that riddle the surface of the moon. Perhaps even in some instances, where the Earth’s surface crust was thin enough and the meteor particularly large and massive enough, some of these collisions no doubt punctured the cooling surface screen, leaving a deep holes of open flame and molten rock.

Probably at this time, due to the particularly high surface temperature of the Earth’s crust, the atmosphere would have been filled with all sorts of vapour i.e. fair amounts of metalic fumes, such as aluminium, calcium, magnesium, and iron based elements and compounds, along with nirtogen, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and a lot of water vapour (there probably would have been no seas or oceans until the surface cooled to well under 100 degrees centigrade). And very probably there would have been quite a few volcanoes, along with seas of lava, spewing their noxious gases into the air. There was definitely no oxygen in the atmosphere what-so-ever at this time. And this is an important fact… Mainly because it will get us to ask the first question that will launch us onto our path of understanding where this infamous oxidizing agent came from.

So let’s not dwindle, but ask it… Where did all the oxygen that we observe today in Earth’s current atmosphere come from? Well… The answer is simple… Life. But before we launch into how Life as we know it could come about, there are two very imporant chemical aspects that we need to look at in order to understand how Life can function. Aspects that bestow certain properties, both physical and chemical, on certain molecules, which in turn allow specific molecules to act in very specific manners under the right conditions… It should be noted, that while these events might seem as though they are Life like reactions, thay are in actual fact only chemical occurrences. And this is something very important that needs to be born in mind i.e. that fine line that divides the rhelms of “natural chemical occurrences” and the “chemistry that makes up Life”.

1. Basic Chemicals, under the right conditions, can recombine easily forming the Complex Compounds found in all Living Organisms

Well… Before I go any further with this one, I would like to bring to your attention this article, entitled “What can pre-solar grains tell us about the solar nebula?“, as I think it will provide a good basis for what scientists have discovered was already there before our sun came about.

As we have already seen, stars are the forgers of the heavier elements i.e. they fuse hyrdrogen and helium into the heavier elements, all the way up to iron in their cores (if the stars are big enough, that is). So as one might imagine, there is probably a lot of heavier elements already floating around in space. Certainly it seems that “dense molecular clouds contain a wide variety of relatively complex organic molecules synthesized by radiation-driven chemistry in the gas phase and in icy grain mantles (e.g., Allamandola et al. 1988). Some of these molecules, such as those containing the OCN− ion, are more abundant in the spectra of protostars than in the spectra of background stars (Pendleton et al. 1999), suggesting that radiation-driven chemistry may be enhanced in the immediate vicinity of star-formation. Many molecules synthesized in laboratory experiments simulating conditions in molecular clouds are similar or identical to compounds found in primitive meteorites (Bernstein et al. 2001). There are clear isotopic signatures (e.g., high D/H) associated with organic molecules produced by radiation chemistry in cold molecular clouds and in dense, cold regions of an accretion disk (e.g., Sandford et al. 2001).” So again, our star was pretty much responsible for the formation of some of the complex organic compounds that the Earth “ate up” during accretion/the formation of the planets.

The finding of complex organics within comets that have come from interstella space has also been confirmed many scientific studies, one of which is entitled “Origin of organic matter in the protosolar nebula and in comets” – J. M. Greenberg, O. M. Shalabiea, C. X. Mendoza-Gómez, W. Schutte and P. A. Gerakines – Laboratory Astrophysics – April 2000.

Also, it has been noted by Stanley Miller in his paper entitled “A production of amino acids under possible primitive earth conditions. Science 117 (1953): 528-529″ that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, arose among other small organic molecules very spontaneously in the lab by simply sparking a mixture of methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water.

It has even been noted that Observations of the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s moon, which is composed primarily of methane and nitrogen, show that photochemically produced hydrocarbon aerosols form a haze layer in the upper atmosphere that protects the lower atmosphere from photochemical destruction. Such a haze layer could also have been produced on the early Earth from outgassed methane and ammonia (Zahnle KJ. 1986. Photochemistry of methane and the formation of hydrocyanic acid (HCN) in the earth’s early atmosphere. Journal of Geophysical Research 91: 2819-2834, Sagan C, Chyba C. 1997. The early faint sun paradox: organic shielding of ultraviolet-labile greenhouse gases. Science 276: 1217-1221, Pavlov AA, Kasting JF, Brown LL, Rages KA, Freedman R. 2000. Greenhouse warming by CH4 in the atmosphere of early Earth. Journal of Geophysical Research 105: 11981-11990).

