Organic Bridges

Organic Bridges

The Nature of Things – the secret life of Inanimate Objects by Lyall Watson

Long before the circulatory system was described and understood, it was noticed that a loss ob blood resulted in a loss of vitality. Blood therefore must be the vital essence, and life, it was assumed, could be given or transferred with the help of some of this magic ingredient. Hence the Aboriginal practice of opening a vein to let blood drip on to a symbolic stone churinga, ensuring the the quickening and increase of totemic animals such as the kangaroo; the the ratification of the Mosaic covenant with God by the sprinkling on an altar of the blood of a sacrificial ox; and the taboo, still common in many parts of Africa, against taking first fruits until the vitality of the entire crop has been guaranteed by making a bloody oblation in the fields.

The assumption in each case is that blood animates, validates or vitalizes that on which it is shed, bringing the dead to life. The sacrificial victims of blood donors were invariably male. They still are. When a new house or shrine is built in West Africa a cock is killed and its body put into the main posthole. Stone-masons in Greece shed a ritual drop of blood into the foundations of a new home. And constructors and architects everywhere take part in “topping out” ceremonies when a project nears completion. Given that such rituals include symbolic sacrifice in the form of split red wine, or the actual beheading of a billy goat, talk of a building “getting topped” seems singularly appropriate.

During work on a Tudor house in London in 1963 a bricked-up recess was found to contain the bodies of four cockerels, two of which had been decapitated and two walled-in alive. Cats too were deliberately entombed, sometimes with a mouse or a bird for company, once in the roof of a church being restored by Sir Christopher Wren in 1691. Other organic charms concealed in buildings include old shoes on over seven hundred sites from Turkey to Australia, with a date range from the thirteenth century to 1935. All are men's shoes, presumably belonging to the builders, but always set with obvious care into their hiding places. Some are ritually marked or deliberately mutilated with mystic symbols, and a few somewhat disturbing examples are still attached to the feet of their owners.

It is interesting how often buildings, ships, roads and bridges seem still to take human toll just as the work on them is coming to an end, almost as though they “demand” a suitable sacrifice. Managers in the construction business recognize the phenomenon of “last day injuries”. And folklore in the industry is full of tales of missing workers whose bodies turn up later when ships are being demolished in the scrapyard, or bridge supports damaged by earthquake or flood. Then the deaths are discovered and rationalized by talk of laborers on their lunch breaks crawling into the cavities of double hulls or the shelter of wooden casements for a sleep, just before the last rivets are shot or the first concrete poured into place. But it is ominous how often River Kelang in Malaysia neared completion in the 1960s. And a measure of how seriously the question is still considered is that workers on project of the English Channel, while deploring the death of two of their fellows, should admit to a feeling of relief that at least “the bugger has had his taste of blood.”

Our daily lives are filled with obvious example of the organic bridge in action. Picture by Elena.

Social Life of Things

The Social Life of Things

The Nature of Things – the secret life of Inanimate Objects by Lyall Watson

Social Notions

When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a child, playing in the lot behind his home in Temuco, he discovered a hole in a fence board:

“I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared – a tiny hand of a boy about my age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvellous white toy sheep. The sheep's wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep. I never saw either the hand of the boy again. And I have never seen a ship like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now... whenever I pass a toyshop, I look furtively into the window. It's no use. They don't make sheep like that anymore.”

Such things are super-notions, objects given value which is independent of their substance or appeal. Value by association. Very often they are gifts. And a real gift, almost by definition, cannot be static. Historically it is something that was intended to be shared, to lead a life of its own. Gifts, to be true to their nature, must move.

Some forms of property stand still, they resist momentum, like houses which exercise extraordinary control over the destiny of certain families. True gifts are not like that, they are not supposed to be kept, but to be given away again as soon as possible. Everywhere that gift rituals exist, those involved recognize that the first movement of a new thing is relatively weak. It is with the movement through the first recipient to a second and a third that an object begins to acquire real potency. Gifts are social things, they need to go out a lot, and those that are prevented from doing so seem to lose a good part of their national identity.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski recalled a visit to Edinburgh Castle where he was shown the Scottish crown jewels, and told how they had been taken away on several occasions by English kings and queens, and how pleased the nation was to have them back now, safe under lock and key, where no one could touch them again. Malinowski was appalled and could not help thinking “how ugly, useless, ungainly, even tawdry they were”, in comparison to a collection of “thin red strings, and big white, worn-out objects, clumsy to sight and greasy to touch” he had seen not long before on islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Malinowski spent the years of the First World War working among the Massim people who live in a spray of islands scattered across the Coral and Solomon Seas. They share a language and most of a common Melanesian culture, but are untied principally by an astonishingly ceremonial exchange of gifts known as the kula. The complex ritual – no one ever things of it in terms of trade – revolves around two main categories of gift. One is known as bagi and consists of small broken pieces of bright red shell taken from Chama imbricata, a frilly rock clam sometimes known as a “jewel box”. These are drilled and strung together into distinctive necklaces on cords of natural fibre decorated with smaller red shell beads. The other gift is called mwali and is a pair of armbands made from giant leopard cone shells, Conus leopards, by breaking off the blunt caps and narrow bases and polishing the central cylinders into shiny white bands like large napkin rings.

Candles are the most common offerings in churches, temples and shrines, where their immolation seems to be understood ad a form of sacrifice. Photo by Elena.

