I was eating some hard-boiled quail eggs this morning.
These Coturnix quail really put out, and we've got bowls of the things sitting around. Lucky for us. They're delicious!
I was thinking about the fact that these little birds are magical factories for turning grain into protein. And about all the crazy steps our bodies take when we eat that protein, to disassemble the eggs down to the amino acid level and put them back together in forms we can use.
Metabolic pathways are more complicated than the US tax code. We didn't even figure out the Krebs cycle until the late 1930s, and I doubt there are many practicing doctors that could explain it to you step by step without consulting a textbook.
Protein folding and synthesis is another level of crazy magic entirely. A shit-ton of work goes into every one of those quail eggs. And the quail just poop 'em out!
Life is going on at so many different scales.
All the way down you've got the molecular level: carbon atoms are tossing around electrons like swingers at a key party. They form wilder and wilder combinations with nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen.
Wave a magic wand or wait a billion years1, suddenly those carbon-heavy molecules combine into factories for churning out proteins, including DNA that can self replicate. So you've got basic single celled organisms. Then there's bigger, more complex ones which the simpler ones move into (mitochondria!) happily pumping out energy for the larger cells in what's got to be the most intimate form of symbiosis in the history of the planet: Eukaryotes, y'all.
Bacteria start grouping up into multi-cellular forms of life, which form organs and organ systems and eventually entire bodies. Not that the bacteria is done for at this point. Far from it. Even though we're unaware of it, we've got more bacterial cells within us than we have cells that are us. We're more like walking colonies then people.
Plus we've got things like red blood cells that circulate and white blood cells that go around zapping the baddies with a level of agency and self-determination and, by all appearances, a great sense of job satisfaction.
Thanks to @suesa for these marvelous animations!
At each level of complexity, life seems utterly oblivious to what's going on "above" and "below" it in terms of scale.
Those lymphocytes, for example: inasmuch as they're "aware" of their immediate environment, they seem perfectly happy to attack invading cells and vigorously prosecute their jobs, while remaining utterly ignorant of the larger body they keep healthy with their actions.
On more relatable levels, our quail don't have any idea they're supporting us with their handy, pill-sized pods of egg protein. Suckers! we think. They don't even care that we're eating their eggs.
We fancy ourselves superior because we can see the big picture.
Are we really, though? Think for a minute about what you do for work.
Personally, I could go back to work at a corporate chain store and devote myself entirely to the daily struggles of sales figures and merchandising strategies, and actually be a pretty effective middle manager. That doesn't mean I'd have any clue about what I'm doing for the larger corporate body and it's shareholders - who likewise wouldn't give two shits about me so long as the dividend checks kept rolling in.
Biological systems scale way down. But they get huge, too: you could argue that communities, economies, and ecosystems are just extensions of the same processes, writ large. In my business example: bad decisions made at the store level can spiral out of control and wipe out a company, which can lead to lost wages dragging down the welfare of a country. The consequences touch on politics: a lousy trade agreement can disrupt things on a global scale and lead to all-out war.
I doubt there's anyone up there at the pinnacles of power who really understands everything going on below them - even if they have tickets to the Bilderberg conference. Things are just too chaotic and complicated2.
So why is it that, after we extend life to the global level, there's a lid clamped down over our sphere of influence?
Why this particular barrier? Why this membrane?
Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech is so moving because it shows just what a tiny, insignificant speck we are in the greater universe.
And by "we," I don't mean "we people." I mean, "We, Life."
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam....
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
Once you start to realize how vast and interconnected living systems are - from chemical interactions through biology to psychology and culture - it feels impossible to accept that it all comes screaming to a halt right at the boundary of space.
Yet, other than a few astronauts spinning around in orbit, and maybe a handful of tardigrades clinging to the hulls of distant satellites, all the wildly complicated interplay of life comes to a sudden stop just a few miles above the surface of the planet.
Out in the bigger picture of the universe, things are still interconnected. The cosmos is wired together by chemistry and physics. There's the play of gravity and light, the hum of the cosmic background radiation, quantum particles popping in and out of existence, and whatever the hell dark matter's up to. And even though we don't know what goes on behind the event horizon of the black holes, we still know they're doing their part to pull us closer.
But the influence of biology ends with the vacuum. "The sky is the limit." Terminus Est.
A butterfly flickering its wings in the Amazon may bring a hurricane to your town, and every glass of water you drink contains a few molecules that passed through Julius Caesar's urine (and mine too!) - but despite your most herculean efforts, nothing you do here is going to impact events on Alpha Centauri. Or even on the moon3.
Footnotes
1. Yeah, we're oversimplifying here. What did you think this was? College?
2. I think this is why we pray to an omniscient god. It's comforting to think there's one mind in the universe capable of really understanding everyone.
3. Feel free to prove me wrong on that last point, though. I would love to be wrong about this.
Some fear our insignificance in it all, whereas some wonder at it. I'm all for wonder, a piece of energy never created or destroyed, just changing, steadily born and dying, just being from the zinc explosion at the mating of sperm to egg, until the final memory of our existence is wiped from the planet. Good enough excuse to live love and not take it all to seriously.
If you want to, you can include my gifs directly in your post. You now have my official permission.
Thanks @suesa! They really are remarkable work and I appreciate your sharing them!
I love the pattern on the quail eggs, and also tastes great.
