Atoms and Life-forms

Atoms and Life-forms

I think the life-forms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids – but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmosphere will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence.

Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much older than Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all – solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about.

But these ideas do not rescue the motion that the Viking lander experiments indicate the life on Mars. On that rather Earth-like world, with abundant carbon and water, life, if it exists, should be based on organic chemistry. The organic chemistry results, like the imagining and microbiology results, are all consistent with no life in the fine particles of Chryse and Utopia in the lat 1970’s. Perhaps, some millimeters beneath the rocks (as in the Antarctic dry valleys), or elsewhere on the planet, or in some earlier, more clement time. But not where and when we looked.

Life-forms will be different, but life will be the same (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Photo by Elena

The Viking exploration of Mars is a mission of major historical importance, the first serious search for what other kind of life may be, the first survival of a functioning spacecraft for a more than an hour or so on any other planet (Viking 1 has survived for years), the source of a rich harvest of data on the geology, seismology, mineralogy, meteorology and have a dozen other sciences of another world. How should we follow up on these spectacular advances? Some scientists want to send an automatic device that would land, acquire soil samples, and return them to Earth, where they could be examined in great detail in the large sophisticated laboratories of Earth rather than in the limited microminiaturized laboratories that we are able to send to Mars.

In this way most of the ambiguities of the Viking microbiology experiments could be resolved. The chemistry and mineralogy of the soil could be determined; rocks could be broken open to search for subsurface life; hundreds of tests for organic chemistry and life could be performed, including direct microscopic examination, under a wide range of conditions. The scientists could even use Vishniac’s scoring technics. Although it would be fairly expensive, such a mission is probably within our technological capability.

Democritus’ Thoughts

Democritus argued about atomic composition of material objects. In a related exercise, Democritus imagined calculating the volume of a cone or a pyramid by a very large number of extremely small stacked plates tapering in size from the base to the apex. He had stated the problem that, in mathematics, is called the theory of limits. He was knocking at the door of the differential and integral calculus, that fundamental tool for understanding the world that was not, so far as we know from written records, in fact discovered until the time of Isaac Newton. Perhaps if Democritus work had not been almost completely destroyed, there would have been calculus by the time of Christ (the frontiers of the calculus were also later breached by Eudoxus and Archimedes).

Thomas Wright marveled in 1750 that Democritus had believed the Milky Way to be composed mainly of unresolved stars: “long before astronomy reaped any benefit from the improved sciences of optics; he saw, as we may say, through the eye of reason, full as far into infinity as the most able astronomers in more advantageous times have done since”.

Beyond the Milk of Here, past the Backbone of Night, the mind of Democritus soared. Image: Sketch Drawing Bird © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

As a person, Democritus seems to have been somewhat unusual. Women, children and sex discomfited him, in part because they took time away from thinking. But he valued friendship, held cheerfulness to be the goal of life and devoted a major philosophical inquiry to the origin and nature of enthusiasm. He journeyed to Athens to visit Socrates and then found himself too shy to introduce himself. He was a close friend of Hippocrates. He was awed by the beauty and elegance of the physical world. He felt that poverty in a democracy was preferable to wealth in a tyranny. He believed that the prevailing religions of his time were evil and that neither immortal souls nor immortal gods exist: “Nothing exists, but atoms and the void”.

There is no record of Democritus having been persecuted for his opinions – but then, he came from Abdera. However, in his time the brief tradition of tolerance for unconventional views began to erode and then to shatter. People came to be punished for having unusual ideas. A portrait of Democritus is now on the Greek hundred-drachma bill. But his insights were suppressed, his influence on history made minor. The mystics were beginning to win.

Birds’ Role in Evolution

Birds’ Role in Evolution

In England, United Kingdom, birds can signify another meaning than the one discussed here, which hereby is namely vertebra from the flamingo species. Thus, ornithology is the science that studies these animals. Further, birds have hollow bones and cannot get fat, since it would impede their flying abilities. Also, birds have likewise contributed to science. Starting with Darwin’s finches, and finches reappear in contemporary neuroscience. Indeed, Darwin developed his evolutionary theory largely based on his observations of the finches of the Galapagos Islands. Gradually, their beaks would adapt to their diet, hence – survival of the fittest. Finally, plasticity in neuroscience research has been greatly aides by how swap and wild sparrows learn their songs. Interestingly, unless a bird is exposed to an adult male from its species during the learning period, the bird will fail to develop a proper mating song.

