by Guy Murchie
Turning now to the animal kingdom, may I introduce what you may have already anticipated: a real live firebird flitting about the Earth's burnt woods. Known in Michigan as Kirtland's warbler, it subsists almost entirely on the young jack pine, and is therefore largely nurtured by fire. In fact this tiny bird has become so dependent on fire that the decrease in forest fires in Michigan this century is causing ecologists to fear its extinction. And beyond it there extends a whole continuum of fire fauna, ranging from the tiny pine-seed-eating whitefooted mouse to the lordly moose, who has been thought to "follow lightning" because of his taste for the smoky-flavored young shrubbery that sprouts in the burn habitats left by summer storms.
Man of course must be included in any complete list of the beneficiaries of wildfire. So too, surprisingly, must be some streams, rivers, lakes and other liquid organisms, not infrequently with human aid. For I hear that farmers and ranchers are increasingly abetting fire in its production of water by seeding the residuum of scorched ground with moisture-conserving grass. Although some land owners still refuse to accept such "miracles," range ecologists are reporting solid evidence that former dry sagebrush country, now burnt over and converted to sod, not only feeds seven times more animals than does unburnt sage land but that it will water them as well. In a recent case a California farmer sowed his dry range one spring after a fire, and two years later, realizing that streams which had always dried up in summer were now flowing the whole year, built himself a reservoir that in a few months became the supply center for a permanent irrigation system.
If fire can do all these things and still be lusty enough to spawn everything from trees to moose to permanent waterways, I'd say its sparks must include the spark of life! Surely there is no longer any doubt that fire, which Herakleitos called "the eternal flux of matter," is a subtle and sensitive phenomenon, a nonanimal, nonvegetable, natural predator that evolved throughout evolution, often doing more good than harm. It does this by regular pruning of undesirable or ill adapted species and by preventing the accumulation of flammable fodder, the presence of which could otherwise enable the next fire to burn so hot it would kill deep roots or even blaze high enough to ignite the crowns of trees becoming a rare fire storm a few of which have actually been known to breed real white hot tornadoes.
LIGHTNING
Remembermg that lightning is one of the principal perpetrators of wildfire, it may be worth mentioning here that this still mysterious symbol of swiftness and divine retribution has a vertebral skeleton similar to that of a river and surprisingly complex physical functions (which I described in detail in my Song of the Sky), and that it leaves its own unique footprints in rusty, igneous dents on rocky mountain crags, the split trunks and sloughed bark of giant trees and the littleknown fulgurites of fused sand it excretes where it strikes a dune or a beach The reason the root shaped fulgurite tubes of silica glass, sometimes appropriately called petrified lightning, are so seldom seen is that they are always deposited by the lightning ferret fashion underground. Of course in some cases the sand around them eventually gets washed or blown away and the fulgurite is discovered and likely put into some museum where it can be studied as a kind of fossilized thunder script - a script "written" in an unimaginable ten thousandth of a second with electric ink at 3000°F. by the mercurial quill of lightning, whose strike, according to present understanding, is double, coming from opposite directions as polarized "leader" and "response" strokes, both of which advance between heaven and Earth in unseeable quantized steps like a sprouting meristem of electrons at least as alive as any river or flame.
ATOMIC EXPLOSIONS
On a vaster scale, the most alarming fire creature ever born to man, an atomic explosion, manifests itself as a kind of organism of the intellect that should not be omitted from any roster of fundamental life forms. Certainly William L. Laurence, the eminent science editor of the New York Times who was the only journalist permitted to witness the atomic bombing of Japan, thought of it as a living phenomenon when he wrote: "Awe-struck, I watched a pillar of purple fire shoot upward, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes ... It was a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth.
"There came shooting out of the totem pole's top a giant mushroom, even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending downward, a thousand geysers rolled into one... giving the appearance of a monstrous prehistoric creature with a ruff around its neck, a fleecy ruff extending in all directions, as far as the eye could see..."