Nightgame

Nightgame

By C.J. Cherryh

The sun climbed higher, and outside, the City sank into its daytime burrowings; and the Lotus Palace sank into its daily hus. Elio bathed, a lingering immersion in a golden bowl only slightly more gleaming than the limbs which curled in it, serpent-lithe and slender. He walked the cool, lily-stemmed halls, and stared restlessly out upon the only unshielded view of the Palace, upon the ruin-flecked valley below the hill, upon the catacombs sheened by the daystar's terrible radiations, and behind him his attendant lesser lords observed this madness with languid-lidded eyes, hoping for something bizarre. But he was not struck by the sun, nor did he leap to his death, as four Tyrants before him had done, when amusements failed; and he turned on them a look which in itself gave them a prized thrill of terror... remembering that to assuage the pangs of the last failed hunt - a minor lord had fallen to him in the Games, rare, rare sport.

But he passed them by with that deadly look and walked on, absorbed in his anticipations, often raised, ever disappointed.

The kill was always too swift. And he knew the whispers, that such power as his always burned itself out, that it grew more and more inward, lacking challenge, until at last nothing should suffice to stir him.

He imagined. Such talent was rare. The sickness was on him, that came on the talented, the brilliant dreamers, who found no further challenges. At twelve, he foresaw a day not far removed when his own death would seem the only excitement yet untried. He knew the halls, each lotus stem and startled, golden fish. He knew the lord and ladies, knew them, not alone the faces, but the very souls, and drank in all their pleasures, fed by them, nourished on their darkest fantasies, and was bored.

He probed the death of victims, and found even that tedious.

He grew thin, pacing the halls by day, and exhausting his body in dreams at night. 

He terrorized captured laborers, but that waking sport palled, for the dreams were more, and deeper, and more colorful, unlimited in fantasy, save by the limits of the mind.

And these he had paced and plumbed as well.

At twelve he knew the limits of all about him, and had experienced all the pleasures, heritor of a thousand thousands of his sort, all of whom died young, in a City which found its Eternity a slow, slow death.

Perhaps tonight, he thought, savoring the thought, I die.

Hammered into rain, the city rebuilt on that ruin, stubbornly rising as if up were the only direction it knew. Photograph by Elena.

The Haunted Tower

The Haunted Tower (London)

By C.J. Cherryh

There were ghosts in old London, that part of London outside the walls and along the river, or at least the townsfolk outside the walls believed in them: mostly they were attributed to the fringes of the city, and the unbelievers inside the walls insisted they were manifestations of sunstruck brains, of senses deceived by the radiations of the dying star and the fogs which tended to gather near the Thames. Ghosts were certainly unfashionable for a city management which prided itself on technology, which confined most of its bulk to a well-ordered cube (geometrically perfect except for the central arch which let the Thames flow through) in which most of the inhabitants lived precisely ordered lives. London had its own spaceport, maintained offices for important offworld companies, and it thrived on trade. It pointed at other cities in its vicinity as declined and degenerate, but held itself as an excellent and enlightened government: since the Restoration and the New Mayoralty, reason reigned in London, and traditions were cultivated only so far as they added to the comfort of the city and those who ruled it. If the governed of the city believed in ghosts and other intangibles, well enough; reliance on astrology and luck and ectoplasmic utterances made it less likely that the governed would seek to analyze the governors upstairs.

There were some individuals who analyzed the nature of things, and reached certain conclusions, and who made their attempts on power.

For them the Tower existed, a second cube some distance down the river, which had very old foundations and very old traditions. The use of it was an inspiration on the part of the New Mayoralty, which studied its records and found itself a way to dispose of unwanted opinion. The city was self-contained. So was the Tower. What disappeared into the Tower only rarely reappeared... and the river ran between, a private, unassailable highway for the damned, so that there was no untidy publicity.

Usually the voyagers were the fallen powerful, setting out from that dire river doorway of the city of London.

On this occasion one Bettine Maunfry came down the steps toward the rusty iron boat and the waters of old Thames. She had her baggage (three big boxes) brought along by the police, and though the police were grim, they did not insult her, because of who she had been, and might be again if the unseen stars favored her.

She boarded the boat in a state of shock, sat with her hands clenched in her lap and stared at something other than the police as the loaded her baggage aboard and finally closes the door of the cabin. This part of the city was an arch above the water, a darksome tunnel agleam with lights which seemed far too few; and she swallowed and clenched her hands the more tightly as the engines began to chug their way downriver toward the daylight which showed at the end.

They came finally into the wan light of the sun, colors which spread themselves amber and orange across the dirty glass of the cabin windows. The ancient ruins of old London appeared along the banks, upthrust monoliths and pillars and ruined bits of wall which no one ever had to look at but those born outside – as she had been, but she had tried to forget that.

In not so long a time there was a smooth modern wall on the left side, which was the wall of the Tower, and the boat ground and bumped its way to the landing.

The city soared, a single spire aimed at the clouds, concave-curved from sprawling base to needle heights. Photograph by Elena.

Catch the Lightning

Catch the Lightning

A novel in the Saga of the Skolian Empire by Catherine Asaro

The Abaj Tacalique

The Raylicon sky glowered red above the horizon, its streamered clouds lined with fluorescent pink. Directly above us the sky calmed into gray and at the opposite horizon it deepened into black.

Athor and I stood alone, surrounded by desert. Low red hills rolled out in every direction as far as we could see. In the distance, claws of rock stretched like skeletal fingers up to the angry sky. The horizon was closer than on Earth and the gravity weaker. Although it looked like how I imagined Mars, Raylicon is actually a darker red than Earth's neighbor and has a more complex biosphere. Her atmosphere is oxygen rich and dense, giving the daytime sky a pale blue color.

Althor still wore the pants and boots of his dress uniform, with a black knit pullover. He had given me his flight jacket, and it hung down over my dress to my hips. Made from the same insulating material as his regular uniform, it even carried its own web system.

We stood staring at the sky. The receding spark that had been the Jag was gone now. “Do you think it can make it back without a pilot?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Althor said.

I wanted to offer comfort, to take away his haunted look. But in the few minutes since the Jag had revived us, Althor had remained distant and closed.