Also, a paper published back in 1974 demostrated how Base Pairs (commonly and importantly found in all genetic material here on Earth), along with other chemicals, like carboxyl terminated aromatic hydrocarbon chains occured simply by Fischer-Tropsch-type, catalytic reactions of CO, H₂, and NH₃ in the solar nebula, at 360–400K and (4–10)×10^–6 atm Catalytic reactions in the solar nebula. The rest of the abstract reads: “The onset of these reactions was triggered by the formation of catalytically active grains of magnetite and serpentine at these temperatures. Laboratory experiments show that the Fischer-Tropsch reaction gives a large kineticisotope fractionation of C¹²/C¹³, duplicating the hitherto unexplained fractionation in meteorites. All of the principal compound classes in meteorites are produced by this reaction, or a variant involving a brief excursion to higher temperatures. (1) normal, mono-, and dimethylalkanes (2)arenes andalkylarenes; (3) dimericisoprenoids from C₉ to C₁₄; (4)purines and pyrimidines, such as adenine, guanine, uracil, thymine, xanthine, etc.; (5)amino acids, including tyrosine and histidine; (6)porphyrin-like pigments; (7) aromaticpolymer with –OH and –COOH groups. These reactions may also have played a major role in the evolution of life: first, by converting carbon to a sufficiently non-volatile form to permit its accretion by the inner planets; second, by synthesizing organic compounds on the primitive planets whenever CO, H₂, NH₃, and clay or magnetite particles came together at the right temperature. Similar reactions in other solar nebulae may be the source of interstellar molecules, as first suggested by G. H. Herbig. Ten of the twelve polyatomic interstellar molecules have in fact been seen in these syntheses or in meteorites.” (Edward Anders, Ryoichi Hayatsu and Martin H. Studier – Implications for interstellar molecules and organic compounds in meteorites – Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres – Volume 5, Numbers 1-2 / January, 1974 – ISSN 0169-6149 (Print) 1573-0875 (Online)).

Either way one looks at it, organic compounds can easily be made in variety of ways… Much of the complex organic chemicals could have even arrived here from meteors and space debris that crashed to Earth in the final stages of accretion, just as the Earth was cooling. Perhaps some of it was even formed, as Stanley Miller demonstrated, when the atmosphere, which contained nitrogen, ammonia and methane, became saturated with water and lightening storms streaked through the air.

2. Fatty Acids form vessels under the right conditions – the basis for all cellular Plasma Memebranes

Firstly… What is a fatty acid? Apart from being mention in E. Anders et al.’s paper entitled “Implications for interstellar molecules and organic compounds in meteorites” as an “aromaticpolymer with –OH and –COOH groups”, a fatty acid is basically a long chain hydrocarbon molecule, that has a hydrophilic end (one that likes polar solvents, such as water) and another end that has hydrophobic properties (that do not like polar solvents and tend not to dissolve in them).

As any good chemist can see, each of these carbon spined molecules has a carboxyl group at one end (which effectively means carbon and oxygen based atomic structure). It is this carboxyl group that is hydrophilic i.e. it likes water and so will dissolve into aqeuous solutions.

The polarisation of these carboxyl groups occurs because of specific trait of oxygen… Namely that all oxygen atoms are extremely electronegative i.e. they pull electrons towards them. This usually occurs because the nucleaus of an oxygen atom is densely packed, and so has a “concentrated” positive charge within its nucleaus. This “concentrated” positive charge is what makes oxygen so reactive i.e. it is the reason why Virgil “Gus” Grissom (Gemini 3), Ed White (Gemini 4), and Roger Chaffee (Mercury 4) were burned alive in a lunar module on the launch pad when they were operating in a pressurised, 100% oxygen atmosphere after a spark from the consol started a flash fire that burnt everything inside. And what a tragedy that was… R.I.P. It is also the reason why iron rusts readily in air. This highly positive nucleaus tends to strongly attract the electrons of any other atoms that do not have their own electrons as tightly bound to their own nucleaus OR are willing to share electrons to gain atomic stability by molecularly “sharing/giving” electrons.

A copy of this period table in .pdf format can be downloaded here.

