The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  These and many similar circulations characterize the Earth organism, she who integrates them all into her subtly tempered body and being, she who is a celestial cell enclosed in the membrane of life. At the least she now seems to be becoming better understood in this germinal century, as was recently intimated by astronaut Michael Collins, who, when asked how Earth looked from the moon, responded with the single word: "fragile."

  Fragile might describe many a human being too, particularly if one were to consider the hundreds of different kinds of juices, serums, lymphs, plasmas, blood, bile, gastric acids, secretions, microbes, enzymes, insulin, sweat, tears, lubricants, etc., that course through his body to the beck of nerves, glands, reflexes, genes, antigens, antibodies and other controls. Perhaps even more fragile would be the whole superorganism of mankind, whose single species is now spearheading germination on a maturing planet. For fragility is characteristic of life, especially of any complex, sensitive organism composed of interdependent parts that must maintain for itself a constant temperature, humidity, pressure, equilibrium, metabolism, muscle tone, peristalsis and waking consciousness.

  The point I am coming to is that this is exactly how it is with planet Earth orbiting so blithely through the void. And should you still doubt she is alive, just consider that the fossil record shows she has maintained a reasonably constant temperature for all her four billion years despite the fact that she now receives somewhere between 1.4 and 3.3 times as much heat and energy from the waxing sun as she did in her early years. It seems to me logical that if a mammal can maintain its life by keeping its body at the same temperature night and day, winter and summer, decade after decade, that Earth's similar ability should be looked upon as serious evidence of her being alive too. In any case there are two research chemists in England who definitely share this view: James Lovelock and Sidney Epton, who improbably launched an intensive study of Earth's dynamics in 1972, including chemical analysis of her atmosphere and soil throughout her existence insofar as the evidence avails. They have already found reason to believe our planet most likely stabilized her temperature in her early life through the heat-absorbing nature of ammonia and other complex molecules in her atmosphere at the time, which acted on sunshine like the glass in a greenhouse, and through vast populations of very primitive organisms that consumed or rejected the ammonia according to whether they wanted to be warmer or cooler; that later there evolved algae that could change their color from dark to light (or vice versa) in order to reflect (or absorb) sun energy; and, after the advent of oxygen, respiration and photosynthesis, there arose a regular explosion of organisms that learned to manipulate the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, another very significant heat-absorbing gas. At least these and other modes of adaptation to her evolving atmosphere seem to have enabled Earth to survive the growing exuberance of her parental sun as well as the shock of oxygen, which must have been a fearful pollutant when it first appeared and, they reckon, just as poisonous to the primordial ferments of two billion B.C. as chlorine gas would be to us today, literally exterminating whole orders of life and driving others into sealed oxygenproof hide-outs from which the wary survivors still dare not emerge.

  And the fact that Earth's present atmosphere is composed largely of oxygen out of the transpiration of living plants, plus nitrogen from living soil microorganisms, each source being alive as well as having a hand in maintaining the air we breathe, is a testament to the vital essence of her life. All in all, say Lovelock and Epton, the atmosphere of Earth behaves so contrary to the recognized laws of chemistry that it looks like "a contrivance put together cooperatively by the totality of living systems to carry out certain necessary control functions." In other words, all living organisms, along with all the air, sea and land environments on Earth, evidently compose one giant integrated system that somehow manages to keep aware of the material conditions that are vital for its survival and takes extraordinary measures to make absolutely certain these will not fail.

