[ExI] destroying 3 billion year old lifeforms, was: RE: how mosquitoes fly in the rain

[spike]

On Behalf Of John Grigg
Subject: Re: [ExI] how mosquitoes fly in the rain

 

>.Spike, thanks for the cool and informative article!  

 

My observation of a mosquito in the rain/snow at Mt. Rainier is the only
time in an entire life of being a bug watcher that I was ever able to
witness that firsthand.  Seeing a mosquito in the rain is a wonderfully rare
treat for a bugger.

 

 >.Growing up in Alaska, I was fascinated how there were the bigger and
slower species of mosquito, and then the smaller and much more evasive kind.

 

Ja, I learned on a trip to your beautiful vast state that the mosquito is
the Alaska state bird.

 

>.I never tired of the feeling of success I got from killing a skeeter that
had found it's way into my home.  

 

Ok, but consider the most direct path of continued existence of the largest
number of your cells is through mosquito bites.  Read on please, and check
my reasoning.

 

A few days ago someone, perhaps Natasha, made a thought-provoking comment
about cells "remembering" their past.  Let us go on a flight of fancy and
imagine that cells, being living things, have some sort of something
analogous to our memory and consciousness, scaled by size of course, so they
would have a trillionth as much of these senses as we do.  Play along, it's
just a game.

 

So imagine "you" are a cell in a human, and you can remember back to before
the last time you divided.  From your point of view, half of you just
blebbed off and went away, and a couple years before that the same thing
happened, and so on all the way back to when you were an ovum, and this
little guy came along and joined you and halves of you started coming off
regularly.  If you prefer to think of yourself as a sperm, that works fine
too, you went for a delightful swim, joined another really big cell, and the
whole division thing started up.

 

In any case, assume you can remember before that unification event, and
there was an entire span of divisions before that, leading back to another
singular unification event, and so on all the way back to a really boring
couple billion years of that whole blue-green algal mat phase (nothing much
was going on back in those days, occasional huge meteorite is all; the whole
multicellular eon is much more interesting.)  Today you perceive yourself as
a cell in a human, which is really cool, because this particular cluster
containing you (and other pieces which were once you) goes around and does
interesting things, much more fun than those hundreds of millions of years
where it was all about looking for food and trying to not be eaten.  

 

Of course from your point of view as a cell, your particular organism being
devoured by some other organism wasn't the worst thing: you were in a sense
recycled into a cell of some often more interesting beast, even if not
directly.  There was the usual disassembly and reassembly, but hey, cells
having a trillionth the awareness also experience only a trillionth the
pain, so being devoured was scarcely a bother.

 

>.And as his ashes rose up into the sky, they turned into hordes of
mosquitoes!  ; )

 

The point of all this is that as humans, the overwhelming majority of our
cells never get recycled.  After surviving (in a sense) for three billion
years, nearly all of our cells just get buried in a sealed container where
they all perish, or are incinerated, where they all perish, for modern
humans have no real predators; we are seldom devoured by other beasts.  For
so many cells, the brief existence as part of a human is the end of the long
three billion year continuous existence.  So tragic!  We don't perish out in
the open, where other beasts can devour our cooling flesh, giving the cells
a chance for continued existence in another beast.  Even if we imagine our
cells are food for worms in a coffin (which I rather doubt) all the worms
would necessarily perish right there in that same box, so it is merely a
delayed terminus of three billion years of life for any worm cells.  If our
cells could remember their own past, how tragic to become part of a human,
for that is THE END of a long and glorious journey.

 

With one exception.

 

The only common case in our modern world where our living cells are devoured
by some living beast is when we are bitten by a mosquito.  That is nearly
the only path I can think of where a cell with an imaginary memory of its
past can have continuity through having been part of a human.  I can
scarcely imagine any other path of continuity, for we wash away nearly all
other parasites with daily bathing, and defeat by some hygienic or medical
practice all other examples of some living beast devouring our living cells.
But if a mosquito sucks away some of our currently active cells and
reprocesses those into more mosquitoes, those cells (in a sense) survive a
desperately dangerous existence, achieving continuity through the (usually
final) human stage.  

 

>.I never tired of the feeling of success I got from killing a skeeter. John

Success?  Well how do you feel about killing that skeeter, John, now that
you realize you swatted into oblivion the very last remote chance for
continuity after three billion years for those few living cells that noble
mosquito sucked out of you at enormous risk to its own existence, in the
wretched beast's last desperate bid to save as many of the ancient lifeforms
as possible from a likely terminal plunge into liquid nitrogen, or an
absolutely certainly terminal burial or incineration?

 

spike

 

 

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