While I won’t go into depth on this “sharing/giving” of electrons in molecular structures, I will mention the following. Strong electronegativity is usually a trait noticed in the elements found on the right hand side of the periodic table, especially in the Halogens (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine and astatine), and most of all it is seen in the Noble gases (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon). However, as the Noble gases have a complete/full electron subshell, they are energetically very stable and, thus, are very unreactive, which can be seen through their high ionisation energies i.e. the energy needed to remove one electron from their natural elemental state. Thus the noble gases exist in nature as basic atoms. The Halogens, however, are very reactive… They almost have a full subshell, and only need one electron to gain good stability. Thus they are driven to grab whatever they can… And when these elements are found to exist naturally, they do so in a diatomic structure where one fluorine atom shares an electron with another fluorine atom. Next… As we move left from fluorine to oxygen… We will notice a similar reactivity. This time though, oxygen is shy of two electons from a complete outer electron subshell. Thus it also will pull two electrons away from another atom(s) to complete its own outer subshell.

All atoms do this i.e. they will either try give electrons aways if the only have a few in an outer subshell in order to reveal the underlying and complete electron subshell, OR they will take atoms to finish their own nearly complete subshells. Elements on the left of the periodic table tend to give away electons… While elements on the right side of the table tend to attract electrons. This can be clearly seen through the ionisation energy chart below, where elements on the left hand side of the table require much less energy to remove their outer electron than those on the right hand side…

Carbon lies in the middle of period 2… And, as a result, carbon is not that electronegative i.e. it doesn’t snatch electrons off other atoms like di-atmoic flourine or oxygen would. It shares beautifully within itself and can give rise to amazingly complex structures i.e. there are many allotropes of carbon such as diamond, graphite, lonsdaleite, fullerenes, amorphous carbon, carbon nanotubes, etc… all of which are very sturdy and stable.

So, bearing all this in mind, lets get back to that carboxyl group. A carboxyl group is a carbon atom that is attached to an oxygen atom by a double bond, to a hydroxyl group (OH) by a single bond and to an R group (R being anything that will bind via a single bond to a carbon atom).

As the oxygen atom is extremely electronegative, so it pulls the electron away form the hydrogen atom allowing the charge to dissociate i.e. allowing the hydrogen atom to become positive and the oxygen atom to become negatively charged. This becomes a Status Quo of sorts i.e. a hydrogen atom attached to a relatively electronegative atom is a “hydrogen bond” donor. This electronegative atom is usually fluorine, oxygen, or nitrogen. And an electronegative atom such as fluorine, oxygen, or nitrogen is a hydrogen bond acceptor, regardless of whether it is bonded to a hydrogen atom or not. An example of a hydrogen bond donor is ethanol, which has a hydrogen bonded to an oxygen atom, which in turn is bonded to an ethyl group. And an example of a hydrogen bond acceptor which does not have a hydrogen atom bonded to it is the oxygen atom on diethyl ether. Plus, as water’s molecular formula is HOH, it too has this same charge dissociation going on within its molecular make up. This essentially means that “hydrogen bonding” can easily occur between water molecules and carboxyl groups. If you want to know more about “hydrogen bonding” please click here. Now… Going back to what we were saying about fatty acids… From all this… It should be pretty easy to see that the carboxyl group end is going to be quite soluble in water.

Right… So far so good. However, we now have to contend with the other end of the fatty acid i.e. the non polar, aliphatic tail, which does not dissolve in water… Why does this aliphatic tail not dissolve? Well, the first thing that can be noticed is that there is no electronegative atom present that can share its electrons with a polar liquid like water… Rather it is basically just a long chain of carbon atoms with  hydrogen atoms branching off it. But even though it will not dissolve in water, this long hydrophobic tail will dissolve beautifully in non polar organic solvents, such as benzene, pentane and hexane. As these non polar organic solvents are not very likely to be found in an aqueous solution, what happens (given the right pH and conditions) is that the tail ends clump together and attract eachother. Why? Well… That’s somewhat easy. As these aliphatic hydrocarbon tails are essentially like non polar organic solvents, they will separate out together for stability i.e. it requires less energy for these tails to amass together to form a lipid bilayer, than it would for them to remain continually repelled in an aqueous solution.

As you can see, this lipid bilayer allows the hydrophilic carboxyl groups to remain exposed to the aqueous solution in which they are dissolved, while the aliphatic tails are (in a sense) dissolved in themselves i.e. they use the non polar organic nature of their own bodies to join together in a more stable fashion. In this structure, they need less kenetic energy to exist within the vibrating water molecules. It’s just like if one takes pentane and water and shakes them vigerously up together… They intermingle for a while; but eventually they separate out into their respective bilayers i.e. water and pentane.

When these lipid bilayers get large enough, then they can flex beautifully in an aqueous solution, forming cup shapes and even spherical vessels where there is a distinct inside and outside of the vessel, as seen in this movie and in the below diagram.