“The Jag was right.” I said. “We're safe here. Both of us.”

“It needs a pilot.” He looked no more accepting now of its decision than he had when it first told him it was going solo.

A rumbling finally registered on my mind. As I became aware of it, I realized it had been in the ground for a while, growing stronger. With it came the memory of that morning so many years ago in Chiapas, when an earthquake shook the ground until fissures opened. After it was over, my aunt and uncle had been dead, our home destroyed, our sheep lost, and our crops gone.

The rumbling grew stronger, shaking the desert, stirring dust. Thunder in the ground. I moved closer to Althor, but when I touched his arm he stiffened. So I dropped my hand. He wouldn't look at me, just stood staring at the horizon.

The came silhouetted against the crimson sky, hundreds of them, sweeping over the curve of the world like phantasms created from the burning horizon. In wave after wave, a horde of riders thundered out of the sunset.

“Go away,” I whispered. “No more.”

“These are friends,” Althor said. “Abaj”

“Your ancient bodyguards?”

He nodded, his attention on the riders. The force of their coming raised clouds of dust.

“If these are bodyguards,” I said, “why weren't they here when the Jag set us down?”

He continued to stare out at the riders. “The Abaj Tacalique control the ground-based, orbital-based, and interplanetary defenses for this system. They've one of the most extensive defense matrices in settled space.” Dust swirled around his feet, agitated by the rumbling ground. “It makes no difference where we are on the planet. They have been guarding us since we entered the system.” He motioned at the riders. “This is ceremony”.

They came on, resolving out of the gathering shadows, tall forms on mounts. Long strips of cloth trailed behind their heads, snapping in the wind.

The lightning. Illustration by Elena.

The Last Hawk

The Last Hawk

By Catherine Asaro

(A novel of the Skolian Empire)

The escort returned Kelric to the AmberRoom the same way they had taken him from it; in complete silence, his wrists locked behind his back, without Deha or her retinue. The journey up the tower seemed endless. He couldn't even use his hands to lean on the rail as he climbed.

Inside the AmberRoom, Hacha freed his wrists. Brusquely she said, “Don't try to leave. An armed octet will be posted Outside at all times.” She turned and walked toward the door, motioning for the others to follow.

Rev spoke: “I'll stay a while.”

Hacha glanced back and shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Then she left with the others, closing the door behind her.

Kelric sat on the edge of the bed. “Is she always that abrupt? Or is it just me?”

Rev said nothing.

“Ekaf took the vow of silence.” Kelric said. “Not me.”

“I have no right to speak with you.”

“Hacha just did.”

“Only because she is now captain of your Calanya escort and Deha has allowed it. But she can't talk with you. Only to you.”

Kelric exhaled. “I don't understand any of this.”

“You can speak with other Dahl Calami,” Rev said. “And with Deha. But not to anyone Outside.”

“You do it too.”

“It?”

“Say Outside as if it were a title.”

“It is,” Rev said. “Those within Calanya are Inside. The rest of the universe is Outside.”

Dryly, Kelric said, “That leaves a lot of people Outside.”

“Yes. You are one of a very few.”

“Great,” Kelric muttered.

Rev sat in a chair. “Kelric, it is considered a great honor among our people.” He stopped. “I should call you Sevtar now.”

“Why Sevtar?”

“He is the dawn god, a giant with skin made from sunlight. He strides across the sky, pushing back the night so the sundgoddess Savina can sail out from behind the mountains on her giant hawk.” Rev smiles. “Deha thought it appropriate.”

“What's wrong with the name Kelric?”

“Kelric isn't Coban.”

“You're right, he isn't. But my name is Kelric.”

“You have a new name now.”

Kelric shook his head. This was getting him nowhere. He ran his fingers over his right armband. Akasi? Deha reminded him too much of Corey, his first wife, stirring ghosts better left buried. Corey had been a well-known figure, a hero of the people. During the long days after her death, at the ceremonies and state funeral, all broadcast to a grieving public, he had stood silent in his black dress uniform, a widower when he was barely twenty-four. On display before everyone, he had kept it all inside, how it tore him apart to lose her. In the ten years since, he had gradually regained his equilibrium. Now Deha came along, throwing everything off balance.

It was safer to thin of other things. He regarded Rev. “I thank you for your speech.”

“It was my honor.”

“I'm glad someone feels that way. I think Llach wants to heave me off a cliff.”

Soft thoughts. Photo by Elena.

New York, 2140 - The Flood

New York, 2140. a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

The next day it was still windy and raining hard, sometimes pelting down, but all within the norms of an ordinary summer storm – drenching, cool, blustery – but compared to the two days before, not very dangerous, and much better lit. White gray rather than black gray. Also the tide, though the dawn began with a high tide, was no longer a storm surge. It was down to only a couple feet higher than an ordinary high tide. Now on the buildings around Madison Square there was a faint bathtub ring of leaves and plastered gunk much higher than the usual high tie mark. The surge had apparently already poured back out the Narrows and through Hell Gate into the sound. It had to have been one hell of an ebb run.

Vlade could now get back into his boathouse, and so he unsealed the door to it and began to sort out the confusion created by having all the boats floated up into each other, and in some cases crushed a bit against the ceiling. Many of them were internally flooded by this, but oh well. Could be pumped out and dried out.

Getting the boathouse sorted took half the day, and after that he could go out in the Met runabout and inspect the building and the neighborhood. The canals were everywhere filled with flotsam and jetsam, pieces of the city knocked loose and floating around. People were back out on the water, although the vapors were not running yet. Police cruiser zipped around ordering people out of their way, stopping to collect floating bodies, animal or human. The health challenges were going to be severe, Vlad saw; it was already warm again, and cholera was all too likely. The freshets of rain that came that day were a good thing in that sense. The longer it was before the sun hit the water and began to cook the wreckage, the better.

