Sunday, February 5, 2012

It's All About Perspective


It’s All About Perspective
                The salamander slept soundly under the decomposing log. His body expanded with each breath filling his tiny lungs with oxygen. He exhales through his nostrils and skin, the permeable surrounding skin also breathes. His home is a swamp on an undiscovered planet. The wet lands are home to a huge assortment of creatures, massive frogs and toads, painted and snapping turtles, the solitary moose and her younglings. The young moose eat swamp cabbage while fanning away the ever present fly. This planet is much like Earth, it has similar plants and animals although it is not necessarily a planet. It does not belong to a solar system, it’s not even part of the universe, it just is what it is, an ever expanding plane that lies within a laboratory experiment.
                The pseudo planet lives in a small petri dish within a government funded research lab. The scientists are pleased with their work; they have successfully created a multi organism supporting eco system, much like a Winogradsky column.
                One of the scientists turns to the other: “this experiment always leads me to the same incomprehensible question. If we have successfully created a self sustaining eco system then who created us? Are we also an experiment in some lab?”
                The other scientist turns around abruptly and responds: “We’ve gone over this; we are Torgones who evolved from Tigones. Nobody created us, we just came into existence billions of years ago as single celled organisms who evolved from macromolecules. It’s all about evolution. That’s how our plane came to be.”
                The scientist was partially correct, his species of bipedal organisms evolved from a different species who in turn evolved from a different, simpler, organism. But what he doesn’t know, or may never know, is that the plane he’s living on is the originator, the original side of the cube of life. Crystals take the form of seven different structures: cubic or isometric, tetragonal, orthorhombic, hexagonal, trigonal, triclinic and monoclinic. For this structure of life there evolved five other planes and they joined together to form a cube, floating in space. Prior to the evolution of the other five sides the original plane was just like a sheet of paper floating in space.
                Little did the scientist know, they created a universe within the plane they created, in the petri dish, under fluorescent laboratory lights. The salamander resting comfortably under a log contains a solar system within his left eye. Light bounces around within his photoreceptor cells to create shooting stars. Making up the solar system is of course a sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The very planets we were taught in school. Little did we know that our very existence relies on the continuity of the organism harboring trillions of others. Within that tiny eye there are enumerable chemical reactions going on, lives of trillions of organisms, along with weather patterns and traffic patterns. We may think our solar system is vast, but it all comes down to perspective. The scale of life as we know it may seem huge to us, but it’s very tiny to something else.
                Life all began on that plane in space, a flat surface floating delicately. But how did the plane come to be? We may never know that mystery.     

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