Chapter 4 The youngest and brightest around us

(draft of a speech given at a medical school graduation ceremony) Doctors, Somewhere on the other side of our galaxy, there is a distant planet that happens to be not too far or near a star of just the right size and temperature.Right now, there's a committee meeting up there studying our little remote solar system.The meeting, which has been going on for a year, is now drawing to a close.The intelligent beings in that place are signing (with some kind of number, of course) a document affirming that the matter of life is inconceivable in our part of the world, and that the place is not worth an expedition.Their various instruments had discovered the presence of the deadliest gas here, oxygen, and that meant nothing.They had intended to come and bring movable factories to make life-giving ammonia.But what was the use of running the risk of being asphyxiated?

For the above synopsis, the part I really believe in, is the committee.I take it as a fundamental tenet that the most fundamental aspect of what we know about human nature lies in it.If you were going to look for evidence of life on other celestial bodies, you'd need special instruments with extremely sensitive sensors that would detect the presence of the Council.If there is life there, you'll find some consortiums, some cooperative group companies, work meals, etc., all over the place. At least, in our species it is. Mars, from what we've seen so far, is a terrifying place.From all appearances, it was dead and lifeless, definitely the deadest place any of us had ever seen, and it was hard to look at it without looking away.Come to think of it, it's probably the only truly dead place of any size that we've ever glimpsed up close, and we're saddened to see it up close.

Perhaps, there is life on Mars, and we may not have found it so far.Countless consultant adults orbiting around NASA are having a heated, highly technical debate on this point right now, and are getting confused.In the depths of the ravines of Mars, would there be no island of life?Shouldn't we drop fleets of vehicles on wheels, and spread out over various parts of its surface, probing here and there?Go into the deep crevasses one by one, go up to the sky and into the earth to search, turn over a piece of stone, sniff everywhere, see if you can find life?Perhaps, there is such a place, just a small piece, that can contain life.

Maybe so.But in that case it is the most strange, absolutely unbelievable thing.Because, we are not familiar with this way of life.We have no solitary, isolated beings.It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single life form, alone, unsupported, unattached to other life forms. If you drop a car, or billions of cars, onto our planet, you might be able to find a patch or two without life.But that's only true if you take a small sample.There are living cells in our hottest deserts and on the coldest mountaintops.Even the ancient frozen rocks recently unearthed in Antarctica contain endolithic organisms, tucked comfortably in the porous space under the stone surface, and living as vigorously as the potted petunias in the flower shop window .

Even if you did find a single life form in a single place on Mars, how would you explain it?There is a term for this arrangement called a "closed ecosystem."And that's a mystery.We don't have a closed ecosystem here.absolutely not.The only closed ecosystem we know of is the Earth itself, but even here the term has to be expanded to include the Sun as part of the system, and, God knows, what vital minerals are in Certain ancient ages have drifted to our surface from the outside world. Every living thing here depends on the survival of other living things.All life forms are interconnected.That is what I mean by suggesting that committees are the basis of life on earth.At the very center, bearing the greatest responsibility, and more deeply involved in keeping this whole system going than any other entity, or rather, any other working part of the entire body of the earth, is the vast council of those non-nuclear microbes.Without bacteria at the head of the pack, we would never have had enough oxygen to distribute, found and fixed nitrogen to make enzymes, or recycled the actual living stuff to reproduce.

A technical definition of a system is this: A system is a structure whose components interact and communicate with each other, acting or operating as a group, individually and jointly, so that through the individual parts coordinated activities to achieve a common goal.Of course, this is a perfectly satisfactory definition of Earth.Where there is room for discussion is probably only the last part of the definition, which is the common goal of the system.So what exactly is our common goal?How on earth did we get involved in such a place? This is the greatest unease of our species.Some of us simply wipe away the unease with a swipe of the pen, declaring that our situation is ludicrous.Said, this whole place is beyond control, therefore, our responsibility is to manage ourselves.However, this didn't solve the problem.Anxiety is still there.We're still part of that dense, staggeringly complex living system, we're still stuck in symbionts growing up with each other, and we don't really know what we're getting into.