Idelba's tug now served as a good passenger ferry up Park Avenue to Central Park, where there were some new jury-rigged docks, very busy with lines of waiting boats, most of the, unloading people from downtown. The glimpses into Central Park that they got before they returned down Park were shocking; it looked like all the trees in the park were down. Which seemed all too possible, and at the moment was not the problem, but it made an awful sight. They returned to the Met and took the last load of refugees out of the building, ignoring the occasion protest, telling them the building was maxed and more than maxed, and Central Park was now becoming the better place for them to get shelter and refuge status. “Also, we're out of food,” Vlade told them, which was close enough to true to allow him to say it. And it worked to get people to leave.

Inspector Gen had been out working since the storm began, but she had come back home the night before on a police cruiser, to change clothes and catch a couple of hours of sleep. Now she asked for a ride up to Central Park, where her people said she was needed again.

“I believe it,” Idelba said. “Won't be long before New Yorkers start a riot on you, right?”

“So far so good,” the inspector said.

“Well, but it's still raining. They can't get out to protest yet...”

The boats. Photo by Elena.

Winds of Time

Winds of Time

Near the site of the Alexandrian Library there is today a headless sphinx sculpted in the time of the pharaoh Horemheb, in the Eighteenth Dynasty, a millennium before Alexander. Within easy view of that leonine body is a modern microwave relay tower. Between them runs an unbroken thread in the history of the human species. From sphinx to tower is an instant of cosmic time – a moment in the fifteen or so billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang. Almost all record of the passage of the universe from then to now has been scattered by the winds of time. The evidence of cosmic evolution has been more thoroughly ravaged than all the papyrus scrolls in the Alexandrian Library. And yet through daring and intelligence we have stolen a few glimpses of that winding path along which our ancestors and we have traveled.

Cassandra's Mirror. Photo by Elena

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing – hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was first kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements, the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building materials of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed.

Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generations of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form the planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth.

Winds of Time - Part II

Within easy view of the leonine body of the headless sphinx sculpted in the time of the pharaoh Horemheb, in the Eighteenth Dynasty (a millennium before Alexander), is a modern microwave relay tower. Between these two symbols of the Human civilisation runs an unbroken thread in the history of the human species.

From sphinx to tower is an instant of cosmic time – a moment in the fifteen or so billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang ; and almost all record of the passage of the universe from then to now has been scattered by the winds of time.

The evidence of cosmic evolution has been thoroughly ravaged. And yet through daring and intelligence we have managed to reveal some of the secrets of the Universe.

… For ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing – hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was first kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter.

A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements, the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building materials of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed.

We are the Glory and the Dim Memory of the Cosmos (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Illustration: Cosmology by © Megan Jorgensen.

New York, 2140

New York, 2140

 A novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

Charlotte

Time came for the co-op members to vote on whether to accept the bid on the building from Morningside Realty, fronting for whomever. Charlotte's half-assed investigations had not been able to crack the the façade there, and in any case, no matter who was behind it, the CC&Rs of the co-op required that a vote be taken on matters like this within ninety days of their initiation, and this was day eighty-nine, and she wanted no technical infractions to cause trouble later. She had done her best ask around and get a sense of what people thought, but really, in a building of forty stories and over two thousand people, it wasn't possible to catch the vibe just by nosing around. She had to trust that people valued the place as much as she did, and toss the dice as required. In essence the vote would be a poll, and if they voted to sell then she would sue them or kill herself, depending on her mood. She was not in a good mood.

Many of the building's residents gathered in the dining hall and common room to vote, filling the rooms as they were seldom filled, even during meal hours. Charlotte gazed at the fellow citizens of their little city-state with such trepidation and political distrust that really it seemed like a new kind of fear. Curiosity also was killing her, but there was no way of telling from their faces and manner which was they were going to vote. Most of the faces were familiar or semi- or pseudo-familiar. Her neighbors. Although they were only the ones who had shown up in person, anyone in the co-op could vote from anywhere in the world, and this crowd was probably only half the voting membership. Still, the time was now, and if people were voting in absentia they would have to have already gotten their votes in. So the tally would be finished at the end of the hour. 

People said what they had to say. Building great; building not so great. Offer great; offer not so great. Four billion meant around two million per co-op member; that was a lot, or it wasn't. Charlotte couldn't stay focused long enough to catch more than the pro or con expressed, leaving the gist of people's arguments to some later time when she might give a shit. She knew what she knew. Get to it for God's sake.

New York city, Hudson Park. Photo by Elena.

So finally Mariolino called for a vote, and people clicked their clickers, which were all registered to them, and Mariolino waited until everyone indicated they had done the deed, then tapped his pad such that he had added the votes of those present to the votes of the absentees. Anyone who hadn't voted at this point was simply not part of the decision, as long as they had a quorum. And there was going to be a quorum.

Finally Mariolino looked up at Charlotte and then the others in the room.

“The vote is against taking the offer on the building. 1,207 against, 1,093 for.”

There was a kind of double gasp from those in the room, first at the decision, then at the closeness of it. Charlotte was both relieved and worried. It had been too close. If the offer was repeated at a substantially higher amount, as often happened in uptown real estate, then it wouldn't take many people to change their minds for the decision to shift. So it was like a stay of execution. Better than the alternative, but not exactly reassuring. In fact, the more she thought about it, the agrier she got at the half of her fellow citizens who had voted to sell. What were they thinking? Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money, money, money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.

She stood up, and Mariolino nodded at her. As chair it was okey for her to speak, to sum things up.

Grey City. Photo by Elena.

