February 23, 2013

• toss the coin humans i win, ants i lose

   Somethings in paleontology become strikingly clear when you research them. There is this uncanny resilience of life that astounds the mind for it’s ingenious ability to thwart the universe at it’s own game. We tend to focus on the bacteria,virus and microbes for this kind of intrigue. Since these lifeforms are primarily the source of our fear and present threat in nature. Believing of course that we have pretty much got everything else under wraps. This of course is farthest from the truth. Hindsight kind of provides a comedic relief when you consider that a species which cant even control itself and its instincts , effectively, should wager that it has dominion over all others. humanity in its greatness surely provides the best entertainment for the universe.drama, intrigue,comedy,tragedy , action,expression in an otherwise void of stars is certainly our best quality. We become the actors that don’t know it is a role.
   As newcomers into the plot. we think that basically the story was crafted around us. the biggest draw of any religious dogma is this assertion that the universe is understandable by the human mind, that the events are somehow geared for the providence of the human condition. the comedy gets better when even in modern times, while this stuff still exists in radical cases ( how else to describe it when science has proven the fallacy of practically every belief previous), the new age desperate types will apply the ‘it is all about us’ fashion towards other life. we even think, that aliens will be all about us. ( i loved that line in that star trek movie (return home) where Spock says that only the human race would think that any greater species will want to talk to only them). it is true , we do think we are the top dog. unfortunately our advancements and incredible intelligence has made us top dogs. but we are like babies with guns, a concept that only we humans can understand. we created it.
   the major truth is, it is by pure luck that we even exist. pure luck that we are what we are.  it has nothing to do with a higher being coming along and giving us the nod of acknowledgement. it simply falls into timing and pure luck.Which is not a demeaning statement at all. though some would find this hard to accept. in truth, timing and pure luck are the major forces of all the most incredible forms of life that have existed both past and present. such powers of the universe even to this day prove reality itself is an elastic flux. the recent asteroid pass and the meteorite that smashed into Russia alone define the concept of pure luck and timing. just think, such stuff is common place and run of the mill for the earth. This type of event, is exactly what proved the turning point in earth’s history to even make humans possible. never underestimate random chance and life, they are like two lustful lovers earnestly seeking each others companionship. greedily embracing each others presence. The results are always astounding and awe inspiring. personally, i love it. i really get a thrill out of it.
   anyways, as i said we are like actors, who have entered the middle or some part of the sketch long after the introduction and believing that we are the stars of the play, envision the whole plot to be reliant upon us. I would have to say that, even know this is not the case, we are like the ego inflated thespians that will force this into reality regardless of the plot. it is our past time. however, having entered into the plot only after the main characters have been introduced and sometimes segued, we remain unsure of our place in the motion of the story. as an observation, i add, we , unlike the rest of the life on earth, do have control over the playwright’s direction. this is a strange balance for life, it gives the illusion of us being exclusively catered too without realizing that in the outline, we are really just a element of a story that has been majestically written in many tongues and arcane media. some of which we are only now beginning to understand. The true story is written in stone. It is here that we enter the play, late and desperately trying to figure out the storyline.

