Chapter 32 6.5 Endless life

At two o'clock in the afternoon on this blustery day, six months after my last midnight hike, I climbed the hill behind my house again.The winter rain washes the grass green, and the strong wind makes the grass bend.Not far from the ridge, I stopped in front of a round grass mat made by wild deer lying on the soft grass.The weather-beaten grass stalks are pale yellow with a hint of purple, as if the color had been rubbed off the belly of a deer.I rest in this grass nest.Overhead is the howling wind. I see wildflowers curled up under the bowed blades of grass.For unknown reasons, all species are purple-blue: lupine, blue-eyed, dandelion, gentian.Between me, the fallen blades of grass, and the distant sea lay bushes with thick, silver-green leaves—the typical desert version.

Here is a wild carrot flower.The lines on its leaves are criss-cross, delicate and complex, dazzling.There are 24 leaflets arranged on each leaf, and 12 smaller leaflets are arranged on top of each leaflet.This recursive shape is undoubtedly the result of some kind of overprocessing.Its terminal compound umbel, surrounded by 30 small milky white flowers, surrounds a small purple flower in the center, which is also surprising.On this grassy slope where I rest, a variety of life forms are irresistibly presenting their own details and inconceivable. I should have been touched.But with two million herbaceous plants and a grove of thousands of juniper shrubs, what struck me the most was the thought of how similar life is on Earth.Of all the shapes and behaviors that animate matter can adopt, only a few and their wide variety of variants survive the selection.Life doesn't lie to me, everything is the same, like canned food in the grocery store, made by the same food group despite the different labels.Apparently, all life on Earth comes from the same conglomerate that transcends national boundaries.

The grass where I sat froze, the tangled dandelion stalks scraped my shirt, the brown-breasted swallows swooped downhill: they were the same thing growing in all directions.I understand because I, too, have been pulled into it. Life is a networked thing—a distributed being.It is a single organism extended in space and time.There is no separate life.Nowhere is the solo of a single organism to be seen.Life is always plural (it is not life until it becomes plural—replicating itself—life is life.) Life inherits connections, links, and sharing. "You and I are of the same blood," intoned Mowgli the poet softly.Ant, you and I have the same blood.Tyrannosaurus, you and I have the same blood.HIV, you and I, are of the same blood.

Life disperses itself into apparent multitudes, but these are illusions. “Life is [primarily] an ecological property, and a fleeting one at that,” writes microbiologist Claire Folsom.Claire loves superorganisms in bottles.We live distributedly in the same life.Life is a torrent of change, filling empty containers along the way, and filling more containers as they overflow.Regardless of the shape and number of those containers, it does not affect this in the slightest. Life is like an extremist, which operates with fanaticism and without restraint.It permeates everywhere, fills the atmosphere, covers the surface, and subtly enters the crevices of the stone bed, no one can deny it.As Lovelock said, every time we dig up an ancient rock, we also dig up the ancient life preserved there.Johann von Neumann, thinking about life in mathematical terms, said: "Living organisms ... are highly improbable from any reasonable theory of probability or thermodynamics ... [but] if by any theory of probability By an inexplicable accident, one life actually arose, and then many living organisms arose.” Once life was formed, it quickly took over the earth, enlisting all types of matter—gases, liquids, solids—into its system. "Life is a planetary-scale phenomenon," says James Lovelock. "It's impossible for a planet to be sparsely populated with life. Otherwise it would be as unstable as a half-body animal."

Today, the entire surface of the planet is covered with a thin film of holistic life.This cover can't be taken off.Tear a hole, and the outer cover will repair the broken place by itself.Ravage it, and the mantle grows more luxuriant.This is not a rag, it is lush and lush, a gorgeous robe covering the huge body of the earth. In fact, it's a timeless coat.Life keeps a great secret from us, and that secret is that life, once born, is immortal.Once activated, it cannot be eradicated. Regardless of what environmental activists may say, completely eliminating the flood of life on Earth is beyond human capabilities.Not even a nuclear bomb could stop life as a whole, and maybe it could actually increase non-human variants.

Billions of years ago, life must have made a move across the threshold of irreversibility.We call it the I point (I is short for irreversible or immortal). Before point I life is tenuous; it faces a steep upward slope.Four billion years ago, the frequent impacts of meteorites on the earth, the intense rays, and the great fluctuations in temperature created an unbelievably harsh environment for all the semi-formed and ready-to-replicate complex bodies.But then, as Lovelock describes it, "during the primordial period of Earth's history, climatic conditions created a window of opportunity just right for the birth of life. A brief period in which life gained self-creation. If it failed in the first place, there was no future entire life system."

But once it has taken root, life will never let go.Moreover, once the I point is crossed, life will no longer be delicate and fragile, but will appear rebellious.Single-celled bacteria are surprisingly indomitable, living in every harsh environment imaginable, including areas of high radiation.Completely remove the bacteria in the ward?Perhaps only the hospital knows that this is simply a fantasy.Erase life from the face of the earth?what!Dream it! We must be mindful of the restless nature of life, which is closely related to the complexity of living systems.We intend to build machines as complex as locusts and spread them across the world.Once on stage, they don't go down.So far, none of the thousands of computer viruses written by virus hunters has become extinct.According to antivirus software companies, dozens of viruses are born every week.They have been with us as long as we use computers.