Champollion and Ancient Egypt

Champollion and Ancient Egypt

In 1801 a physicist named Joseph Fourier was the prefect of a departament of France called Isère (Fourier is now famous for his study of the propagation of heat in solids, used today to understand the surface properties of the planets, and for his investigation of waves and other periodic motion – a branch of mathematics known as Fourier analysis). While inspecting the schools in his province, Fourier discovered an eleven-year-old boy whose remarkable intellect and flair for oriental languages had already earned him the admiring attention of scholars. Fourier invited him home for a chat. The boy was fascinated by Fourier’s collection of Egyptian artefacts, collected during the Napoleonic expedition where he had been responsible for cataloguing the astronomical monuments of that ancient civilization.

A hieroglyphic inscription roused the boy’s sense of wonder. “But what do they mean?”, he asked. “Nobody knows”, was the reply. The boy’s name was Jean François Champollion. Fired by the mystery of the language no one could read, he became a superb linguist and passionately immersed himself in ancient Egyptian writing.

France at that time was flooded with Egyptian artifacts, stolen by Napoleon and later made available to Western scholars. The description of the expedition was published, and devoured by the young Champollion.

As an adult Champollion succeeded; fulfilling his childhood ambitions, he provided a brilliant decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it was not until 1828, twenty-seven years after his meeting with Fourier, that Champollion first set foot in Egypt, the land of his dreams, and sailed upstream from Cairo, following the course of the Nile, paying homage to the culture he had worked so hard to understand. It was an expedition in time, a visit to an alien civilization.

“The evening of the 16th we finally arrived at Dendera. There was magnificent moonlight and we were only an hour away from the Temples: Could we resist the temptation? I ask the coldest of your mortals! To dine and leave immediately were the orders of the moment: alone and without guides, but armed to the teeth we crossed the fields… the Temple appeared to us at last… One could well measure it but to give an idea of it would be impossible. It is the union of grace and majesty in the highest degree. We stayed these two hours in ecstasy, running through the huge rooms… and trying to read the exterior inscriptions in the moonlight. We did not return to the boat until three in the morning, only to return to the Temple at seven… What had been magnificent in the moonlight was still so when the sunlight revealed to us all the details.

We in Europe are only dwarfs and no nation, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on such a sublime, great and imposing style, as the ancient Egyptians. They ordered everything to be done for people who are a hundred feet high (Champollion). Image : Fantasy Haunted of Magic Castle Witch © Meg Jorgensen (Elena).

Reflections About Brain

Reflections About Brain

The brain is a tissue. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is. There are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, but they function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Their electrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpreted and their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute the brain's woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can (David H. Hubel, neuroscientists).

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

Now, for the first time, we are observing the brain at work in a global manner with such clarity that we should be able to discover the over-all programs behind its magnificent powers (J.G.Taylor B. Horwitz and K.J.Friston).

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasoning unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds form the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab! (William James).  

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend (Albert Szent-Györgui).

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others (William James).

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom (Bertrand Russell).

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Susan Jeffers).

Witchcraft and the supernatural in general pertain to Gothic mysticism.  Photo by Elena.

Nemesis

Nemesis

Isaac Asimov

Remaining

Marlene smiled hesitantly at Siever Genarr. She had grown used to invading his office at will.

“Am I interrupting you at a busy time, Uncle Siever?”

“No, dear, this is not really a busy job. It was devised so that Pitt could get of me, and I took it and kept it son that I could be rid of Pitt. It's not something I would admit to everyone, but I'm compelled to tell you the truth since you always spot the lie.”

“Does that frighten you, Uncle Siever? It frightened Commissioner Pitt, and it would have frightened Aurinel – if I had ever let him see what I could do.”

“It doesn't frighten me, Marlene, because I've given up, you see. I've just made up my mind that I'm made of glass as far as you're concerned. Actually, it's restful. Lying is hard work when you stop to think about it. If people were really lazy, they'd never lie.”

Marlene smiled again. “Is that why like me? Because I make it possible for you to be lazy?”

“Can't you tell?”

“No. I can tell you like me, but I can't tell why you like me. The way you hold yourself shows you like me, but the reason is hidden inside your mind and all I can get about that are vague feelings sometimes. I can't quite reach in there.” She thought for a while. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

“Be glad you can't. Minds are dirty, dank, uncomfortable places.”

“Why do you say that, Uncle Siever?”

“Experience. I don't have your natural ability, but I've been around people for much longer than you have. Do you like the inside of your own mind, Marlene?”

Marlene looked surprised. “I don't know. Why shouldn't I?”

“Do you like everything you think? Everything you imagine? Every impulse you have? Be honest, now. Even though I can't read you, be honest.”

“Well, sometimes I think silly things, or mean things. Sometimes I get angry and think of doing things I wouldn't really do. But not often, really.”

“Not often? Don't forget that you're used to your own mind. You hardly sense it. It's like the clothes you wear. You don't feel the touch of them because you're so used to their being there. Your hair curls down the back of your neck, but you don't notice. If someone else's hair touched the back of your neck, it would itch and be unbearable. Someone else's mind might think thoughts no worse than yours, but they would be someone else's might not like my liking you – if you knew why I lied you. It is much better and more peaceful to accept my liking you as something that exists, and not scour my mind for reasons.”

And inevitable, Marlene said, “Why? Where are the reasons?”

“Well, I like you because once I was you.”

“What do you mean?”

“ I don't mean I was a young lady with beautiful eyes and the gift of perception. I mean I was young and thought I was plain and that everyone disliked me for being plain. And I knew I was intelligent, and I couldn't understand why everyone didn't like me for being intelligent. It seemed unfair to be scorned for a bad property while a good property was ignored.”

Training. Photo by Elena.

