One secrecy of Life.
On one of those reflective days in 2015, it came to my mind that – maybe – during this year a baby would be born that, once as an adult, would become the first human to put his/her footprint on our neighbouring planet Mars, searching for clear evidence of life – past or present.
And then I started wondering about how life on Earth might have come about...
Dinosaurs are reported to be extinct by the climatic consequences of an asteroid impact on Earth, some 60 million years ago. Of course this extinction did not happen suddenly and not all reptiles were affected in the same way. Some even did survive - as we still can see today - although they already were highly sophisticated, like turtles, lizards, crocodiles, etc. At the same time the warm-blooded species began their raise in the kingdom of animals. Would there be a coincidence and, if yes, what could it be?
Till now our understanding of the material world and our body, as we see and experience it, was based on a “belief”. Namely the belief about “Materialism”, that stipulates that “Reality” is what we experience through our senses.
Of course, our sound mind tells us that this can’t be true. From where I stand I can experience that the world is flat, which isn’t. I experience that I stay on stable ground, which isn’t as I move at a speed of several thousands of miles per hour around the sun. My senses tell me that the sun rises in the East and moves across the sky, which isn’t, as we know now.
In previous editions, we have treated several “established truths” and we have tried to show you that these truths are in fact our individual interpretations of the environment in which we live and think and that these interpretations can have a significant influence on ourselves and on the quality of our life.
The milestone for the concept of cybernetics started with a series of legendary meetings in New York, known as “the Macy Conference”. These meetings – and especially the first one, in 1946 – were extraordinary, stimulating and joined an exceptional group of highly creative people who collided against each other during intensive interdisciplinary dialogues about new ideas and ways of thinking. The participants divided themselves into two main groups. The first one was formed around the original cybernetics and included mathematicians, engineers and neuroscientists. The second group was formed around human scientists who were led by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.
We all know that light – the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum – is crucial and indispensable to life; it is generated by the sun and supplies our earth with plenty of energy. The rest of the electromagnetic spectrum reaches our planet in the form of radio waves, heat, UV, X- and gamma-rays. All living organisms receive, collect and transform these waves in one or the other form.
But what about emission of light by living organisms? And I do not mean the glow worms, -flies or other luminescent creatures like from the deep sea. I mean the emission of minute amounts of light by common cells like the ones that you have in your body or from the vegetables in your garden.
Is there anybody who knows how life on Earth started? Most probably no, but many pieces of the puzzle already fell into place and give us a good picture how life could have started.
Earth had been created at the time when our solar system was born, some 4.600 millions of years ago. Initially our planet was a ball of fire and molten mass but slowly she cooled down and a crust was formed. According to modern science, life started about 3.500 million years ago. It is clear that the Earth was very different at that time with no sign of life and no oxygen in the atmosphere.