Penguins are birds but they only “fly” underwater. Image: Megan Jorgensen

Furthermore, birds are predominant in mythology and symbolism, such at the white dove signifying peace. Similarly, many mythical creatures are winged, often formed by morphing the bodies of an eagle and another animal. Moreover, in Medieval literature, eagles, dragons and pterosaurs or pterodactyls are likewise winged, but are reptilian in nature. By the same token, Griffins have an eagle’s head and a lion’s body. Conversely, felines have similarly been a favoured subject of mythology, with the Sphinx a remnant of Ancient times with the head of a woman and the body of a lion, the ruins still seen in contemporary Egypt. Finally, crows and ravens are most likely associated with Gothic literature. Horror films have also showcased birds, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s namesake, Birds.

An angry bird. Photo by Elena

Organic Molecules

Organic Molecules

There are tens of billions of known kinds of organic molecules. Yet only about fifty of them are used for the essential activities of life. The same patterns are employed over and over again, conservatively, ingeniously for different functions. And at the very heart of life on Earth – the proteins that control cell chemistry, and the nucleic acids that carry the hereditary instructions – we find these molecules to be essentially identical in all the plants and animals. An oak tree and I, we are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor.

The living cell is a regime as complex and beautiful as the realm of the galaxies and the stars. The elaborate machinery of the cell has been painstakingly evolved over four billion years. Fragments of food are transmogrified into cellular machinery. Today’s white blood cell is yesterday’s cream spinach. How does the cell do it? Inside is a labyrinthine and subtle architecture that maintains its own structure, transforms molecules, stores energy and prepares for self-replication. If we could enter a cell, many of the molecular specks we would see would be protein molecules, some in frenzied activities, others merely waiting. The most important proteins are enzymes, molecules that control the cell’s chemical reactions.

Enzymes are like assembly-line workers, each specializing in a particular molecular job: Step 4 in the construction of the nucleotide guanosine phosphate, say, or Step 11 in the dismantling of a molecule of sugar to extract energy, the currency that pays for getting the other cellular jobs done. But the enzymes do not run the show. They receive their instructions – and are in fact themselves constructed – on orders sent from those in charge. The boss molecules are the nucleic acids. They live sequestered in a forbidden city in the deep interior, in the nucleus of the cell.

(Carl Sagan, Contact)

Green Pine. Photo by Elena

Impetus for Science

Impetus for Science

If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or very complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. Again, there would be no such thing as science.

But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or, as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air, it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west, it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so it becomes possible to figure things out. We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives.

In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability.

A Distant Galaxy. There was a time before television, before motion pictures, before Internet, before radio, before books. The greatest part of human existence was spent in such a time. Over the dying embers of a campfire, on a moonless night, we watched the stars. Image : Distant Galaxy by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Human beings are good at understanding the world. “We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens… The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the reassures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment (Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographucum).

Science Never Ends

Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number of social, religious, political and philosophical issues.

Science is ongoing process and it never ends. In fact, there is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. Truly enough, because this is so, our world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation. These millions of humans, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in findings and methods of science.

Every year we uncover a host of wonders concerning the Universe, its intricate composition and its swarm of stars and planets.

Science never ends. Glow. Illustration: © Elena

Holland

In a typical year many ships set sail halfway around the world. Down the west coast of Africa, through what they called the Ethiopian Sea, around the south coast of Africa, within the Straits of Madagascar, and on past the southern tip of India they sailed, to one major focus of their interests, the Spice Islands, present day Indonesia. Some expeditions journeyed from there to a land named New Holland, and today called Australia. A few ventured through the straits of Malacca, past the Philippines, to China.

Never before or since then has Holland been the world power it was then. A small country, forced to live by its wits, its foreign policy contained a strong pacifist element. Because of its tolerance for unorthodox opinions, it was a haven for intellectuals who were refugee from censorship and thought control elsewhere in Europe – much as the United Stated benefited enormously in the 1930ies by the exodus of intellectuals from the Nazi-dominated Europe.