Language of Dreams

The Language of Dreams

(By Ray Kurzweil, excerpt from How to Create a Mind)

Dreams are examples of undirected thoughts. They make a certain amount of sense because the phenomenon of one thought's triggering another is based on the actual linkages of patterns in our neocortex. To the extent that a dream does not make sense, we attempt to fix it through our ability to confabulate. Split-brain patients (whose corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is severed or damaged) will confabulate (make up) explanations with their left brain – which controls the speech center – to explain what the right brain just did with input that the left brain did not have access to. We confabulate all the time in explaining the outcome of events. If you want a good example of this, just tune in to the daily commentary on the movement of financial markets. No matter how the markets perform, it's always possible to come up with a good explanation for why it happened, and such after-the-fact commentary is plentiful. Of course, if these commentators really understood the markets, they wouldn't have to waste their time doing commentary.

The act of confabulating is of course also done in the neocortex, which is good at coming up with stories and explanations that meet certain constraints. We do that whenever we retell a story. We will fill in details that may not be available or that we may have forgotten so that the story makes more sense. That is why stories change over time as they are told over and over again by new storytellers with perhaps different agendas. As spoken languages led to written language, however, we had a technology that could record a definitive version of a story and prevent this sort of drift.

The actual content of a dream, to the extent that we remember it, is again a sequence of patterns. These patterns represent constraints in a story; we then confabulate a story that fits these constraints. The version of the dream that we retell (even if only to ourselves silently) is this confabulation. As we recount a dream we trigger cascades of patterns that fill in the actual dream as we originally experienced it.

Because important things go in a case, you've got a skill for your brain, a plastic sleeve for your comb, and a wallet for your money (George Costanza in The Reverse Peephole, episode of Seinfeld. Photo by Elena. Push, the cat.

There is one key difference between dream thoughts and our thinking while awake. One of the lessons we learn in life is that certain actions, even thoughts, are not permissible in the real world. For example, we learn that we cannot immediately fulfill our desires. There are rules against grabbing the money in the cash register at a store, and constraints on interacting with a person to whom we may be physically attracted. We also learn that certain thoughts are not permissible because they are culturally forbidden. As we learn professional skills, we learn the ways of thinking that are recognized and rewarded in our professions, and thereby avoid patterns of thought that might betray the methods and norms of the profession. Many of these taboos are worthwhile, as they enforce social order and consolidate progress. However, they can also prevent progress by enforcing an unproductive orthodoxy. Such orthodoxy is precisely what Einstein left behind when he tried to ride a light beam with his thought experiments.

Cultural rules are enforced in the neocortex with help from the old brain, especially the amygdala. Every thought we have triggers other thoughts, and some of them will relate to associated dangers. We learn, for example, that breaking a cultural norm even in our private thoughts can lead to ostracism. Which the neocortex realizes threatens our well-being. If we entertain such thoughts, the amygdala is triggered, and that generates fear, which generally leads to terminating that thought.

In dreams, however, these taboos are relaxed, and we will often dream about matters that are culturally, sexually, or professionally forbidden. It is as if our brain realizes that we are not an actual actor in the world while dreaming. Freud wrote about this phenomenon but also noted that we will disguise such dangerous thoughts, at least when we attempt to recall them, so that the awake brain continues to be protected from them.

Relaxing professional taboos turns out to be useful for creative problem solving. We may use a mental technique each night in which we may think about a particular problem before we go to sleep. This triggers sequences of thoughts that will continue into our dreams. One we are dreaming, we can think – dream – about solutions to the problem without the burden of the professional restraints we carry during the day. We can then access these dream thoughts in the morning while in an in-between state of dreaming and being awake, sometimes referred to as “lucid dreaming”.

Freud also famously wrote about the ability to gain insight into a person's psychology by interpreting dreams. There is of course a vast literature on all aspects of this theory, but the fundamental notion of gaining insight into ourselves through examination of our dreams makes sense. Our dreams are created by our neocortex, and thus their substance can be revealing of the content and connections found there. The relaxation of the constraints on our thinking that exist while we are awake is also useful in revealing neocortical content that we otherwise would be unable to access directly. It is also reasonable to conclude that the patterns that end up in our dreams represent important matters to us and thereby clues in understanding our unresolved desires and fears.

I have an old brain but a terrific memory (Al Lewis).  Illustration by Elena.

Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?

Where Are They?

Enrico Fermi was a brilliant Italian physicist who is known to the public as the man who led the team that first harnessed nuclear power under Stagg Field in Chicago on December 2, 1942. His impact in physics was actually much broader than that, and he has been honored (among many other tributes) by posthumously lending his name to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. America's preeminent laboratory for studying the basic building blocks of the universe. In addition to sheer brilliance, Fermi had a gift for trying to ge at the bottom line, using simple estimators. Physicists call “a Fermi Problem” a question that is easy to ask, hard to know definitively, but able to be estimated by thinking it through. The most repeated example of a Fermi Problem is “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” By knowing the number of people in the city and then estimating how many households have a piano, how long a piano holds its tune, how long it takes to tune a piano, and the length of a work week, you can come up with a reasonable estimated answer (current estimate, about 125).

Fermi lived in an elite academic world – an active mind surrounded by others of similar caliber. They would talk about all manner of things, looking at them from every angle, trying to get at the truth. From a casual lunchtime conversation, one of the most famous questions involving extraterrestrials was asked. The story goes something like this.

One summer day in 1950, Enrico Fermi was visiting the Los Alamos Laboratory, which had been the secret government facility at which much of the first nuclear weapons had been developed. He and three companions one of who was Edward Teller, were on their way to lunch. They were talking about a cartoon seen in the May 20 issue of The New Yorker, which explained a recent spate of thefts and trash cans in New York City as being perpetrated by Aliens taking them into their flying saucers. (The UFO mania of the late 1940s was still fresh in the public's mind). The conversation then meandered to Teller and Fermi bantering back and forth over the chances of mankind exceeding the speed of light in the next decade, with Teller suggesting a chance in a million and Fermi guessing 10%. During the stroll, the numbers changed as they intellectually fenced.

