Monday, 26 December 2011

Being Alive - Chemical Components and Consciencious Considerations

Either life on this planet has adapted phenomenally to the planet, or the planet has adapted to the life. I am inclined to think it is a combination of both, because in all such things, it is always, always, a little of both. Life itself is exceedingly and wonderfully adaptable, resilient, and creative - elements and cells in concert creating chemical cocktails that manage to build protein chains and DNA that somehow thrives within almost every environment you care to find it in. This is truly remarkable.

Human life is one of the more interesting examples of this - and not just because we, being human, are so very biased. As Bill Bryson puts it in his wonderful work 'A Short History of Nearly Everything,' if the earth was tectonically tranquil and perfectly, spherically smooth, it would be 'covered everywhere with water to a depth of 4km. There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but it wouldn't be football.'

We seem to have evolved adaptively to have an incredible chemical harmony with the world around us, and the building blocks that form and fuel it, and us. Consider what happens when you combine one of the most chemically unstable elements with one of the most toxic - you get ordinary table salt. Expose one of them to open air and it will explode; the other will poison you with prejudice. The ingredients in water, ironically, are two of the universe's more famously flammable elements.

What about elements that are not naturally more or less everywhere - including rarer naturally occuring ones, industrial pollutants, extraterrestrial and radioactive elements and so on? We react to these in what can only be called disagreeable ways. Again to borrow from Bill Bryson '(no amount of plutonium) is not going to make you want to lie down'

Life is insane, truly. Like a mad scheme that somehow pulled itself off here, but not, on say, Venus, or the moon, or Ceres or Neptune. This is not to say that among the trillions of other planets that this universe (or indeed, among the multiverse, if it or anything like it exists) contains, life does not, did not, or will not exist. But it will be of a different type. Perhaps we may be visited by a race of beings who are grateful for their plutonium spires, ammonium suplhate glaciers and their polished-marble-smooth planet with its absence of tectonic anything. How might these beings react to see us thriving in our air conditioned shopping centres and offices, largely ignoring our parks and oceans and natural beauty? How might they react to those natural (and unnatural) features we grew up in and on? Not to mention the obstinate and bizarre chemicals in the atmosphere that we breathe, and in and on the earth we walk upon.

I am aware that I borrowed more than just the quotations in this article from the book by Bill Bryson. I did so because I took his conclusion a necessary and important giant step further: almost all of us never invest the time to discover how truly rare, insane, beautiful, valuable and precarious is life, and our little planet's capability to produce and sustain it. For those who *do* this, there is a very real danger of being trapped in the magnificence of the knowledge.

This is twofoldly dangerous. First, as Slavoj Zizek so poignantly pointed out, such ideological posturing addresses very real things by mystifying them into something surreal. And second, the cosmos is quite obscenely, simply mind-blowingly vast, and our knowledge of this, the most important context to consider ourselves within - the universal, in every sense of the word - may be similarly infantile and stunted as a bull ant in my backyard's understanding of the tectonic and religious history of the Himalayas. Therefore, the extraordinariness we attribute to our existence may not be quite so fabulous after all.

And if it is not so fabulous, then we should waste no time sitting open mouthed like beached guppies about it.

Regardless how fabulous it is or is not, it is the only physical chance at living we will ever get. It can be taken for granted almost as much as the awesomeness of it can mesmerise us. This is to say, none at all. Especially now that, by our own decadent industrial obscenely over-consumptive hands, we are destroying the capacity of the planet to sustain us. Stop fucking around, people. Maybe you want to die (most of you act like it, nonchalantly, narcissistically naive about what is going on), but I do not. And unfortunately as it may seem, especially if you are offended at my abruptness, we are all in this together.

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