  UNIVERSAL LIFE

  If Earth thus presents a good case for a living planet, and the solar system is a fair sample of one of some two hundred billion star families in the Milky Way, itself a run-of-the-mill galaxy among uncountable billions of them in the observable universe, there is every reason to suppose life is to be found elsewhere, if not everywhere, and that it is simply inherent in nature. Even blazing stellar plasma, which seems so inhospitable at first, possesses an intense energy that must provide a star with circulation, metabolism, growth and other dynamic attributes of life. Indeed it has long been assumed that stars, like other organisms, must somehow get born. And the theory developed that they were spawned in huge gas and dust clouds that gradually condensed and heated up until clots were formed that eventually got big enough to ignite them into globes of light. And now just such embryo stars have been actually discovered, a good example being a hydrogen cloud known as IRS-5 (for infrared source number 5) that is much bigger than the solar system and emits 30,000 times more energy than the sun, yet it is still cool (170°F.) while slowly conglomerating into what, in perhaps a mere 10,000 years, will become an exceptionally bright newborn star like others recently born in its neighborhood in the outer Milky Way that astronomers are beginning to refer to as a celestial "maternity ward."

  A little later these swaddling stars should begin to experience the stellar version of growing pains and childhood diseases. In fact the late Sir Arthur Eddington once specifically stated that "pulsation is a kind of distemper that happens to stars at a certain youthful period. After passing through it they burn steadily. There may be another attack of disease later in life when the star is subject to those catastrophic outbursts: ... novas" and supernovas.

  I admit such symptoms don't prove any star is alive, but it is also true that, since the astronauts started voyaging to other worlds, no one can reasonably claim life is confined exclusively to Earth. Furthermore, chemists are coming up with convincing evidence of life in the interiors of meteorites (page 543), which, to the scientists' surprise, have turned out to be on the average about a million times more organic than the estimated average for Earth herself. Also a new space chemistry, established under the name of molecular astronomy - only in 1968, has discovered in the vast clouds of space-dust drifting perpetually among the stars not only sand, ice crystals and tiny diamonds by the quadrillions but all sorts of organic compounds from methane and ammonia to fuel, such as wood alcohol, formaldehyde (a potent preservative), formic acid (the juice of ants) and dozens of other combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and the other common constituents of life. Besides, the latest spectroscopic analysis shows that these errant elements are not just floating at random but rather selectively interacting, progressively and panspermically building up large, stable molecules and crystals, even amino acids (as in the meteorites), polyamino acids and, some biochemists think, protein and possibly viruses. In other words, what are called dust grains in space are really miniature worlds with tiny iron-rich cores surrounded by silicates, ice and an outer mantle of organic compounds. And it is now considered more than likely that these little seeds of life just naturally grow and grow, accreting by collisions over hundreds of millions of years until eventually the huge clouds of them get to be more than dense and rich enough to constitute a sort of ferment of space that can spawn actual flora and fauna in any halfway hospitable world they either come to or become.

  Astrophysicists and exobiologists have not yet said categorically where this space dust originates, but the more complex and potent ingredients in it are thought to be compounded in exploding stars, particularly in the tremendous supernovas that flare up only a few times per century per galaxy and rarely near enough Earth for human astronomers to see them clearly. The heat and violence of such explosions, in which a star's brilliance increases many billion times in a few hours and its material shoots outward at speeds exceeding I00,000 miles a second, are known to be sufficient to transmute any light elements like hydrogen and h
elium into heavier ones, including the few dozen that are considered essential to life. Whether or not other kinds of crucibles (sun spots for instance) may later be found to be also brewing life, it seems certain that life must already be rather well documented in the mystic sanctums of the universe. Surely life has never played second fiddle to anything else anywhere as far as we living reporters can find out - and, for the life of us, we haven't managed to discover even a hint of a serious rival. Obviously I don't consider the Deity a rival, whatever He may be, because He is plainly on the side of life, even if His essence is purely spiritual.