They are pretty, aren't they? Strangely, the eggs from wild bobwhite quail are pure white.
I haven't heard about bob white quail, I think the white in her name suggests why the eggs are white
You could be on to something, there...
corporations are a form of artificial intelligence
I love Charlie Stross! One of my favorite writers, across a widely varied body of work. And he seems pretty well plugged in to the way things are going.
Have you read any of his books?
a few
Can't prove you wrong :) Comforting and easier way for sure, less painful ...
I wanna try ostrich eggs. Did you ever try those?
No but if you get your hands on one I'll split it with you.
Start boiling one now and by the time I get to India maybe it'll be ready!
Haha! Come over, be my guest. Not so hard to find I guess.
I think of life as like looking through a microscope. In this life, we are focused on this little microcosm of our lives, and when we die, it's like taking your eyes off the viewfinder. The greater macrocosm was there the whole time, we're just unaware of it, focused on this tiny piece right now.
Have you read the book, Quantum Physics, Near Death Experiences, Eternal Consciousness, Religion, and the Human Soul by Prof. William Bray? I like that one a lot.
"Life as a lens." I kind of like it. That book sounds pretty interesting too.
It's very dense reading (as in, at least for me, it's not a breeze-through-the-book-quickly type book), but so worth it, imho.
Indeed, plankton and plant-life are one of the most efficient solar power converters; our current solar panel technology does not even perform a fraction of the magic these biologic power converters can perform. The biologic solar converters transmute solar rays into basic building blocks of life itself, are self-repairing, are self-replicating, and can last into eons in duration. Can Tesla solar planels or batteries perform even a fraction of the aforementioned capacities of biologicals?
When a man's awareness and perspective reaches to encompass planets, solar systems, and galaxies, can such a man be defined as human anymore? His perceptions likely would not include mere life on one planet; he would likely be disconnected from his fellow humans; and his actions would have the potential for mass extinction on an entire planet.
Does God, likewise, care for us pitiful humans in all his power and awareness? Does He intervene in trivial struggles of human species? Can such a being even relate to a mote in His grand creation?
If he's omniscient, no sweat. If he's at all bound by the physical laws of the universe he created (at least as we understand them) probably not.
And for our awareness to encompass the stars, it's going to have to slow down a good deal - unless we find a way to overcome speed of light limitations! For the stuff of thought to flow from one planet to another, when each idle consideration takes light years to transmit...
Then again, maybe it's going on right now. How would we know?
This post made me so hyper aware and of my self-ness and all of the processes going on in my body that I almost wanted to jump out of my skin! I'm so glad all that stuff runs on auto pilot or there's no way I could manage it!
I'd be awful at human body admin.
Also, making hard-boiled quail eggs must be the quickest process in the world! Can't beat that for efficiency!
Yeah, it's probably best not to think too much about it.
The situation came up in Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man. One of the wizards at the university died, but Death had been laid off, essentially, so the wizard just went on as a zombie. He realized he had to think about breathing, digesting, keeping his pulse going, and the rest of it. Not that it really mattered, but people thought it off-putting if he stood there looking completely dead.
LOL, being alive is such hard work!- guess it's a good reminder to be thankful for the things we DO have on auto pilot, and quit trying to manage the things we don't have control over anyway.
Reaper Man sounds like an interesting read though!
All of Pratchett is great. Smart, hilarious, irreverent. Reaper Man was the sequel to Mort, but you don't really have to read his stuff in order.
sounds like my kinda guy! Would love to get some one audio book to do work to, I used to fly through about 3-4 books a week that way at one of my old jobs
The audiobook to Monstrous Regiment was fantastic. The reader did such a great job with all the voices. It's how we discovered Pratchett.
NOTED! Can't wait to check it out!
It's a good thing that quails are egg-making machines because that's a lot of eggs in your breakfast bowl. It'd take me till noon to finish breakfast if I had to peel them all. I salute your fortitude!
I was browsing through various posts a while back and found @shelby’s great post about power which has a section on how batteries store power. It was insanely comparable to the way the the body's neural system works. It does seem like everything does end up coming in circles once it is well understood. The trick, of course, is to understand it. Understanding it so often does make us seem so much smaller in relation to so many other elements in the universe and it is so obvious why we need to explain the things that we don't understand until we have the knowledge to fill in the answers. On the other hand, I think I'd rather no know too much about the water, thanks.
Oh, heh, I didn't eat all of those at once! It does take some persistence to peel them, though.
Isn't it interesting how, when we learned about mechanics, we thought how much like a clock the body was? And then when we learned about electricity, how like a battery, and when we learned about computers, suddenly the brain was like a computer. I wonder what our next scientific breakthrough will turn us into?
It's so true that things compare so completely. It's kind of a wonder that discoveries aren't more intuitive and faster but then - hindsight...
your post is very good and perfect
Your comments are very spam and terrible.
Awesome!!! From quail eggs to the universe! This is some serious pondering going on.
Quail eggs must be brain food.
My whole new way of eating is based on the Krebs cycle, which I had never really known anything about before...science, y'all ;)
woa... now THAT sounds like something to google!
Wait - this is a thing?
Are you running your 5Ks down metabolic pathways?
it's basically the idea behind the Ketogentic diet: by eating fats for energy rather than sugar. fatty acids are converted to ketones, for energy. i mean, that's a super simplistic explanation, but it's the basic idea.