Whether we like it (in the sense of finding it flattering to our vaunted sense of human specialness) or not, such behaviors, whose natural teleology (or purpose) is to reduce ambient gradients, are genuinely future-directed. But, contra Kant and modern self-organization theorists, such future-directedness does not so much “emerge” as inhere in the fundamental telic nature of energetic matter, as described by thermodynamics’ second law.25
In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Peter Brooks talks about the “Freudian master plot”: apart from, behind, and informing all the complex meanings of a text or novel is a movement toward equilibrium, which for us as individuals means death.26 I think we have to bracket the conflation of awareness with meaningful, patterned behaviors to understand what is going on here. Living is a form of extending the energy degradation process, and I don’t think it takes anything away from us to see how our behavior grows out of this higher or lower realm of energy transformation and data processing, which may or may not itself have a deeper meaning. The death wish, as I explore briefly in the conclusion, stems from this protosemiotic or ur-semiotic drive to return to equilibrium. But living, which makes use of death, is even better, as it sustains and expands the open systems that produce more entropy.
CHAPTER 9
LIFE GAVE EARTH THE BLUES
NATURE IS NOT JUST RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW but green with symbiotic chloroplasts, yellow with chrysophyte algae, and flamingo-pink with ingested carotenoids. It is an amazing psychedelic display of spiraling foraminifera, radiating radiolaria, and diatomaceous earth-making diatoms. It is not just hemoglobin red with the blood of animals but nacreous and jeweled with strange partnerships, luminous microbes illuminating deep-sea animals, floating cathedrals of calcium and silicon, oceans full of miniature filigreed and fragile pillbox, star-shaped, and coin forms. On land, hordes of green beings alchemically transform sunlight and dirt and animal exhaust into fruit and flowers and, at another remove, lovers and meat, their shining, glistening, mutually orgasmic bodies a billion-year refrain of triumphant partners, a buoyant rejoinder to chromatic oversimplification, a multicolored splendor. Life is not all roses, but neither is it the opposite. A more profound poet than Lord Tennyson, William Blake, said, “Exuberance is beauty” and “Energy is Eternal Delight.”
EARTH IS NO ORDINARY PLANET. We may pride ourselves on our scientific instrumentation, our thermal satellites and X-ray diffractometers, our magnetic resonance imagers and gas chromatographs determining the atomic composition of crystals and the chemical composition of stars. But the biosphere uses more ancient, distributed self-growing and self-repairing instruments to recognize and maintain its manifold operations. Global humanity is a modern variation on an ancient theme. The biosphere builds an endless variety of biomolecular concentrators and redistributors, organo-devices such as water scorpions (family: Nepidae) with built-in fathometers, plants with gravity sensors and exquisite animal behavior–modifying compounds, algae with barium sulfate and calcium ion–detection systems. Magneto-sensitive bacteria detect true magnetic north, homing pigeons and bees fly home on cloudy days. Electric fish generate and sense, via electroreception, magnetic fields, which they use to locate and communicate with one another.
It is a psychedelic planet and life lights it up. It parties with fireflies, luminous fish, glow-in-the-dark algae in Vieques Island’s bioluminescent bay, and Gonyaulax that flash circadianly wherever they are. Green plants, red algae, and cyan-colored bacteria join us and most animals in perceiving the visible slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from 400 to 700 nanometers in wavelength, and which we see as the colors of the rainbow spanning from purple (the shortest wavelength) to red (the longest). But pollinating insects detect pretty patterns of petals visible only to those that espy within the ultraviolet range at wavelengths below 400 nanometers. Honeybees navigate by polarized light. Pit vipers such as rattlesnakes track their warm prey via infrared. Dogs detect ultrasound; bats not only detect but emit it at ultrahigh frequencies, some 100,000 cycles per second. Together we living beings make and sense and alter the composition of the soil, ocean, atmosphere, and even lithosphere, where microbes that live in the rocks, endoliths, live. Everyone alive has a history of uninterrupted life that goes back for more than three billion years. That includes you, but it also includes inchworms and E. coli. In that sense, there are no extant “highest” or “lower” organisms: although they may not act like it, each present-day life-form represents a successful track record of some 3.8 billion years of evolution.
The numinous feeling of aliveness we get in seeing our blue sphere from space finds support in multiple lines of evidence that show that global life is physiological. The continuous use of matter and energy by multifarious living beings combines to impose regularities and boundaries of action on the planet’s oceans, land, and air. Biospheric life is not an organism, technically, because organisms don’t completely recycle all their available atoms; they share them with other organisms in ecosystems. Earth is thus a kind of superorganismic being or, more academically, a global ecosystem. A kind of closed causal nexus, the blue planet not only reacts but responds, including to its own plentiful inhabitants/constituents.
The notion that Earth is a rock with some life on it is part of our historical heritage and an example of Cartesian dualism: here, on the planetary rock, we have matter; while over here, in moving organisms, we have life. But life and its environment are so tightly wound, it’s wrong to speak this way. In fact, life and the environment form a single system, an energetic phenomenon of chemistry and movement, connected to the sun, at Earth’s surface. “Life” is a kind of substance, one we feel from the inside, but which consists of cosmically available elements organized in regions of energy flow. From a materialistic standpoint, living matter is a peculiar moving mineral made mostly of water. It is, indeed, an impure form of water.