We know from a mid-century account of an “Embassy from the East-India Company of the United provinces of the Netherlands, to the Grand Tartar, Cham, Emperor of China”. We even know what gifts they brought the Court. The Empress was presented witj “six little chests of divers pictures” and the Emperor received “two fardels of cinnamon”.

The Dutch burgers, ambassadors and sea captains stood wide-eyed in amazement, face to face with another civilisation in the Imperial City of Peking.

Un cartographe hollandais.Beautiful. There are many things in the heavens that have not been seen before our own age. Image: in public domain

Holland and Science

Seventeenth century Holland was the home of the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza, whom Einstein admired; of Descartes, a pivotal figure in the history of mathematics and philosophy; and of John Locke, a political scientist who influenced a group of philosophically inclined revolutionaries named Paine, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. Never before or since has Holland been graced by such a galaxy of artists and scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. This was the time of the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer and Frans Halls; of Leeuwenghoek, the inventor of the microscope; of Grotius, the founder of international law, of Willerbrord Shellius, who discovered the law of the refraction of light.

In the Dutch tradition of encouraging freedom of thought, the University of Leiden offered a professorship to an Italian scientist named Galileo, who had been forced by the Catholic Church under threat of torture to recant his heretical view that the Earth moved about the Sun and not vice-versa (In 1979, Pope John Paul II cautiously proposed reversing the condemnation of Galileo done 346 years earlier by the Holy Inquisition). Galileo had close ties with Holland, and his first astronomical telescope was an improvement of a spyglass of Dutch design. With it he discovered sunspots, the phases of Venus, the craters on the Moon and the four large moons of Jupiter now called, after him, the Galilean satellites. Galileo’s own description of his ecclesiastical travails is contained in a letter he wrote in the year 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina:

Some years ago, as your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that have not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors (many of them ecclesiastics) – as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts.

Rules of Life Are Sacred

Rules of Life Are Sacred

Sometimes, in our fantasies, we imagine there was someone who thought like this:

We eat berries and roots. Nut and leaves. And dead animals. Some animals we find. Some we kill. We know which foods are good and which are dangerous. If we taste some foods we are struck down, in punishment for eating them. We did not mean to do something bad. But foxglove or hemlock can kill you. We love our children and our friends. We warm them of such foods.

When we hunt animals, then also can we be killed. We can be gored. Or trampled. Or eaten. What animals do means life and death for us; how the behave, what tracks they leave, their time for mating and giving birth, their time for wandering. We must know these things. We tell our children. They will tell their children.

We depend on animals. We follow them – especially in winter, when there are few plants to eat. We are wandering hunters and gatherers. We call ourselves the hunterfolk.

Most of us fall asleep under the sky or under a tree or in its branches. We use animal skins for clothing: to keep us warm, to cover our nakedness and sometimes as a hammock. When we wear the animal skins we feel the animal’s power. We leap with the gazelle. We hunt with the bear. There is a bond between us and the animals. We hunt and eat the animals. They hunt and eat us. We are part of one another.

Rules of Life Are Sacred. Picture by Elena

We make tools and stay alive. Some of us are experts at splitting, sharpening, flaking and polishing, as well as finding, rocks. Some rocks we tie with animal sinew to a wooden handle and make an ax. With the ax we strike plants and animals. Other rocks are tied to long sticks. If we are quiet and watchful, we can sometimes come close to an animal and stick it with the spear.

Meat spoils. Sometimes we are hungry and try not to notice. Sometimes we mix herbs with the bad meat to hide the taste. We fold foods that will not spoil into pieces of animal skin. Or big leaves. Or the shell of a large nut. It is wise to put food aside and carry it. If we eat this food too early, some of us will starve later. So we must help one another. For this and many other reasons we have rules. Everyone must obey the rules. We have always had rules. Rules are sacred.

Imagination and Skepticism

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without imagination we go nowhere.

Understanding is a joy, knowledge is prerequisite to survival. The future of everyone depends on how well we know the Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. This is called imagination.

But any exploration of the world, any progress require imagination and skepticism, both. Because skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact. Skepticism teaches us to test our speculations.

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages.

Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced and our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate. Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all (Senece, Natural Question, Book 7, first century).