Showing posts with label Cells. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cells. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Driven...

Someday I'm going to die.....
There will be a moment, when the neurons in my head will pulse for the last time. The muscles in my heart will pound one last time, and the blood in my veins will carry their last load of life to my cells. The mitochondria in my cells will zip through their very last citric acid cycle. The cycle will arrive back at its origin, only to find no more nutrients waiting for it. No more water arriving, no more oxygen....no more life. The mitochondria will use up the ATP in about 10 seconds, and production will grind to a halt. My body of old, tired organs will kneel to the earth. My eyes, although rapidly drying, will no longer blink. It will be as if some cruel wizard has turned me into wax. Strangely still, my body, once humming with life will live no more.


Dying is such a strange though to me. It's so simple...yet so strangely complex at the same time.
We all have this tiny little battery, this life-spark which fights entropy every day. Naturally, the universal laws of life are constantly trying to tear us apart. Life in itself is an opposition of science. It really is a miraculous existence that we have been presented with. Every organ simultaneously keeps its neighbors alive and functioning. Sensing even the smallest molecular change, our bodies adapt every second, providing us with an equilibrium that we rarely even think about.
Anyone who has studied science and felt its addictive fingers grasp the thriving mind of the scholar can attest to the sense of awe which surrounds the whole field. Unlike most things in our world, life goes on effortlessly. Our bodies and the whole world around us forms a thriving engine, the complexity of which we could never even pretend to duplicate.


Even so, life is fragile. The entropy of the universe expands like a tsunami, and by all logic, life should not be able to withstand it. Every day we fight for our lives, endlessly feeding our unquenchable needs. We battle the pieces of us which constantly slow, needing fuel. We nourish our cells with water, and recharge our souls with sleep.
Every day we defy entropy, and every day entropy hisses
"Just wait, child, just wait. I always win in the end."

Science is beautiful and heartless at the same time. But why should we be surprised? Science has no heart. That's why it's so comforting to people who have been heartbroken, beaten, and abused by the hearts of this world.
The compulsive need for order which haunts my soul thrives in the comforting arms of science. There is mystery in science, but there is also consistency and order. Everything exists for a purpose, we exist only as spectators.

When we die, we do not disappear, atoms are not wasted in nature. We feed prokaryotes and are decomposed by beetles. We become part of the earth. In a way, everything we see is composed of our ancestors. The trees harbor their spark, the soil crawls with their remnants, the earth is one gigantic memorial for the people who lived before us.

It's almost as if the knowledge of the universe already exists, we only exist as its fingers, it's instruments.

Whatever the purpose of the universe really is, I am in it, and I do not intend to waste the opportunity to shake the world and seal it with my fingerprint. Whether divinely created, or naturally molded, the earth is chugging along like a well-oiled machine.

Science is the passion which pushes me towards my dreams. It fuels me like an atomic bomb, and lights the corners of my future like a laser. I am driven, I am determined, and I am in love.







Monday, February 27, 2012

Smashing weeds is murder!

What are weeds made of?
Weeds are made of cells and tissues which are broken further into atoms, which are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
All of those components are just building blocks behaving the way that they are supposed to behave.
So in simple terms, weeds are just atoms obeying science.

What are humans made of?
Aren't humans also composed of atoms obeying science?
Furthermore, our brains are just made of cells, and they work correctly thanks to electrical currents (and a whole lot of other stuff that has to all synchronize perfectly, but hey, this is a blog not a science class).

So what makes us better than weeds? How come it's okay to smash a weed repeatedly with a sledgehammer, then drown the particles with gasoline, then leave the whole gasoline weed particle mess out in the desert to slowly evaporate and disintegrate? If we did that to a person it would make the news and put people on death row.

But really, if all things in the world, and universe, are just well-behaving scientific building blocks, why are homo-sapiens superior to trees, or worms, or poop?

Maybe it's because humans have independent thought. Maybe it's because we create spaceships and train tigers to purr. But the only thing that allows us to do those things is our brains, right? And brains....are cells behaving as cells are supposed to behave.
People in a vegetative state do not have independent thought, they can not create spaceships or train tigers to purr. Yet somehow they still must be viewed as superior to a weed. So brains can't be the reason we are superior to weeds.
Some people might say it's because we have life.
But life is just because cells are working correctly. Squirrels have life, and although most people agree that squirrels are better than weeds, that doesn't make them equal to people.
Also, somehow dead people are still better than weeds. They get caskets, and people get sued if they are disrespectful in graveyards or if they just throw corpses into ditches.
Therefore, life also can not be the reason for people's superiority to weeds.

Let's put it this way, is one individual cell superior to another individual cell? No, they are equal.
So why would one heap of cells be superior to another heap of cells?

Ladies and gentlemen, we are no greater than weeds.