  THE GALAXIES AND BEYOND

  Moreover, thinking materially, I see life not only in the stars individually but at least as much in stars collectively, in the Milky Way and all the other galaxies containing them by the billion. For these tremendous bodies are also born from amorphous clouds (clouds of stars as well as of gas and dust) and they go through an even longer evolution with their own distempers and explosions, as we shall see, gradually congregating into loose spirals of one sort or another that progressively tighten into ellipsoids and finally stable spheres. Of course the dynamics of galaxies are more difficult to understand than are those of stars, but it is now surmised that most spiral galaxies suck material inward through their axles and scatter it outward from their rims, an inhaling and exhaling of stars and gas amounting to a continuous metabolism with many complex manifestations of life, from a curious side-puffing of "breath" out of the galaxy's "head" end to a stupendous parturition of offspring stars that must eventually coagulate into juvenile galaxies elsewhere.

  And all the while, inside each galaxy, the star and planet life is perpetually being spawned on a cosmic scale through the incomprehensible genesis of the afore-mentioned supernovas and their pulsar heirs, pulsars being a new class of stars discovered in 1967 that throb and beat with remarkable regularity several times a second. The most significant and interesting thing about the pulsar is that it is made of neutrons that got imploded together into a kind of central atomic ash at the same moment and by the same action that exploded the rest of the giant star outward as a supernova, the complementary implosion and explosion exactly balancing each other and leaving a residue of neutrons locked so tightly together they amount to a single giant nucleus of 1057 neutrons, every golf-ball-sized segment of which weighs more than a battleship, while a mass many times greater than the sun is concentrated in an asteroid-sized spheroid (perhaps ten miles thick), whirling like a top and radiating like a radio beacon with every revolution.

  If a pulsar is the ghost of a supernova, a quasar may be something like a thousand supernovas in the center of a galaxy blowing up one after the other in a chain reaction. It amounts more or less to the explosion of a galaxy, a phenomenon so incredibly stupendous it was neither knowable nor believable until 1963 when Maarten Schmidt of Palomar Observatory, studying a faint, fuzzy "star" that gave out a very strong radio signal and a visible jet of matter, suddenly realized from its peculiar spectral lines that this body was not a star at all but almost certainly a very remote galaxy that was inexplicably a hundred times brighter than any previously known. That's how the class of mysterious objects that astronomers had been calling "quasi-stellar radio sources" - soon shortened to "quasar" - came to world attention as the most astounding astronomical development since Galileo's telescope revealed the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

  Discovered four years after the quasar, the pulsar came as something of an anticlimax, for its most vital function seemed to be to serve as an empyreal enzyme inside the quasar, which in turn must ultimately stoke or nourish the cell-plasm of the greatest celestial outburst ever dreamed: that of the whole exploding universe. And in the scant years since quasars and pulsars were discovered, astronomy has developed so fast that already thousands of quasars are known and ten million are estimated to be within the range of visual telescopes, including one that is 11 billion light-years away and receding at 91 percent of the speed of light, which makes it the remotest object ever sensed by man. But since they seem to burn themselves out fairly quickly (their probable average duration of a million years being, in galactic terms, a mere flash) it is calculated that there must be a total of at least 10 billion quasars in the known universe, almost all of them "dead" and dark. In fact the "dead" ones are so dark they are black and conjectured to be largely made of black holes, a black hole being the possible denouement of a congregation of pulsars, therefore much denser than any one pulsar because its massiveness is so vast and concentrated and its gravity so unbelievably powerful that nothing, not even light or any other radiation, can withstand or escape it. For that reason, black holes have to be essentially lightless and invisible, created not by explosion but only by implosion and on unimaginable scales, involving the collapse of the most massive of stars, sometimes in large numbers, their material falling inward and whirling down or into some sort of an internal drain into nothingness.

  This has never been witnessed, mind you, for black holes are notoriously shy and elusive, seeing as they can neither be looked at nor tuned in on. Yet they are increasingly theorized about and more than a few are suspected of subsisting in our Milky Way, notably in Cygnus and in the nearby multiple star group known as Epsilon Aurigae, where a bright star is associated with some tiny dots (likely planets) circling around a central something that is neither seen in visual telescopes nor heard on radio ones. Moreover black holes warp space and twist time and have a polarity and a dynamic structure, at least theoretically. I mean their rotation (always present in some degree) gives them an axis around which form rings and accretion zones (millions of miles in diameter) of inward-moving gas and dust that gets hotter and faster as it approaches the central drain, giving off x-rays and possibly gamma rays before the critical gravitation becomes too great in the final plunge.

