Spike,<div>It was me that said I was nostalgic of when I was a unicellular being.</div><div>And Natasha replied she was too.</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, why being buried is not recycling? Even in a container eventually the cell material is being recycled. Missing something? </div>
<div>But we know what is important is the information of a living being not its material structure and if a cell ends up in a transhumanist, its chances to live for ever in its information pattern or its contribution to the overall information pattern would be very enhanced.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Giovanni</div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 7:34 PM, spike <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net" target="_blank">spike66@att.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">On Behalf Of </span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">John Grigg<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] how mosquitoes fly in the rain<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">>…</span>Spike, thanks for the cool and informative article! <u></u><u></u></p>
</div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="color:#1f497d">>…</span>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<span style="color:#1f497d">…<u></u><u></u></span></p>
</div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">Ja, I learned on a trip to your beautiful vast state that the mosquito is the Alaska state bird.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">>…</span>I never tired of the feeling of success I got from killing a skeeter that had found it's way into my home. <u></u><u></u></p>
</div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">>…And as his ashes rose up into the sky, they turned into hordes of mosquitoes! ; )<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">With one exception…<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">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. </span> <u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><span style="color:#1f497d">>…</span>I never tired of the feeling of success I got from killing a skeeter… John<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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?<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><u></u><u></u></font></span></span></p>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">spike<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></font></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></div></div><br>
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