Now… Bearing in mind that celluar Life uses the basis of this structure to house their internal working parts in nearly all types of Life today… Is this really Life? Or is this just physical chemistry finding it own kenetically stable energtic existence? Even today, nearly all bacteria (gram positive or gram negative) have this lipid bilayer underneath their outer coats, which is called a “plasma membrane”.

And even though we are jumping the gun somewhat on our “star dust” to Life hypothesis… This bilayer is found everywhere in cellular Life today. One very important thing that any vessel does, whether a wooden box or a lipid bilayer, is it concentrates the internalized objects/chemicals into a self contained storage/eco-solution… This is obviously very handy for the following two reasons:

i) It allows the compartment/vessel to become isolated from the surrounding environment i.e. if one stores an open deck of cards on the table, if they are knocked then they can disipate around the room, and even some can get lost. The same is so with checimals inside a lipid membrane. If there was no lipid membrane keeping these chemicals inside themselves, then a lot of the chemical concentrations needed to ensure a healthy internal working cellular order would simply diffuse away into the surrounding environment. Higher concentrations usually means stronger, more vigerous reactions.

ii) These compartments/vessels also keep out unwanted objects that might get mixed up in and/or disrupt the internal cellular workings/make up.

So now we see the bigger picture, of how easily these relatively complex organic compounds form in our solar system, it becomes quite obvious how chemicals like Ribonucleic acids and other organic precursors could have got “trapped” in these fatty acid vessels and started “doing things” together in their “artificially” closed (and now higher concentration) environments.

Once all the water in Earth’s atmosphere condensed out into seas and oceans and a stable hydrosphere came about (near on 300 million years after the Earth’s formation, so scientists estimate), these fatty acid vessels, some of which had managed to form in rock pools that had been filled with high enough concentrations of prebiotic organic chemcials (whether by evaporation from the Sun’s heat removing water, thereby concentrating the organic solutions, OR if the watery pools formed in rocks that had high concentrations of organic matter already present), started to “tick-over” in little recuring reactions. No doubt some of these reaction would have taken millions of years to form, and in the muddle of these prebiotic chemcial reflexes that were occuring in these vessels, some (out of the millions OR billions occuring) would have unwittingly begun to make chains of repeatable molecular reactions… Reactions that ticked over in cycles, repeating simple little chemical additions and alterations, forming new compounds that could sustain themselves in an ever internalised little fatty bubble, a float in a rock pool or sea. Either way, this dawn of life is a vague memory… But it is beautifully captured by the National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting’s 10 minute TED talk.

So what are these Stromatolites that Frans Lanting talked about? Stromatolites (from Greek στρώμα, strōma, mattress, bed, stratum, and λιθος, lithos, rock) are layered accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria (commonly known as blue-green algae) and include some of the most ancient records of life here on Earth. There is plenty of evidence that these cyanobacteria were the first abundantly successful life forms to exist on/colonize Earth i.e. their fossils are found in almost all ancient rock strata from the Precambrian time period, the oldest period of history, occurring just after the Earth was formed.

The Proterozoic is a geological eon of time, which represents a period before the first abundant forms of complex life evolved on Earth. The name Proterozoic comes from the Greek “earlier life.” The Proterozoic Eon extended from 2500 megaannum (or Ma for short) to 542.0 ± 1.0 Ma (million years ago), and is the most recent part of the old, informally named ‘Precambrian’ time period.

The Proterozoic consists of 3 geologic eras, from oldest to youngest:

i) Paleoproterozoic
ii) Mesoproterozoic
iii) Neoproterozoic

Several well-identified events occured during the Proterozoic era. These events are defined as:

a) The transition to an oxygenated atmosphere during the Mesoproterozoic period. This has been linked to the cyanobacteria that colonised Earth successfully i.e. the first basic organisms to have bloomed en masse here on Earth.

b) Several glaciations, including the hypothesized Snowball Earth during the Cryogenian period in the late Neoproterozoic.

c) The Ediacarian Period (635 to 542 Ma) which is characterized by the evolution of abundant soft-bodied multicellular organisms i.e. especially Trichophycus pedum in particular, which are found commonly throughout the fossil records of this time period.