After sitting down to lunch, the conversation went in a different direction, with Fermi sitting there quietly. Fermi then suddenly burst out, saying “Where is everybody?” to general laughter, as they all instantly understood that he was talking about extraterrestrials.

The premise of Fermi's paradox is the following. The Milky Way is about 13 billion years old and contains between 200 and 400 billion stars. Our own sun is only a little over 4 billion years old, suggesting that there have been stars around for a very long time. If Aliens are common in the galaxy, there has been plenty of time for them to have evolved – perhaps hundreds of millions of years or more before humanity – and have visited Earth. So where are they?

To figure out what sorts of data are needed, it is helpful to have a guiding paradigm. Photo by Elena.

While Fermi's outburst in the origin of the paradox, the question was revisited in 1975 by Michael Hart (leading some to call this the Fermi-Hart Paradox). Hart published “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrial Life on Earth” in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In this article, he explored some of the reasons why we hadn't contacted yet, from reasons of simple disinterest of the Aliens to either colonize the galaxy or to contact us to the idea that the Earth is being treated as a nature preserve. Perhaps some form of Star Trek's Prime Directive applies, whereby civilizations are not contacted until they develop the capability for interstellar travel. These kinds of explanations were offered in The Day the Earth Stood Still and, of course, Star Trek. What Hart was able to show was that technology wasn't the problem. Taking some simple assumptions, Hart showed that a civilization that sent out two craft traveling at 10% of the speed of light to nearby stars and then spent a few hundred years developing infrastructure to build another pair of slow-moving starships could completely populate the Milky Way in just a couple of millions years.

If intelligent extraterrestrial life is even slightly common in the galaxy and only a few species have mankind's curiosity and exploratory nature, it seems that we would know by now that we are not alone. Hard concluded that it was a distinct possibility that mankind might well be one of the earliest-developing intelligent species in the galaxy. In short, The X-Files tagline “We are not alone” could well be gravely incorrect.

Of course, the answer to the question is unknown and hence the reason why the term “paradox” is applied to it. Another Steven Webb explored the question in his delightful 2002 book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's 2003 book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe is equally enjoyable, and this book takes the position that it is difficult for a planet to develop intelligent life. The book describes the many ways in which planetary disaster can interrupt the development of sentient life on a planet.

No matter how carefully thought out, arguments of the sorts advanced in these books and others like them must defer to data.

Given the fact that there are stars that are billion of years older than the sun, it seems impossible that we should not not have been visited before. Photo by Elena.

Extremophiles

Extremophiles

Extremophiles are organisms that live under conditions injurious to many forms of life. Mankind has used extreme environments for a long time to preserve food. We now know that this is because these techniques kill or suppress the bacteria that would otherwise cause spoilage. A few techniques are to heat (i.e. cook) the food, refrigerate it, salt it, or even irradiate it.

And we all know this works. We have refrigerators and freezers. We have been admonished to cook rare roast beef to an internal temperature of about 140F or as much as 180F for well done beef or all poultry. The reason is to both cook the meat – to convert it from something raw to something yummy – and to kill the bacteria living in the raw meat. 

There are other methods for preserving food that you have encountered in your local grocery store. There are dried vegetables, fruits, and meats, which have been starved of water, inhibiting bacterial growth. Nuts and other foods come vacuum packed to reduce the oxygen available in the package. Processing food by using high pressure can kill microbes. This is used for many products, including guacamole and orange juice.

Meat is cured by salting, as in the familiar bacon and ham. Alcohol is also used to preserve some fruits. This is usually done in conjunction with using sugar as a preservative.

Changing the acidity or alkalinity of the food is another way to lengthen its lifetime. Atmosphere modification is also a useful technique. Food, such as grains, can be put in a container and the air replaced with high-purity nitrogen or carbon dioxide. This removes the oxygen and destroys insects, microbes and other unwanted intruders.

The real point is that mankind has known about various ways to preserve food for millenia. Spoilage of food originates from undesirable creatures (typically microbes of some sort) “eating” the food and releasing wast products. Through some combination of the techniques mentioned above, we have learned to kill the undesirable bacteria that would otherwise ruin our food.

Our experience has led us to some understanding of the range of conditions under which Earth-like life can exist. However research revealed that life is actually hardier than we thought.

Life can be born in the most harsh conditions. Photo by Elena.

Biologists have given the name “extremophile” (meaning “lover of extreme conditions”) to organisms that thrive in environments that would kill familiar forms of life. While the study of extremophiles is still a fairly young science, we can discuss some of the range of conditions under which exotic life has been found.

At the bottom of the oceans, sometimes at extraordinary depths, there are spots where magma has worked its way from the interior of the Earth to the ocean floor. At these points, called hydrothermal vents, superheated water streams away from the magma. This water can be heated to well above the familiar boiling temperature of 212 F, but the huge pressure at the bottom of the ocean causes the water to stay in its liquid form. Water inside these hydrothermal vents can be nearly 700 F, certainly high enough to kill any form of ordinary life.

Only a few feet away from these vents, the temperature of ocean water can be very close to freezing, about 35 F. In this temperature gradient grows an unusual ecosystem.

Heat-resistant, sulfur-breathing life is not the only type that exists in extreme environments On the other end of the spectrum are the cold-loving cryophiles. Life-forms at the cold end of the spectru, have quite different problems compared with their thermophile cousins. If water freezes, it expands and can rupture cell membranes. Chemical adaptations are needed to mitigate the problems of the cold.

As of our current understanding, we know of no eukaryotic life that can exist at temperatures outside the range of 5 to 140 F. While the lower number is below the freezing point of ordinary water, water with high salinity can remain liquid at these temperatures. Microbial life has been observed over a temperature range of -22 to 250 F. An example of a cryophilic organism is Chlamydomonas nivalis, a form of algue that is responsible for the phenomenon of watermelon snow in which snow has the color and even the slight scent of watermelon.

