Chapter 3 Some ideas for countdown timers

When every group of astronauts who went to the moon return, people always perform that set of elaborate rituals, and there are always some obscure things in it, which seem to be some kind of symbol.Astronauts always praise the inviolability of the earth first, and every time they praise, they re-enact our long-standing worries about the nature of life in a stylized design.They don't fall on their knees and kiss the deck of the ship, as we might think; that would encroach, disturb, stain that deck, the ship, the surrounding sea, and the whole earth.Instead, they donned large surgical masks and walked briskly, hands up, touching nothing, into a sterile box.They waved to the president mysteriously and aseptically from behind the glass panel, lest the moon dust in their breath would get on the president.They were hung up, suspended in another sealed room in Houston, to wait out the expiration of their forty-day quarantine.During this time, people looked at the inoculated animals and tissue cultures uneasily, fearing that something was really ominous.

They were not allowed to see the sun again until after the long sterilizing ceremony was completed, and they were not allowed to drive to Broadway. Visitors from another planet, or people from another century, would think this stuff was downright crazy.Alas, outsiders will not understand this.These days, we have to do things like this.If there is any life on the moon, we must be afraid of it first, and must be on guard against it, so as not to be infected with something. Maybe it's a bacterium, a stray nucleic acid, an enzyme molecule, or some nameless little thing that's smooth and hairless, with gray eyes that look sly.Whatever it is, this foreign, and therefore malevolent, thing is no fun once we think of its existence.Be sure to close it.I imagine the debate on this will turn to discussing the cleanest way to kill it.

It is a wonder that we can all accept this fear of outsiders without even booing, as if it were nothing more than some law of nature.It exposes, in a way, our century, our attitudes toward life, our obsession with disease and death, and our human chauvinism. There are fragments of evidence that we are wrong.Most of the interrelationships we know of between living things are basically cooperative, symbiotic to varying degrees; when seemingly hostile, they usually keep their distance, with one of them signaling and warning, signaling for the other to leave .Prolonged closeness, prolonged and close cohabitation is required for one organism to infect another.If there is life on the moon, it will wait for us to accept it into our membership.We have no solitary creatures here.In a sense, every living thing is related to every other living thing and depends on every other living thing.

It is estimated that the microorganisms we really know are probably only a small part of the microorganisms on the earth, because most of them cannot be cultivated alone.They live together in dense, interdependent groups, nourish each other and maintain each other's living environment, and adjust the balance of the number of different species through a complex chemical signaling system.In our present state of technology we are no more able to separate and culture all the micro-organisms one by one, any more than we can take a bee out of the hive without it drying up like a desquamated cell.

Although the bacteria are small, they are already showing the appearance of social organisms.They must provide fairly good models for studying the interactions between different life forms at all levels.They live by cooperating, adapting, communicating and bartering.Bacteria and fungi, probably also with the aid of a communication system established by viruses, make up the matrix of the soil (it has been suggested that humic acid, due to the microbes, is the equivalent of the connective tissue in our body for the soil substance).They live by each other, and sometimes in each other.Bdellovibrio burrow through the body walls of other bacteria, curl up inside them, multiply within them, and then rush out again, as if they thought they were phages.There are groups of bacteria so deeply involved in the affairs of higher forms of life that they appear to be new types of tissue in those plants and animals.Rhizobia swarm the root hairs of legumes, looking like a swarm of voracious, invasive pathogens.However, the root nodules formed after their intervention cooperate with plant cells to become the main nitrogen-fixing organ of the earth.The production of bean nodulin between plant cells and microbial cells is a model of symbiotic high technology.Proteins are synthesized by plants, but only under the command of bacteria; the plant DNA that codes for this substance may have come down to microbes early in their evolution.

Bacteria that live in insect tissues, such as those associated with bacteria-containing cells of cockroaches and termites, appear to be specialized organs in their hosts.It is not yet clear what they do for the insects, but it is known that the insects cannot live long without them.Like mitochondria, they are inherited from generation to generation by egg cells. It has been suggested that symbiotic associations between prokaryotic cells were the origin of eukaryotic cells, and that fusion between different types of eukaryotic cells (eg, swimming, ciliated cells into phagocytic cells) resulted in some colonies Formation of these colonies eventually became metazoans.If so, then the signs of identity that distinguish the this from the non-this have long since been confused.Today, marine life is dominated by symbiotic relationships to such an extent that it is difficult to tell who is who, and even when some symbiotic organisms play the role of a single organism, it is difficult to tell which organism is composed of symbiotic organisms The question of who is who with other creatures.Those anemones that are firmly attached to the carapace and even the chelicerae of some crabs can accurately identify the molecular configuration of those attachment surfaces; and the crab can also recognize its own anemone, and sometimes find it, Let it attach to the carapace as decoration.Some nymphids, which seem to themselves to be the functional organs of certain species of sea anemones, at an early age adapted themselves to living between the deadly tentacles of their hosts; Swimming back and forth in the fringe area, until the body surface bears the mark that the sea anemone thinks is acceptable, then it can swim into these tentacles.

In the regulation of relations among animals, there are sometimes inventions, as if improvised, suggestions for possible evolution.Some of them are kind, even witty.A few years ago, some Australian surfers were stung by some small animals.It turned out to be some gills equipped with a man-of-war jellyfish stinger.These Neptunian colonies feed on jellyfish, and by manipulating the jellyfish as food, attaching their stinging cells to their body surfaces, for a while a kind of temporary hybrid is produced that bears the characteristics of both Neptune and Jellyfish , albeit somewhat asymmetrically.

Even when the situation calls for both winning and losing, this trade is not necessarily a battle.The indifference with which members of the several species of the marine coelenterate coelenterate show towards one another suggests that mechanisms for maintaining individuality must have existed long before immune mechanisms evolved.Scallops always grow together in dense clumps and grow into a branch-like thing, but they do not merge with each other.If they merge, their forms will undoubtedly become a mess.Theodor (JL) has shown in a series of beautiful experiments that when two individuals of the same species are brought together in close contact, the smaller one always disintegrates first.This self-destruction comes from a cleavage mechanism completely controlled by the lesser.It wasn't thrown from the field, it wasn't defeated by force, it wasn't outgunned, it just voluntarily exited the field.It may not be consoling to know that there are such things in the biological world, but at least it will make people feel comfortable after being surprised.

Atmospheric oxygen is produced by chloroplasts in plants (which, surprisingly, also live in the straws of giant clams and lower sea creatures).In tissue culture, it is a natural tendency for genetically unrelated cells to come together and fuse into some hybrid cells regardless of the species.Inflammation and immune mechanisms really have to be very powerful by design to separate us organisms from one another.Without these rather labor-intensive mechanisms, we might have evolved into a kind of mobile syncytium that overwhelmed the earth, and then not even a flower would grow on the earth. Perhaps, we would feel that it is possible to accept other life forms from other planets just out of goodwill.Our planet is, after all, a planet with vitamin B12 in the rain!According to Parker's (BC) calculations, when fields are plowed, convective storms carry B12 from the soil to the upper atmosphere, and its concentration in rainwater is sufficient to allow a visible euglena flower to bloom in a large pond .