Tangerines and String Quartets

The origin of life eludes us. The leap from organics to organisms isn't definitively understood.

I believe a leaf of grass is not less than the journey-work of the stars.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The desire for us to understand existential unknowns produces limits on the range of possibilities. The range of possibilities provide the guideposts to inquiry. Within possibilities emerge the paths of plausibility, some more fruitful than others.

The origin of life, and the nature of the living, remains elusive. Still there are established characteristics, like heredity — the self-replicating passing on of information — that links all organisms to the simplest cells and the most basic elements on the periodic chart.

What do they call it…the primordial soup? The glop? That heartbreaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.
— Edward Albee, Seascape

The microcosmic gods of life seem to be nucleic acids and proteins. The earliest detectable life arrived 3.6 to 3.8 billion years ago in the form of simple cells.

Over billions of years, simple replicating cells evolved into complex organisms. This came about against the deterministic cleave of natural selection.

The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Humans are comparative newcomers arriving 200,000 years ago, yet our organic and earlier inorganic ancestry, is traceable to cosmic stardust.

Years Ago	Event
4.6 billion	Earth began circling the sun
3.6 billion	Arrival of simple cells - Prokaryotes
3.4 billion	Arrival of cyanobacteria performing photosynthesis
2 billion	Arrival of complex cells - Eukaryotes
1 billion	Arrival of multicellular life
600 million	Arrival of simple animals
550 million	Arrival of bilaterians, animals with a front and a back
500 million	Arrival of fish and proto-amphibians
475 million	Arrival of land plants
400 million	Arrival of insects and seeds
360 million	Arrival of amphibians
300 million	Arrival of reptiles
200 million	Arrival of mammals
150 million	Arrival of birds
130 million	Arrival of flowers
66 million years ago	Departure of the pterosaurs and non-avian dinosaurs, in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
60 million	Arrival of primates
20 million	Arrival of Hominidae or great apes
2.5 million	Arrival of the genus Homo - human predecessors
200,000	Arrival of anatomically modern humans

An insatiable curiosity and judicious hypothesis testing will eventually lead us to many of the answers we seek. But the satisfaction of each answer will be momentary. The side effect of each aha! moment is a set of new questions. This is the quest of science.

The Existential Ledger

On the known side of the ledger, is the precedence, preponderance and rigor of established science. On the unknown side, it must suffice that the nature of life will reveal itself in fits and starts.

We're continually pinged with incoming data. Revelations necessitate reconciling of our existential accounts. We only know what we know at a given time. What remains is pontification or poetry.

REFERENCES

• Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, David Grinspoon, Harper Collins, November 2003.
• Timeline of evolutionary history of life, Wikipedia.

Planetary Life Raft

Biosphere

For every year I live, I ease my criteria for what constitutes the natural world. My criteria for naturalness has softened.

At age twenty, the bar of naturalness was set by the ever-elusive absence of human trace – no human structures, sights, smells, or discarded Ding Dong wrappers.

Yes, humans are an untidy species.

Michael Pollan reminds us of our unwavering codependency on flora and fauna. Other animals and flowers have changed us. We, in turn, have changed them.

It has become much harder in the past century to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
― Michael Pollan

In The Botany of Desire Pollan explores the co-evolution of humans with four plants — apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes — from the perspective of both plant and human.

Co-evolution is the notion that change in one biological object is triggered by change in a related object. I wonder about the frequency of triggering events over the course of a human lifetime. Do they occur unbeknownst to us?

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
― Henry David Thoreau

Like other fauna and flora, humans have built-in drives, if not self-obsessed desires. Each species, animal or plant, is hell-bent on thriving in a dynamic biosphere where change is rapid, slow, and sometimes cataclysmic. To thrive we take advantage of ― and co-depend on ― other species, as they do on us.

Earth's Biosphere

How do we reckon this thin raft of life on earth? The biosphere is,

The place on Earth's surface where life dwells.
― Eduard Suess, Geologist, 1875.

Cloud Tracks

The biosphere is the sum of all ecosystems. This life raft is thin compared to a planetary scale, or the distance between the earth and the moon.

Earth's biosphere consists of all living beings and their relationships. The life-giving relationships of "earthlings" include critical interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere.

By humanity's best reckoning, earth's biosphere evolved beginning through biogenesis or abiogenesis some 3.5 billion years ago. Abiogenesis describes the so-called primordial soup. That is,

the study of how biological life could arise from inorganic matter.

No less poetic, biogenesis is

the generation of life from existing life.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller observed that

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. . . Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.

Naturalness

Indeed my criteria for naturalness has softened over the years. Seeking an absence of human trace is an elusive and frustrating folly.

Is it not better to embrace the splendor and untidiness of life, to drop the thread of time, and to live each sensual input of the moment?

For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.
― Michael Pollan

Within the Blue Spiral

When I am mindful that humans co-evolved with enumerable, and perhaps uncountable species, and when I am mindful that these species have adapted to our desires for their self-serving viability, I see the earth's biosphere as a life raft.

Earth calls in the wind, sings in the rain, and laughs in the flowers.

All life, and all artifacts of life support, are in the same boat.

Reading & References

• Fuller, Buckminster. 1963. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
• Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World.
• Termesphere sculptures by Dick Termes.