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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Working on the easterly path

Yesterday I was helping Bro. Simon place stones and rocks, he working on a westerly path, I on an easterly path, of the labyrinth. Because I was being mindless in my work, allowing the autopilot in my head to place the rocks just as instructed by Bro. Simon, my mind was allowed to wander. I should add that we were working in the cool air of early morning before the rather brutal desert sun would chase us indoors. So here are a few of my mental jottings from yesterday morning.

If it were not for humankind, all would be Truth?

An "explosion" may seem haphazard chaos and a human observing it would see a rather rapid and blurry event and without external sensing instruments, could make no sense of what took place, whereas with measuring instruments, one could "slow down the events" taking place so that it could be possible to reconstruct the entire "explosion" event so that the seemingly disorder is in fact order.

Was the Big Bang an explosion?

What if in that mysterious pond (or ocean) at the beginning, not one inanimate piece of stuff leaped over from the realm of inorganic to organic, but many at that most important of moments. Whatever the defining ingredient (electricity?) of that defining moment, perhaps many tiny bits were energized into whatever it takes for synthesis to make that moment truly a beginning. Reason would tell us that many of the bits that came to life most likely didn't live long enough to replicate, but maybe more than one did, in fact it makes more sense that many did if our pot of soup is filled with just the right ingredients and only awaits the final ingredient. I would think these many bits that came to life would most likely evolve in similar manners simply because of their like makeup. But of course their exterior likeness would soon disappear as they all traveled their separate paths. Which leads me to believe that perhaps the platypus and the crane fly did not have a common ancestor. Most likely a common pre-life list of inorganic ingredients, but a different organic grandparent. I suppose one could argue about commonness between platypus and crane fly, but could not that commonness be from the shaping exterior environment and not necessarily from a common organic ancestor?

And further, that those first assemblages, like assemblages, in a like environment, all became animate and most of all could replicate, then they all share the same common assemblage of parts. Somewhat like a science fair for kids, each kid receives a box with the exact same assemblage of parts, yet each kid puts together entirely different 'things'. Yet on close inspection one finds the common building blocks. Perhaps the environment, I'll thinking on a grand scale, the cosmos environment, steers through the natural laws life on a very narrow pathway.

But no, current science thinks me wrong. Using DNA as a recorder of the history of life, science is piecing together the evidence that all life on Earth follows the countless pathways back to a singular path, to a singular event, to a singular inorganic-becomes-organic event. Which got me to thinking of this most hospitable planet with all the varied chemistry and all the wondrous lightning that electrifies the countless brewing soups of not-yet-quite-life with bolts striking around the clock since the dawn of ages, and even the undersea boiling cauldrons of chemistry soup, and yet still nothing again ever sprang to life? Life is rare indeed. Yet the ever so faithful scientist build huge radio-telescopes, listening to the skies around the clock, do they really think life is so easy to make?

Then Bro. Simon hollered, "Are you still on that mindless kick?"

3 comments:

Lucy said...

It's good to be here.

Bro. Bartleby said...

This morning at break fast, at one end of the large dining table was Bro. Juniper and the other end Bro. Simon, both communicating with a tin-can telephone, the kite string taunt, and later I discovered that Bro. Juniper used a button to tie the string to, and then passed the string through a hole punched into the bottom of the cans, this he said allowed for a better connection. On the side of each of the tin cans was penned with a black marker, "iCan" ...

Granny J said...

The iCan is a wonderful technology! Thank you!