The earth is embraced as a whole, and its various organizations have unity.It really does look like a structure that might have some sort of solvable meaning, if we learn enough about it.Viewed from a distance, such as from the moon, it seems to be an organism.From the moment I first saw it, well, it was clearly in the process of developing, like a big embryo.Despite its enormous size, its countless parts, and its infinite variety of life forms, it has a uniformity.The viability of each tissue depends on all others; it comes along by means of symbiosis, and the invention of new ways of symbiosis is a fundamental process of its embryogenesis.For the evolution of this kind of life, we have no rules and regulations.In certain biomathematical details, we already know a great deal about the laws governing the evolution of individual species on Earth.But no Darwin has hitherto contemplated the orderly, coordinated growth and differentiation of this whole astonishing system, let alone its seemingly eternal survival.This poses an interesting question: some mechanisms seem to be completely restricted by chance and randomness, how does it produce new species, and also make these species adapt to each other seamlessly, just right, and mutually beneficial? , as if they were some cells of an organism?It's a wonderful mystery.

Humans have now swarmed the entire surface like bees, changing everything and tinkering with every other part, making it believe we are in charge, while risking the survival of the entire majestic creature. You can forgive us, or forgive us anyway, for our ignorance.At least one thing can be said for us, we are finally becoming aware of this gradually.In no century during our brief existence has man learned more deeply and painfully the extent and depth of our ignorance of nature.We are beginning to confront this fact and try to do something about it through science.This might save us all, if we're smart enough and lucky enough.But we're pretty much starting from scratch.Our road is still long, very long.

Remember, I don't mean to belittle ourselves; I'm a fervent believer in our species, and I'm impatient with the way we degrade humans into useful parts of nature.Instead, we are spectacular manifestations of life.We have language, and we can make metaphors as deftly and precisely as ribosomes make proteins.We have feelings.We have genes that encode useful properties, and useful properties are the closest thing I can imagine to a "common purpose" for all beings in nature.Finally, and probably the best thing, we have music.Any species that, in the earliest, naive stages of its development—almost barely born, by any standard of evolution—produces Johann Sebastian's Un Bach It's bad.We should feel more certain about our future.For we have Julian of Norwich, who said, "But all will be all right and all things will be all right." And we may turn to Montaigne for our sinful age.He said, "If I don't look crazy when I talk to myself, then I won't be heard calling myself saying, 'You plague-stricken fool' all the time."

However, we have no right to think that we are safe.We are perhaps the uniquely distressed of all animals on Earth.We are worried about the future, dissatisfied with the status quo, unable to accept the idea of ​​death, unable to sit on the fishing boat, we are sad because of worry.In my opinion, we really should have a better image of public opinion.We have always had the strongest conjecture about our origin, and that conjecture has multiplied our worth; and from the oldest language we know, which is Indo-European, we took the word Dhghem for earth, and made it Humus (humus) and human (person); also made humble (humble), this word makes us more glorious.In any case, we are undoubtedly the most persistent and persistent social creatures of all species, more dependent on each other than the most famous social insects, and, when you look at us, you will see that in terms of social life , we really have more imagination and skill than them, more than they can compare.We are good at it; that is how we make all cultures, literature in civilizations.We have high expectations and set high standards for our social behavior.If we've made a mistake and endangered the species -- and we've done it several times in this century -- the strongest words we can find to blame ourselves and our actions are those two to the point : "Inhuman" and "Inhumane".

There is nothing strange about the human condition.We just matter.It seems to me that the following is a good guess, made by many who have thought about it, that we may be in the business of forming some sort of mind for life on this planet process.If this is the case, we are still in the most primitive stage, still groping for language and thought, but have acquired unlimited capabilities for the future.Looked at this way, it is admirable that we have come so far in such a short time—no time, by geologists’ standards—that we have come so far.We're really the newest, youngest, brightest things around.