The reason why life cannot be stopped is because the complexity of life dynamics has surpassed the complexity of all known destructive forces.Life is far more complex than non-life.Life itself takes care of death - predators share prey - consumption of one life form by another does not detract from the overall complexity of the system, and may even increase it sex. All diseases and accidents in the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, never stop attacking the human body, and it takes an average of 621,960 hours to kill a human individual (note, the average life expectancy of the world population).Seventy years of 24/7 assault to break through the defenses of human life—without the interference of modern medicine (which can either hasten or delay the death of life, depending on your point of view).This tenacious persistence of life stems directly from the complexity of the human body.

In contrast, a well-made car can wear out a cylinder valve at most 200,000 miles, about 5,000 hours of driving.A jet turbine engine can run for 40,000 hours.An ordinary light bulb with no moving parts can last for 2,000 hours.Compared with the persistence of life, the life span of non-life complex is simply not comparable. In the museum of Harvard Medical School, there is a special display case for the "crowbar skull".The skull was roughly punched by a crowbar flying at high speed.The skull belonged to Phineas Gage, a foreman in a quarry in the nineteenth century, who exploded when he tamped black dynamite injected into the hole with an iron rod.The iron rod pierced his head.His men sawed off the iron bar protruding from his head, and sent him to a poorly equipped doctor.According to those who knew him, Gage lived on for another thirteen years, more or less functional, except that he became ill-tempered.This is understandable.But his body still works.

A person may not be able to run a marathon without a pancreas, a kidney, or a section of their small intestine, but they can still survive.Overall death occurs when many small parts of the body—especially the glands—decrease in function, but these are heavily cushioned so they don't break easily.Indeed, avoiding breakage and disintegration is a major property of complex systems. Plants and animals in the wild often survive severe violence or damage.The only study I know of to measure damage rates in the wild was with Brazilian lizards, and it concluded that 12 percent of lizards were missing at least one toe.An elk can survive being shot, a seal can heal from a shark bite, and an oak tree can sprout after it has been felled.In one experiment, a group of gastropods whose shells were deliberately crushed and released into the wild lived as long as an undamaged control group.In the natural world, it is nothing for a small fish to escape from the shark's mouth. It is a heroic feat if the death of an old man can cause the system to collapse.

The complexity of forming a network reverses the usual reliability relationships between things.For example, a single switch in a modern camera may be 90 percent reliable.If hundreds of switches are improvised and connected into a sequence, if they are not arranged in a distributed manner, the reliability of these hundreds of switches as a whole will be greatly reduced-even if they have 75% reliability .And if the connections are made properly—each switch relays information to the other switches—such as in an advanced compact digital camera, counterintuitively, the overall reliability of the camera can rise to 99 percent, exceeding that of each Reliability of individual components. But at this point the camera has many new subsets of parts, each like a part.The more such virtual components there are, the greater the overall likelihood of unpredictable behavior at the component level.The paths that go wrong are varied.So while the camera as a whole is more reliable, when it does, it is often an unexpected accident.Old cameras are prone to failure and easy to repair.New cameras are creatively ineffective. Creative failure is the hallmark of a living system.It is difficult to seek death, but there are countless paths leading to death. In 1990, more than two hundred well-paid engineers worked intensively for two weeks to find out the reasons for the frequent occurrence of various conditions on the telephone switching network in the United States at that time, and it was these engineers who designed and built this system.The problem is that a certain situation may never have occurred in the past, and may not occur in the future. Every birth is roughly the same, but every death is different.If the coroner is willing to give a precise cause of death certificate, then each death is unique.Medicine finds generalized closing and categorization more beneficial, and thus fails to record the true peculiarities unique to each death. Complex systems don't die easily.The members of the system enter into a transaction with the whole.Parts say: "We are willing to sacrifice for the whole, because we as a whole are greater than the sum of us as individuals." Life and complexity intertwine.Parts die, but the whole lives forever.As a system self-organizes into more complex wholes, it takes on a life of its own.Not the length of its life, but the strength of its life.It has more vitality. We tend to imagine life and death as dualistic; a living being is either dead or alive.But self-organizing subsystems in living organisms suggest that some things are more dynamic than others.Biologist Lynn MacGelies and others have pointed out that even a single cell survives in plural because each cell retains at least three degenerate forms of bacteria, the result of historic marriages. "I am the liveliest of all beings," the Russian poet Tarkovsky (father of filmmakers) clamored. This is not politically correct, but it may be true. The vitality of sparrows and horses may There is no substantial difference, but the vitality is different between a horse and a willow, a virus and a cricket. The more complex a living system is, the more life force is likely to inhabit it. As long as the universe continues to cool, life will gradually build up more What a weird variant, building a more interconnected network.