   I remember as a boy hearing and learning that the dinosaurs had dominion over the earth. The way this was portrayed is like a huge , behemoth lumbering and bestial type of lordship. With no sense of direction and basic primal kill or be killed empirical domain. Thrilling over the stop action animation of the 60-70′s depiction of dinosaurs fighting for life in a jungle backdrop. there was much adventure and daydreaming to feed the mind of boy. yet, as we learn more,we  learn that it was not exactly that way, that the dinosaurs were displaying advanced social behaviors. as an adult i quip to myself, well like yea, birds pretty much spell that out. crocodiles, as i wrote about previous also demonstrate fascinating social behaviors. it becomes more and more complex and ultimately it turns out that the time or closer to the origin of life, the more detailed such social organization becomes. in biology, one can not deny the incredible advancement of cells. the one thing they had over the other prevalent forms of life at the time was the ability to colonize. it proved to be the one thing that would spell dominion over the equally powerful variation of microbes and bacteria. the high mutant rate and seemingly immortal (via natural cloning) of some forms of microbes,virus and bacterial life with their incredible mutation properties was not an easy competition. the cells, they began to combine and then specialize. they eventually proved that socialized behavior was the strongest form of survival in the universe. the vast variations and incredible nature of disease is not a display of how weak our type of life is, it is a display of how strong and how desperate the disease specimen is to try and survive. in all truth, we are tough and by no means at the mercy of these organisms. we are the legacy of cells and their greatest strategy, socialized colonization. so strong that even the most basic examples, older then i can possibly imagine still exist today, in the form of a sea cumber and ammonites which lead to the magnificence of coral reefs. the latter being really a simple colony of cellar growth creating the base of whole ecology within the ocean depths.
   The eons would be a wildly fluctuation of balance and over bounding success of species that will never be known or recognized. life and chance are anything but shy in their union. eventually though the story will lead us to insects and the trees, the eternal fight for domain, which ultimately belongs to the trees and plants. nothing would survive without them. such benevolent masters , compared to its dependents. reptiles soon come into play and they prove to be perfection. there is no reason really to think of them as a lesser creature. they are perfect, the physiology and metabolism of reptiles and lizards is so economic, that in a  world that was incredibly hot and barren they managed to out do everything else. however, the story never left the original animal form in the background. insects, still proved to be the best and most prolific of animal species. it is here where we see the main antagonist. introduced way at the start of the play, the character now fully developed and incredibly advanced. more advanced in the story then anything else really, because something began to happen. this, is the act we enter, with the protagonist of the insects. here now is the scene and backdrop.
   roughly around the middle of the jurrasic period there was major changes going on with the earth. it wasn’t just one single thing either, there was a period we think is roughly a thousand years or more of persistent super volcanoes and generally major volcanic activity. the exact reason is unclear. it could be from solar activity  or from geomagnetic terrain conditions of earth itself. the atmosphere was much different as far as how much and thick various components were of the air. uv radiation was much more pronounced. minor climate shifts were popping up. there was also heightened frequency of meteorites. we know this from the moon and the surface of venus. which shows craters that are both numerable and unchanged since that time. written in the landscape of venus. the earth has much to demonstrate this as well. as a result, the change though not highly radical was enough to start the chain of dinosaurs to begin to develop strategies for actively maintaining the temperature of their bodies. this of course is demonstrated in birds, a direct ascendant of the dinosaurs and only real reliable object of study to give us insight into how the dinosaurs changed. dinosaurs were not exactly reptiles. they would be like us to the other primates, with exclusively different traits that would vanish with them and their extinction. only hinted at , like i said with the birds.so what this demonstrates is, there was a tendency going on with life at this time. something was starting life to embrace a strategy for climate shifts and change long before the meteorite would hit the earth.

   Life was not losing. it was beginning to even gain foothold into arctic areas, as the dinosaur fossils discovered in this region depict. chance and fate were beginning a romance and their admirer life was dancing in the exotic dance of the universal song. there is however the real topic of this discussion, which enters now. wasps.
   wasps, were more or less in the picture roughly in the middle of the dinosaur dominion. they had no real fashion going. being largely like some wasps are now. singular and parasitic. they were roguish and pretty much highly barbaric in their way of life. the typical environment of insects. being kill or be killed as a  primal instinct way of life. but something strange began to happen. when, i am not very sure. but close to the extinction of dinosaurs, wasps began to do something strange. they began to group up. they also began to lay their eggs into the ground. the climate shifts had somehow forced this creature to the ground. it was a sudden and incredibly fast change. ants, are wasps. the queen is actually as close to a wasp as you can get. velvet ants are really wasps , that live like ants. how this happened, why it happened is a mystery. but for whatever reason, the previously non social animal suddenly became a social animal that totally depends on its social structure to live. usually it is here that most people nod and say they are called super organisms. truth is, they are truly the most incredible example of the cells legacy for colonization. this is where people turn away. but don’t, not yet. ants, are manufacturers, they even herd and have pastoral cultures, they will even use microbial agents to fight disease and have the most elaborate social structure on earth. they can fashion items for tools.they can and will coordinated as a massive entity. pretty much a lot of what we claim we have over the other animals , ants have already mastered and perfected. long before we even existed. here is where fate and luck play a major part. if it wasn’t for the asteroid and volcanoes and ice age. the ants, as a social and culture entity would own the earth. there is, really no reason at all other then this they aren’t.  we would not exist. 
   some people have a hard time understanding this. but it is true, the ants were and in many ways are superior to us even now. the saving grace, is the way their intelligence works. as a colony, where ours is based on individuality. the individual sense in humans is how we have rebound from many different disasters. if we lost an important human then we had the ability to rebound and continue. ants, can not do this. they lose their queen. that spells the end. so in effect an alien super organism species exists right in front of us. technically it seems, we are not the only one.  we just lucked out.

   

  • 11:37 pm
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