Winding up the strange life forms of war, I cannot but mention war ecology, which, like fire ecology, involves fire of different but no less deadly sorts and which likewise has its creative side. War as now understood is an ecology where the elimination of established species of animals and vegetables normally heralds the arrival of new ones and the unexpected is commonplace - like bomb bursts playing the part of dinner bells to tigers in Vietnam, calling the suddenly increasing numbers of these carnivorous beasts to their unaccustomed but delectable diet of freshly butchered soldiers, or the 269 species of flora that were transplanted (mostly by the winds) to London during World War II and announced their arrival by arising triumphantly out of the soil of thousands of bomb-plowed vacant lots that had obviously offered their seeds growing space not previously available.
Although the list of analogues of life could go on indefinitely, I think I have suggested enough to make my point that the abstract essence of life may be found almost everywhere one looks, not only on what may be a far-from-rare planet but also on a fairly typical star like the sun, indeed, more than probably, all over the universe.
Chapter 16
Doornail and Crystal Essence
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SO WE COME to the next logical step in our analysis of life: a close look at metals and particularly crystals, which just could be where some pioneering scientist may yet descry how the material structure known as life actually begins to take shape.
In this connection, I once heard someone remark that the moon, because she apparently harbors no native creatures, must be a dead world. To which a young astronomer responded as if ringing a knell, "Yeah, as dead as a doornail!" And it struck me as curious that, of all the materials generally considered not alive, the metal in a doornail is proverbially the deadest. In fact, if you believed common talk, you might well suppose a man could comb the four corners of the world without anywhere finding anything deader than a doornail.
METALLIC "LIFE"
Understandably, therefore, it was with a keen whet of interest that I read of Sir J. C. Bose's experiments early this century in Calcutta to test the "life" in iron, steel, bronze and other metals, which now makes it possible for me to use some of his discoveries to bolster my own exploration of life. Without any knowledge as to what title, if any, Bose gave to this study, I can only guess and hope that he would not have thought it inappropriate for me to call it the Doornail Project. Whether or no, I am informed that Bose rigged up his pieces of metal with wires and clockwork so they could be subjected to electric shocks automatically once each second or at other desired intervals, and that he observed on his very sensitive instruments how each piece of "doornail" accepted or resisted these repeated onslaughts. In doing so he soon noticed a significant progressive increase in the metal's electrical resistance as time passed, so that after an hour or two the piece under test might be taking only half the current it had accepted in the beginning. He considered this symptom as evidence that the "doornail" was "getting tired." And he further found that if he gave it a rest it would recover in a few minutes, almost as if it were an animal or a man, and would then respond as before. Subsequently he discovered that if he gave it too long a rest, say a full month's vacation, it would get sluggish or sleepy and not do at all well - that is, no
t until he had given it a brisk jolt of electricity, the equivalent of a cold dip, to wake it up and snap it out of its doldrums.
He found also that certain chemicals or drugs would do almost as well as the electric shock in this "shot in the arm" treatment, while other drugs on the contrary seemed to poison the test metal and put it into a kind of coma. In fact Bose reported that copper, tin and platinum reacted to electricity almost exactly as did nerve and muscle tissues. In some cases a small dose of "poison" would invariably quicken a metal's response while a large dose of the same "poison" would "kill" it, just as with a so-called living organism, and when the graphs of nerve reactions and of metal reactions were compared they looked so much alike they got misfiled on two occasions, and had to be specially labeled so the workers in the Doornail Project laboratory could tell which was which.
If curing "sick" metal with "medicine" administered by a doctor of metallurgy is remarkable, how much more so is the space research now going on in several parts of the world to develop a metal that can heal itself! One such effort at the University of California in 1967, for example, produced a supersteel alloy called TRIP (with TRansformation-Induced Plasticity) which not only stretches four times as far as other steels without cracking but, if the stress continues to the point where the molecular structure starts to rend, a solid-state chemical reaction is triggered which "blunts" the incipient crack, at the same time filling and healing it.