But I am jumping the gun on to complex Life… So let’s just reiterate where we’re at. Once successfully replicating single celled organisms arrived, it was inevitable that more complex forms of life would eventually follow and evolve, using similar flows throughout this arduous and intricate molecular chemical interplay. Cycles of organic chemistry, repeating over and over again into ever deeper grooves of being, slowly iterating as errors and/or modifications gave rise to better sustainability via a process of natural selection… All the time, this Life (or these chemical reactions) would slowly but surely evolve, working their way through the cycles of seasons, tides and planetary influences here on Terra firma… Little strange attractions being tugged into and out of sync with their natural instincts, tweeking them into ever more majestic developments of chaotic chance… Chance chemical structures/Life forms that were “doomed” from the outset to harmonize with the environmental shifts and changes persented to them… Until one cell started working with another, making Life’s chemistry easier to bear, so that they could share their labors and efforts, and so building up into complex forms, that naturally worked so well, unquestionably following the patterns of chance that all natural phenomena, like mountains, rivers and snow flakes, flow with.

Here we see the natural progression of events in a timeline that depicts the stages of Earth’s own formation along with its natural biosphere and subsequent chemistry, into what we now call “Life”. And as life started to replicate the chemicals that it needed to ensure its own survival, so they too graciously gave up the toils of their Life’s labor as excrement i.e. oxygen, organic by products, etc… and eventually their bodies. As these fell away, their forgotten remnants started to build up… Oxygen, a by product of cyanobacteria, became a prominent part of Earth’s atmosphere, and provided a new path for Life’s chemistry to walk along. More fatty acids were eventually sysnthesised in creatures, and provided sources of fatty acids for future generations from which to build themselves. Such a deep and interconnected biosphere…

When one looks at it like this… Isn’t it pretty obvious that the probability of some chemicals on other planets (planets which have the right chemical make-ups, in the right proportions, located in the right temperate orbits around their stars) will also “probably” be bearing/rearing life of some form or another? Because when you see the chemistry of atoms, and understand these phenomena will occur wherever the atoms reside, it suddenly becomes all about probability…

But no doubt Earth is special. Why? Well… Intuitively for me, what sets Earth apart from all the other Life in the Universe currently, is that we have been fortunate enough to evolve to the stage that we are at today i.e. we are developing perceptive stances about what we really are, stances that are becoming free of “fantasical” reasons and stories about how we got here… We know Life is not that special i.e. there are probably loads of Earth like planets out there in the “infinity” of space and time that bear Life in one form or another. But what I do sense is that we have come somewhat further than other life forms i.e. we reside on the cusp of knowing what we are, and so can now glimpse just how fortunate we are to be here in a rational way, away from Religious idealogies.

Religion was born from that old human need to know and understand, a need that empiricism has help some us quench, if only we cared to look at it without fear… I’m not saying Religion is bad because of this… It has allowed us to celebrate the Universe “truly” as we could only have hoped to back in past times; times where our perceptive stance was only partially enhanced through limited and basic machines/tools of observation… Enchanced so that we could only see a slightly wider part of the truth via our limited reasoning, which still couldn’t guide us to see beyond the strong emotional and instinctual ties of hunter gatherer times. But these are old values in many ways. We no longer need to wage wars on one another… We are now standing at the threshold of a new dawn, where we can all make that change for the better. No doubt it will not be easy… But then again, it never has been easy. just as struggle to get here today was inevitable, so it will be for us to overcome ourselves. But there is hope! So far we have made it through all the odds… That mountain of improbabilty is immensely taller than Olympus Mons. And we are well up onto its side…

In my humble opinion, we should not become complacent now we have reached this comfortable zone of a consumerist society, or even stop challenging ourselves with the truth. Let us let go of the old values… And begin to work together, just as all the single celled organisms once agreed to do in order to build bigger, better and more harmonious structures for existence… Why? Well, we are part of the Universe that has been afforded this great chance to experience itself; to see the beauty in the cosmos, and within ourselves… Do we owe it to ourselves to push off and find new shores for harmony? Shores where we can be humbled by the truth, and work with it to deeply heal our own Earth… An Earth where we only know about 15% of all the speicies in existence…

So… How can we begin this journey towards truth? I would propose by adopting empirical views about our surroundings, ones that we can all agree upon, to delve into our natural environment and accurately document all of the speicies here on Earth, observing in the process how they all interlink and work together to sustain themselves… And then we can begin to develop compasion towards ideals that we may not understand as well as we should currenly. Because to see all the life that is here on Earth, AND to understand how it interconnects, interrelates, and lives off of itself, will show us just how connected we are to everything around us… And we may eventually begin to fathom how much we are reliant on this Earth. How, in actual fact, it is nothing more than a closed off ecosystem in the inky black void of space and time… So delicate, so sensitive and so fragile.

