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

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Will Steinberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] destroying 3 billion year old lifeforms, was: RE: how
mosquitoes fly in the rain

 

>.I reckon this is the most beautiful thing I have read posted by Spike thus
far on this list.  Simply excellent.

Thanks Will.  You like that one?  I am full of it.  

THEM, rather, I am full of THEM!  Flights of fancy, like mosquitoes
desperately rescuing pico-memory lifeforms, with their needle-nose probosci,
lots of that kind of junk rattling around in my head.

There was kind of a point to all this, which I will now present.

I made the argument that every living cell in our bodies have continuity
backwards to a previous cell, all the way back to an embryo, which has
continuity back to a previous embryo and so on back to the very first living
organism.  Furthermore, humans are rather unique among beasts in that
nothing eats us, other than mosquitoes (other examples please?) and our
bodies are disposed in such a way that usually all the cells die.

However, there is one other mechanism whereby some of these ancient
organisms can perhaps survive in a sense the experience of having been a
picohuman: blood donation.  We can look up the volume of a typical human
erythrocyte and see that it is about 100 femtoliters, but using the argument
I gave earlier, that doesn't count, for the red blood cell has no nucleus
and therefore does not divide.  I am not merely expressing anti-procaryotic
chauvinism, but rather holding to the reasoning given in the Emergency
Medical Mosquito post.

We can even disregard the leukocytes, which are larger but still irrelevant
for this next flight of fancy, but the blood contains some number of stem
cells.  We know that stem cells must be transported to the site of injured
tissue by some means, so my reasoning is that a few of them must be in the
bloodstream.  I don't even know how to estimate an order of magnitude, but
perhaps Anders or one of the other JupiterBrains among us can offer a
suggestion.  

In any case, last Wednesday I visited Stanford to excrete a unit to complete
my fifth gallon of blood donations, so I would take a wild guess and
estimate at least a billion stem cells would be sloshing around in that
bloody mess, and these would go into patients who would (I hope) recover,
and of these, some fraction would then go on to breed, after having one of
my stem cells fortuitously land in his testicles and contribute to
generating a sperm cell.  Hey, those things come from somewhere, and keep
coming from somewhere, so my reasoning is that stem cells must come into
play somehow.

So by way of blood donation, my cells end up in another yet another human,
which from the cell's point of view is like leaping from the sinking Titanic
into the icy sea.  But perhaps the new, young human will be inclined to
blood donation as well, in which a cell could wind up surviving yet another
perilous longshot to ultimate survival, and eventually be rescued by a
mosquito, or perhaps another intriguing possibility, which I will now
suggest.

At Mount Rainier, near where I observed the snowflake dodging mosquito, I
recently heard a couple of greens discussing how to dispose of their earthly
remains in the most environmentally friendly way, using the least amount of
fuel for their cremation and so forth.  I suggested having one's body frozen
in liquid nitrogen, then using perhaps a modified clothes dryer held at
liquid nitrogen temperatures, , tumble the frozen body with a couple of
shot-puts or cannon balls until it is bashed into bits the size of beach
sand.  Then take the remains in this form (punsters, do think of a name for
it) up the slopes of the revered mountain to scatter widely, at which time
the material melts and is an ideal size for snacking by the local ant
population.  No burial sites cluttering the landscape, no fuel use, a good
excuse for your friends and family to hike up in that beautiful place, and
most importantly, those cells immediately escape the perilous end-game
existence as a femto-human to become a much larger fraction of an ant, which
causes it to be far more likely to rejoin the mainstream of life on this
blue-green planet and continue its 3 gigayear existence.

For those of us who are cryonics-oriented, this is all perfectly compatible
with our vision: remove head, freeze, store, into the dryer with the rest of
the remains, tumble to frozen sand, scatter.  Alcor could perhaps offer the
service to green-minded individuals.  Perhaps some of these clients have
plenty of money and no children, and may see the wisdom of getting their
heads preserved while passing along the rest of their carbon to the ants on
Mount Rainier, minimizing their own carbon footprint etc.  I donate this
idea to the public domain.  Say nice things about me if you make a fortune
on it.

But go give blood.  It's the kind of good deed that doesn't even cost you
any actual money.

spike

 

 

 

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