One of the most trying problems of spacecraft in space is the vital circuitry inside their almost uncountable electronic gadgets, which have been found to suffer fractures not only from radiation but from prolonged vibration, lubricant evaporation and sudden temperature changes. Here the astonishing cure turns out to be a tin-magnesium-aluminum alloy that can be extruded into a new kind of wire, which has the power, should it get broken, immediately to start growing "whiskers" to bridge the gap and heal the wound. The alloy accomplishes this by the seemingly magical crystal process of sprouting fine metallic fur out of any new surface free of restraint, as in a fresh crack, every individual hair of which has enough driving energy to extend itself about a millimeter in three days and enough substance to carry roughly a watt of electric power, which, multiplied by the contributions of fellow hairs, is much more than enough to keep the average spacecraft circuit in operation. The similarity between these metal whiskers and tropical plants is further accented by the observation that, although they grow moderately well at room temperature, they reach their fastest growth at about 125°F. and, if the heat rises above that, tend to "wilt" before maturity.
LIFE IN MACHINES
Although it is by no means hard to track down such examples of metallic life, it is noticeably easier to find analogies of sentience in larger or more complex "organisms" made of metal, many of which are commonly known as motors or machines. A small electric fan on my writing table, for instance, had a fall the other day while it was running and landed on its side in such a way that the rubber blade was prevented from turning while the motor strained and hummed in frustration for a few seconds until I could rescue it. To my dismay the motor refused to work when I set the fan back in place but, after I spun the blade by hand, it eventually caught on a little and turned slowly with an unaccustomed rattle. "Perhaps the motor is partly burned out," I thought as I watched it falter, pick up a little, then gradually die again. But every time it quit, I encouraged it with a new spin and, after ten minutes of this physiotherapy, to my delight it somehow lost its rattle and, although it would still slow down occasionally, it had improved enough to be almost completely normal - and it has retained its health ever since.
Isn't this rather similar to the time-honored resilience of many an old automobile which, after refusing to start for a few minutes, suddenly convulses into a fit of coughing, then somehow manages to clear its throat, shake off its stammer, steady down and run perfectly all day. Or the so-called foolproof airplane that is so control-limited and inherently stable that it obviously "wants" to fly and will work itself out of any stall, mismaneuver or spin anyone puts it into - in the process settling itself back on a comfortable and even keel? Machines breathe, eat, react, grow old and die, you see, very much like living organisms, sometimes protesting violently, as when a car, started in high gear, shudders as if with emotion from the undue strain, or a middle-aged locomotive responds to a steep grade by puffing like a fat man on the stairs.
PSEUDO-LIFE
In the microcosm and the small world of chemical reactions still other lifelike functions may be found such as "artificial amebas" made of oil and soap which crawl and extend pseudopodia, and "water bugs" of camphor that skate and whirl across a full tub because of the shifting pressures of surface tension as the soap or camphor dissolves unevenly. And even more animal-like is the performance of a drop of chloroform in water, which behaves remarkably like a "finicky" eater, refusing offered grains of sand, glass, plastic or charcoal but hungrily engulfing crumbs of paraffin and shellac. The chloroform has also in one recorded case "outwitted" a researcher who tried to "deceive" it with a piece of glass coated with shellac, for, although it swallowed this "morsel" without "noticing" anything wrong, it digested only the shellac before hastily regurgitating the glass.
The most realistic of all such chemical organisms, however, is probably a drop of mercury left close to a small crystal of potassium dichromate in a bowl of water that includes a few dissolved teaspoonfuls of nitric acid. The mercury just sits there at first, apparently dozing, but, as the pink cloud spreading from the dissolving crystal gets to it, it seems to "smell" something exciting and reacts instantly - almost like a tomcat meeting a receptive female on the back fence at midnight. The mercury shoots out a tongue as if it were trying to lick the crystal, but withdraws it again without quite touching it. A few seconds later it repeats the overture, this time with more "confidence." By the third or fourth time it actually touches the crystal and begins to quiver and boil, literally throbbing as it surges toward the object of its "desire," which retreats "coyly" while being pursued around the bowl. This "love chase" continues for several minutes, progressively building up to a climax of sorts, whereupon the mercury, which had been spitting out dense orange-brown clouds, subsides in apparent exhaustion.