Chemical considerations can give us insights into the ultimate constraints on the temperature of carbon-based life. Due to the bond strength involving carbon atoms, it's hard to imagine life at standard pressure much higher than 620 F; about as hot as the hottest your oven can bake. Of course, pressure can affect the rate at which molecules break apart and the decomposition of molecules can be slower at high pressure. It's probably safe to say that carbon-based life is not possible above about 1000 F at any pressure.

Water is critical to life, however it may be that there are extremophiles that don't need much of it. There are also forms of life that are halophiles (salt loving). In the Dead Sea region of the Middle East, most life couldn't survive. However, there are lichens and cellular life that have adapted their chemistry to maintain their inner environment in such a way as to thrive. Some of these forms of life actually need the high salt environment to live at all.

As with the other food-preserving extremes, life has been found in highly acidic and basic environments and even in the presence of radioactivity a thousand time higher than would kill the hardiest normal forms of life. These observations have certainly broadened scientists' expectations of the range of environments that life can successfully inhabit.

With the discovery of these extremophiles, scientists have intensified their search for the niches that life can occupy on Earth. We have pulled life out of well cores taken from a couple of miles under the surface of the Earth. Life has been found floating in the rarified air of the stratosphere. Microbes have been found as high as 10 miles above the ground. This environment is extremely harsh. The temperature and pressure is very low, the flux of ultraviolet light is very high, and there is nearly no water. Survival in this hostile environment inevitably raises questions of “panspermia”, which is the premise that life might have arrived on Earth from some other body... perhaps Mars. While this seems improbable, it is not ruled out. But life had to start somewhere, so the questions are still relevant, even if life started elsewhere. Of interest to us here is the understanding that some primitive forms of life can exist in an environment that would kill creatures that live closer to the Earth's surface. However, this primitive form of life wouldn't be an Alien. But it does give us some additional information on precisely how resilient Earth-based life, with our carbon and water-based biochemistry, can be.

(Source: Alien Universe, extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and the Cosmos, by Don Lincoln).

Presence of water and oceans are one of the conditions which create life on the Earth. Photo by Elena.

What Is Life

What Is Life?

This question is seemingly so simple, and yet it has vexed some of the most knowledgeable scientists and philosophers for decades. While hardly the first writing on the subject, physicist Erwin Shrödinger's (of Shrödinger's cat fame) 1944 book What Is Life? Is one such example. It is an interesting early attempt to use the ideas of modern physics to address the question. Both James Watson and Francis Crick, codiscoverers of DNA, credited this book as being an inspiration for their subsequent research.

The definition of life is not settled even today. Modern scientists have managed to list a series of critical features that seems to identify life. A living being should have most, if not all, of the following features:

• It must be able to regulate the internal environment of the organism;
• It must be able to metabolize or convert energy in order accomplish the tasks necessary for the organism's existence;
• It must grow by converting energy into body components;
• It must be able to adapt in response to changes in the environment;
• It must be able to respond to stimuli;
• It must be able to reproduce.

These features distinguish it from inanimate matter.

Life is able to respond to stimuli. Photo by Elena.

While these properties can help one identify life when one encounters it, they don't really give us a sense of the limitations imposed by the universe on what life might be like. We can ask ourselves if a would-be science fiction writer is being ludicrous when he or she bases a story around an Alien with bones made of gold and liquid sodium for blood. So what does our current best understanding tell us that life requires? A combination of theory and experimentation suggests that there are four crucial requirements for life. They are (in decreasing order of certainty):

• A thermodynamic disequilibrium;
• An environment capable of maintaining covalent interatomic bonds over long periods of time;
• A liquid environment;
• A structured system that can support Darwinian evolution.

The first is essentially mandatory. Energy doesn't drive change, rather energy differences are the source of change. “Thermodynamic disequilibrium” simply means that there are places of higher energy and lower energy. This difference sets up an energy flow, which organisms can exploit for their needs. It's not fundamentally different from how a hydroelectric power plant works: there is a place where the water is deep (high energy) and a place where the water is shallow (low energy). Just as the flow of water from one side of the dam to the other can turn a turbine to create electricity or a mill to grind grain, an organism will exploit an energy difference to make those changes it needs to survive.

The second requirement is essentially nothing more than saying that life is made of atoms, bound together into more complex molecules. These molecules must be bound together tightly enough to be stable. If the molecules are constantly falling apart, it is hard to imagine this resulting in a sustainable life-form. It is this requirement that sets some constraints on which atoms play an important role in the makeup of any life. Hopefully after this discussion, you'll understand the reason for the oft-repeated phrase in science fiction “carbon-based life-form.”

Requirement number three is less crucial; however it's hard to imagine life evolving in an environment that isn't liquid. Atoms do not move easily in a solid environment and a gaseous environment involves much lower densities and can carry a far smaller amount of the atoms needs for building blocks and nutrition. Liquids can both dissolve substances and move them around easily.

Finally, the fourth requirement might not be necessary for alien life, but it is crucial for Aliens. Certainly multicellular life of the equivalent not be the first form of life that develops. The first form that develops will be of a form analogous to Earth's single-celled organisms (actually, most likely simpler... after all, modern single cell organisms  are already quite complex). In order to form species with increasing complexity, small changes in the organism will be necessary. Darwinian evolution is the process whereby a creature is created with differences from its parents. The first thing that is necessary is that the organism survives the change. After all, if the change kills it, it's the end of the road for that individual. Once there are changes that both allow the daughter organism to survive and possibly confer different properties, selection processes become important. Creatures who subsequently reproduce more effectively will gradually grow in population until they dominate their ecological niche.

Many forms of life exist. Photo by Elena.