Detours in nature
Detours: the earth lives by the rule of detours.
The desert mountains cradle the edges of the valley of sand below. Water has washed sand from the mountain ridges and wind has scraped away the edges. Still we are left with rivulets in the rocks, minor canyons to major canyons, carved into the face of the earth. Nature has its way to shape the landscape. And shape life.
We fight nature, but it still wins. We build roads and storms wash them out. We build bridges and they wobble in their sandy beds eventually. The earth’s 4.5 billion year’s of experience conquers all takers—eventually. And yet humankind wages noble battles against forces much older and stronger than it can comprehend. And some times we win—for a while. It’s worth the fight. We’re fighting for our lives, for civilization—for a way to exist. But all life forms want to exist. Some work together better than others. Some work harder than others.
We guess that bacteria are about 3.5 billion years old, an educated guess though . They are simple entities with 3.5 billion more years of experience than we have in their moment to moment miniscule lives. We estimate that there are five trillion trillion of them (a 5 with 30 zeros after it) on earth, but that is just a rough estimate. There are 40 million bacteria, again a good estimate, in one gram of soil. roughly the same volume as 1/4 teaspoon of sugar. There are a lot.
Viruses are about 1.5 billion years old. The number of virus types there are is based on loose assumptions about how many viruses may exist per vertebrate, and that guess is possibly in the 100s of millions range, if we consider invertibrate life forms, too. These are just types of viruses. To this we should probably also add the huge variety of bacteriophages in the oceans, viruses that attack bacteria. It is not possible to guess how many viral particles there may be on this earth.
Dinosaurs lived from about 252 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. Mammals, placental beings, rose up before the dinosaurs died off. Some suggest that anatomically modern human existed as long ago as 200,000 years ago, but others suggest earlier dates, if we include Neanderthals. And humans moved in civilizations only about 10-15,000 years ago. It’s only been the last few decades we have developed technology to detect life forms smaller that can be seen with human eye sight.
Only in the last century, in 1931, with the development of the electron microscope, scientists were first able to see viruses, bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria. So, we have less than a 100 year history of accurate knowledge about viruses, and our best practices and knowledge are only a few decades old. We have learned a vast amount in a very short period of time. And we know that this world is teeming with life, much of it smaller than we can see with our eyes. Most of it exists harmoniously. But some do not.
We’ve bumped into just such a moment. It’s still new for us, who are alive today, and though we’ve been fighting viruses for centuries, it is just in our lifetimes that scientists have found ways to build vaccines. Much work has already been done—before this coronavirus pandemic hit—and it is the basis for the vaccine work scientists are doing now to find a cure for us. That work will likely take another year to two years. Given the time spans of how we got here, that’s not much.
But we are so impatient. I am impatient. I need to take a breath, be thankful to live in this era when a vaccine is possible, and develop a capacity to wait through this delay without anger and hopefully less angst while scientists work so hard to save us and our future, and while doctors and nurses and first responders work so hard to keep us alive until the vaccine arrives.
I need to be just a little patient. Just enough for today will do. And tomorrow, repeat.