It is a real puzzle to try to define exactly why such interaction should be considered to signify life when observed between animals but not when observed between chemicals. I presume it is because the accepted fundamental characteristics of organic life are that it is formed of cells (collectively known as protoplasm) which consume nourishment, grow, metabolize, move, react and reproduce themselves and that, although inorganic chemicals may do many of these things in a way, they can hardly be said to be composed of protoplasmic cells or to fully reproduce themselves like animals or plants. Another and rather curious difference between organic and inorganic matter, it was long ago discovered, is that if you cook the former, whether it be sugar, olive oil, bread, bone or flesh, it will eventually char, shrivel or go up in smoke, remaining irrevocably changed from its original state, while inorganic matter such as salt, lead, stone or water can be heated and melted or boiled for hours without essentially changing. The generality of this culinary definition of life may be attributable to the fact that most inorganic matter is relatively simple and pure, being made of vast numbers of similar molecules of very few kinds, while organic matter owes its much more sensitive complexity to its containing only small numbers of similar molecules of each of a wide variety of different kinds.
DISORDER AND ORDER
An obviously profounder distinction about life turned up late in the nineteenth century with the advent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, commonly called the Law of Entropy or Disorder. This famous law says there is a long-range, long-run certainty that order will eventually give way to disorder in any clpsed material system. As life obviously involves organisms, which are organized and orderly, the entropy law clearly states the inevitability of physical death, which means the loss of order. And the p
ervasive tendency extends all the way from your cluttered closet to the atom in one direction and out to the farthest reaches of the universe in the other, a universe whose end (assuming it has limits) will entail nothing but dry "dead" worlds and shattered galaxies that are drifting farther and farther apart while inexorably disintegrating. And, according to this law, entropy will continue until all energy is distributed evenly everywhere with nothing warmer or cooler than anything else and only tepid dust and finally separate, random atoms and subatomic particles diffusing listlessly and invisibly outward, outward and ever outward into unknowability, lifelessness, spacelessness, timelessness ... nothingness.
Opposing this depressing Dantean "heat death" of entropy of course is its opposite force, the positive and much cheerier Wordsworthian principle of negentropy, of growth and order which, even while appearing mortally limited in time (not to mention space), constitutes life. It seems unfortunate, not to say ironic, that such a vital and positive influence should be known by such a negative name as negentropy. But the only thing really negative about it is that it opposes entropy, so we may let ourselves think of it as overpoweringly strong. In fact, despite the touted Second Law of Thermodynamics, our universe may well harbor a less obvious, less material but overriding Law of Negentropy - particularly if no proof turns up of the universe being a closed system, which, I presume, would require a positive curvature of space over a big enough volume to close in upon itself, a cosmic happenstance none of the accelerating evidences of astronomy has so far come near to substantiating.
These two preponderant forces then are seen to be locked in a profound struggle for mastery of the world: negentropy arising out of almost universal entropy, order bravely stemming the tide of disorder, life Sprouting confidently up from the inertia of diffuse and vacuous space. It is worth a moment's reflection, I think, to consider just what this means in specific terms, beginning by trying to visualize the virtually infinite numbers of dust motes and molecules roaming the interstellar and intergalactic vastnesses of the universe. Where are they going? Why do they wander? What force motivates their unpredictable caprices? One obvious answer is that a randomly moving particle tends to wander because it is much easier for it to go somewhere else than to return to where it was a moment ago, a prime tenet of kinetics being (as you can see in the diagram) that many more paths lead away from than back toward any previous position.