  There seems to be a social life among black holes too, involving various kinds of meetings or matings between moving holes, one variety of which, after a "gestation" period, procreates offspring holes that can be very small - some astrophysicists theorize even microscopic - but which tend to grow and grow, swallowing each other like predatory fish, perhaps ultimately proliferating into a stupendous negative conflagration or star-population implosion that engulfs stars by the millions and may provoke such a violent reaction in the rest of the galaxy that a new quasar is set off.

  Of course the star stuff that vanishes into the nadir vortex of a black hole must be presumed lost to any surrounding quasar, for there is no evidence, even in theory, that it can re-emerge or rematerialize any where in the universe. Indeed a few cosmologists have launched the hyperbolic idea that somehow it must seep completely away from the universe to "resurface" in what they call white holes in some very different, if not opposite, exoverse elsewhere. This should appeal to ecologists as an ultimate (if not cosmically charitable) solution to the pollution problem, but a truer explanation may turn out to be that the vast masses gravitating into black holes are actually diffusing into the microcosm in the form of gravitons, the subatomic gravitation grains postulated by Einstein, the reality of which has recently been supported by impressive evidence (still unconfirmed) that waves of gravitation (previously unknown anywhere) are actually emanating continuously from the center of our Milky Way.

  If attempts to measure the gravitational waves cannot solve the mystery of black holes, perhaps quasars and their holes will turn out to be part of the interaction between matter and anti-matter, antimatter's atoms being composed not like ordinary matter of positively charged nuclei surrounded by negative electrons but rather of opposite negative nuclei surrounded by positive positrons. Some astrophysicists seriously maintain that, in order to satisfy the laws of symmetry, the universe must contain equal parts of matter and anti-matter within the total equilibrium of what may be termed worlds and anti-worlds in which dwell life and anti-life. One model recently proposed by J. Richard Gott III (which appropriately means God III) of Princeton even argues for three universes: (i) t
he familiar universe of matter and forward-flowing time represented as a cone whose apex meets (2) an opposite anti-universe of anti-matter and backward-flowing time, the two cones forming an hourglass-shaped figure, outside and around which lies (3) a tachyon universe whose particles are neither matter nor anti-matter but hypothetical entities called tachyons that by definition perpetually move faster than light.

  Other and even more fantastic models have also been suggested, some of them more imaginative than reasonable and populated with all manner of queer luminous Ifrits, radiating behemoths, uranic monsters and fiends and anti-fiends of the firmament that appear and disappear like runaway stars farrowed and freed in the mass dispersions of quasars. And more and more inevitably the disparate regions of matter and anti-matter have to be insulated from each other by what are called event horizons or curtains of hot ambiplasma, forming a weird no-man's-matter of colliding positive and negative particles, amounting to a seam in the universe across which there is no cause-effect relation and no communication except (say some theorists) "spacelike" interaction that somehow extends through space without any corresponding extension through time. In a sense, if it really exists, such timeless communication must be extrasensory like ESP and would presumably have to involve superorganisms of otherworldly civilizations millions of years more advanced than our own rudimentary anarchy. Indeed we may now be under long-range observation, if not control, by spiritual worlds much more mature than we could possibly conceive, to whom we are comparable to ants or termites or even enclosed within some sort of a cosmic Petri dish, bassinet or Promethean sanctuary - a prospect to which we will return near the end of this book. In any case, I wouldn't put it past ambiplasma to articulate a sort of node between the physical and mental worlds, perhaps in some still unimagined way defining the dimensional verge of body-mind or even, if you can stand it, letting out some secret stitches from the symbolic seams of finity-infinity, life-death, body-soul...