“I am as pure as the driven slush,” said Tallulah Bankhead in that louche and ultimately cosmic quip. It’s no insult that she boasted of her impurity, her promiscuous materiality. The processes of living organize many minerals on Earth’s surface. Human teeth, for example, are converted toxic waste dumps: Evolutionarily, my teeth derive from the need of marine cells to dump calcium waste outside their cell membranes. Calcium is a mineral that will wreak havoc with normal cellular metabolism. Trucking this hazardous waste across cell lines in ancestral colonies of marine cells may well be the basis of all present-day shell- and bone-making, including the apatite, a combo of calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, calcium fluoride (not the same as sodium fluoride added to drinking water), and other compounds, in a smile. Prevalent calcium minerals such as calcite, aragonite, carbonate, phosphate, halite, gypsum, and so forth are also the dominant media used in biomineralization. Opal, a semiprecious type of silica known for its iridescent play of colors, comes next. The magnetic mineral magnetite caps the teeth of chitons but is also found inside the cells of bacteria, in swimming forms of algae, and in minute quantities in the brains of migratory fish, birds, sea turtles, and honeybees where it may act as a compass. Opossum shrimp use needle-shaped fluorite crystals to avoid the light. Like the found objects a junk artist turns into beautiful works, calcium ions once poisonous to marine cells are now arranged in crystalline lattices to make shells and bones including those of our ancestors with spines and central nervous systems, including, that is, those of the junk artist himself. Beautifully symmetrical marine microbes known as radiolarians deplete the oceans of amorphous silica and strontium to produce their ornate skeletons. The dried leaves of a New Zealand shrub, Hybanthus floribundus, contain up to 10 percent of nickel, a greater percentage than some mineral sources currently being mined.1 The concentration of vanadium in marine animals known as ascidians rivals the concentration of iron in ours. The chambered nautilus, related to the squid and octopus, has a powerful aragonite “beak” capable of crushing bones. Its shell is also aragonite, while its balancing organ is formed of calcite
crystals in a “pinpoint mineralization”; and it has normal kidney stones made of phosphate minerals, inclusions shared even by nautilus-type organisms whose kidneys have lost their function. Their inclusions continue to serve, however, as reservoirs used to store the raw skeletal materials calcium and phosphate within the organism. Mediating cell-to-cell interactions as part of the putative neurological basis for motor reflexes and thinking, calcium is lethal to cells in a free ionic state; but although calcium ions are ten thousand times more prevalent in the oceans than is the poison cyanide, calcium itself has been incorporated into the very marrow of life, into its skeletons and shells, and in physiological processes ranging from blood clotting to thinking.
The elements incorporated into the psychedelic biosphere’s flowing functional design include silicon, the second most common element in Earth’s crust after oxygen. Ninety percent of the minerals in Earth’s crust are silicates. As silicon dioxide, this element composes glass, agate, tiger’s eye, and rose quartz. The technology industry has found it useful, as it is used in the silicon chips of our computers and cell phones. But if we recognize it in the stained glass of our churches, we should also note it as the tiny beautiful exteriors of diatoms (which can look like stained glass!), radiolaria, sponges, and other organisms. And silicon is only one example. Life has been biomineralizing its environment for thousands of millions of years, turning its house into a home and its home into a body as it assembles ever more complex bioarchitectures from its “nonliving” surroundings. Clarice Lispector, who said she felt happy only when she was writing—that is, being a conduit between the graphite tip of a pencil and the photosynthetically produced surface of a page or, rather, in her case, being the incarnadine agent that touches the key of a metallic typewriter that imprints and scars earthly matter in a memorable way—remarked that when she was young, before her mother died so young, books to her appeared to be natural things, like fruit or babies. In a geophysiological sense we must admit that the little Clarice was right: an extraterrestrial, looking at Earth’s mineral flows without access to the awareness of the beings within those flows, would no doubt consider books another example of Earth’s boggled body of transformative biochemical processes. We come out of Earth like books come out of us; technology and biology are different aspects of a single process.
THE ENTIRE COSMOS is not composed mainly of water, but is made mostly of one of water’s ingredients: hydrogen. So is life. The hydrogen of the universe appeared from the beginning in the big bang some thirteen billion years ago. Hydrogen, the basic stuff of the entire visible sky, is converted to helium and other heavier chemical elements in the center of those natural nuclear reactors known as stars. We recognize hydrogen on Earth mostly in its combined form as the elemental component, the one that besides oxygen makes up water. Yet some hydrogen on Earth does persist in a purer form; it is a colorless, odorless, lightweight gas (H2) that, as in a balloon, easily escapes from Earth’s gravity. Life, when active, is always composed mostly of water. But life’s ubiquitous H2O, water, is not the elusive H2 (hydrogen) gas. H2, the stuff of stars, makes only a cameo appearance on Earth. Gas hydrogen, when sparked, is violently reactive; to find it in nature one must crouch in the mud or descend into the smelly depths of the Black Sea. For hydrogen’s energetic reactivity is valuable, and, unlike water, it is easily converted into organic matter by particular kinds of life under the Sun’s energizing rays. “Organic matter” is merely a simplified name for millions of chemical compounds, many of them foodstuffs, made of hydrogen bound to carbon.