Perhaps we might then keep in check our personal ideals and reinvent our consumerist tendancies towards a sustainable future, thereby cultivating a purer soul that is driven by Love and Understanding, and so follow the obvious patterns that life has so ingeniously shown us, through its own fractal design. Many things will be sacrificed… Ignorance, selfcherishing and other obsolete ideaologies… But then, these seemingly “important” things always were sacrificed at one time or another in order to move on.

This time of plenty that we currently find ourselves enjoying will not always last. Impermanence is the way of the Tao. Just as there was another impact on Jupiter last month, where a comet or asteriod smashed into the gaseous giant’s atmosphere, leaving a scare the size of Earth’s Pacific ocean, there will be other impacts on other planets, perhaps even our own. So maybe we should start to prepare for this eventuality, thinking about it while admiting the fear of it, but controlling our emotional terror of the truth… That we all could die at any moment… Or be plunged into a long darkness of famine, destitution, drought, scarcity and want. We should always be aware of this… Because if we honestly feel our destiny is out among the stars, we will need to be honest with ourselves. But then again… If we feel we have strived hard enough to get here now, and only care to bask on Life’s beach of an Earth as long as we can get away with it, then we are going about it perfectly. Afterall, what we do with our future is ultimately up to us… But when we see how far we’ve already come… Doesn’t this inpsire one to go all the way, as best as we can? Because too many give up just as success is about to come to them…

Lastly, I came across this documentary on YouTube called “Origins – How Life Began” just the other day, which I feel covers some important aspects of what I have breifly touched on above. It is beautifully pieced together, using some very neat analogies i.e. 24 hour clock of Earth’s entire history, as well as some really up to date ideas on how life could have come into being i.e. the impact pressures within comets forming polypeptides out of any amino acids trapped in the ice, etc… and it is narrated by the astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson for PBS’s “NOVA science NOW” science documentary series. So if you have a spare 55 minutes, I’d highly recommend viewing it:

Origins – How Life Began – Part 1

Origins – How Life Began – Part 2

Origins – How Life Began – Part 3

Origins – How Life Began – Part 4

Origins – How Life Began – Part 5

Origins – How Life Began – Part 6

Conclusion

From all of this… I would offer the reader who has got this far one thought to deeply ponder on. Should we all look at Life as nothing more than a complex interplay of biochemical reactions and processes that work together, responding to their environments as best as they can, settling into structures and cycles that provide the greatest energetic stability possible? After all, apples don’t fall upwards, do they!? They fall down… Towards the ground, where they gain an equilibrium in their own potential energy. This is the nature of all things: to find equilibrium.

Perhaps these chemical vats that we call bodies, filled with the atomic essence derived from eons of star dust/soot, are more like an orchestrated collection of independent reactions, beautifully structured into a flowing composition of input and output? If you are having trouble visualizing this, then please watch the following video of Dr Bruce Lipton, as he beautifully discusses these reations, demonstrating how perception comes about from the complex interplay of chemicals within out bodies:

The Biology Of Perception – Part 1

The Biology Of Perception – Part 2

The Biology Of Perception – Part 3

The Biology Of Perception – Part 4

The Biology Of Perception – Part 5

The Biology Of Perception – Part 6

The Biology Of Perception – Part 7

Looking at how the cell switches on and off genes, through the use of complex cellular machinery, to work around and respond to the environment is pretty amazing.

So I think we should be bold, and go fishing, with the expectation that whatever happens in our journey for the truth, we will learn from it. It might end sooner than we have expected… Or we might span the Universe majestically and grow beyond our wildest dreams. Hell… We may even discover something about Life’s origins by being willing to accept the origin of Life as an emergent phenomenon arising from a very complex chemical environment, one that was forged in the hearts of ancient stars in the inky black void of space and time… And on this journey, we therefore might take a chance to test this hypothesis, and find that similar reactions can be reproduced in the laboratory, simply by trusting the laws of chemistry and physics to do the work for us. Jack Szostak is starting this journey. Perhaps he’s realized that what we have got to loose is… Nothing. And what we have got to gain… Is everything.

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say: “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” … and we kill those people. Ha ha, “Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as ONE. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over, not one human being excluded, and we can then explore space together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

Bill Hicks – Comedian (possibly prophet?) – December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994

“The Universe could so easily have remianed lifeless and simple – just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space. The fact that it did not – the fact that life evolved out of literally nothing, some 10 billion years after the Universe evolved literally out of nothing – is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.”

Richard Dawkins – Evolutionary Biologist of Oxford University – March 26, 1941 – Present