On our arm of the galaxy, the Sun and its companions ignited from a cloud of gas concentrated by gravity over four billion years ago. At that time, most of the hydrogen atoms—those that failed to remain in the Sun—escaped to the outskirts of our solar system. Today hydrogen exists mainly as cold gas and hydrogen-rich ices (of methane, CH4, and of ammonia, NH3) of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and of their moons that retained gaseous atmospheres. But here, in the inner solar system, the bodies of the rocky planets, Mars, Earth, and Venus, have not been massive enough to retain this atomic constituent of water, this lightest of elements. Hydrogen, the light stuff of stars, mainly has escaped to outer space from Mars and Venus, our planetary neighbors. Here on Earth, hydrogen lies hidden in one massive disguise: inside the three-thousand-meter layer of water on the surface of our planet. (The average depth of the world’s oceans is three kilometers.) Mars, too cold, and Venus, too hot, both lack any open bodies of liquid water and have retained, on their surfaces, less than a single meter of water as vapor or ice!
Although our three kilometers of hydrogen have had billions of years to escape, we suspect the element has remained tenaciously on Earth for only one reason: the incessant thirst of highly active living matter. Life, which originated in water, remains composed of water. Cyclically making itself and remaking itself, life may be as much the reason that water remains on Earth as water is the reason why life remains on Earth.
WHEN HUMANKIND ACCOMPLISHED ITS EPIC GOAL, landing on the moon in 1969, what was not immediately seen was that the territorial move to conquer space for America had a windfall pointed in the opposite direction: that of the planet we left, rather than of the satellite that was visited. As in a trip, sometimes the most fateful and educational part of the journey is the homecoming. It may have been impossible to see that Earth’s surface formed a single ecosystem before landing on the moon or investigating to see if there was life on Mars. But in retrospect we realize that our view of our home has forever changed: we now see the artificiality and anthropomorphism of the European colonial view of Earth as a color-coded globe divided into nation-states—and the relative magnificence of a profound blue orb, engulfing us but itself a tiny drop in the immensity of space. And we exist as a tiny part of that tiny drop, with great potential perhaps but no proven staying power.
Over 99.99 percent of the species that have evolved on the Earth’s surface have become extinct. The longest-living ones are those that entered other cells, providing them with services such as the ability to metabolize oxygen or the power to use light to make food that came from symbiotic transformation. For us to make the transition to a long-term viable life-form is by no means assured. But if we do, we’ll probably have to be like those symbiotic transformers that formed close alliances with other, very different beings, lending them our special skills to make a more powerful union. In retrospect we realize that life does not just exist on Earth like a snake, say, slithering over the face of a rock. Rather, life exists not just on Earth but in the Earth and as the Earth’s planetary surface, including its oceans and atmosphere.
It has been suggested that the continuous presence of water on the Earth’s surface for the last four billion years is not an accident but the result of life, which is made mostly of water and continues to maintain itself in (and as) this planet’s surface. Plate tectonics, too, which requires limestone—made by marine microbes—to lubricate the continental plates, may also be dependent on life. Because a continuous marine rain of algal skeletons ultimately forms a layer of calcium carbonate that lubricates Earth’s giant continental plates, life seems involved in plate tectonics. Crashing plates also open up expanses from which ocean water can evaporate, leaving behind salt and thus removing it from the ocean where it can, in too high concentrations, become deadly to most marine life-forms.
Without the continental plates, which move on life-made limestone and require life-recycled water, there might be no Himalayan or Andean mountain ranges. Microbes really do move mountains, and life and the environment are connected with a depth and intimacy that may surpass the imagination of even the boldest scientists.
Convolutedly, the wet recursive chemical system of waterlogged life seen from space as our turquoise blue beauty of an aqua planet might not be here without life. Water is made of hydrogen, but hydrogen, the lightest element, tends to escape into space, where it has gathered again around the giant outer planets. As Stephan Hardi
ng of Schumacher College points out, one of the escape routes for hydrogen ever since the Archean eon has been a chemical reaction between water and basalt, which is the major rock type at the bottom of the oceans. Basalt contains ferrous oxide and in the presence of carbon dioxide strongly captures oxygen atoms from seawater, letting hydrogen molecules escape to space. Life is moist and damp, and we live on a happily wet planet, but this natural process could have dried Earth up in two billion years. Bacteria again saved the day: photosynthetic life at the sea’s surface liberates free oxygen, which binds to the escaping hydrogen making new water molecules. Other bacteria, such as chemautotrophic anaerobes dwelling in ocean bottom ooze, combine escaping hydrogen with carbonated seawater, creating water in the ocean and liberating methane gas.
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 13
