Welcome to the Electricity of Life,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
Beings like ourselves, birthed in an oxygen-rich atmosphere,
may casually understand the requirements of life in terms of the creatures we can see.
Air is breathed or extracted from water in the case of fish,
water is drunk or retained for weeks and months by hardy life-forms.
The oxygenated environment around us informs our schemas.
It is wise to remember that life is not ultimately defined by water and air.
It is defined by the molecular electronics in an organism's biology.
There are a great many microscopic life-forms here on Earth
that can or regularly do thrive on substances that baffle human beliefs.
370 miles off the shore of Newfoundland - Canada,
the ship wreck of the Titanic was found.
It lay almost two-and-a-half miles deep or 12,500 feet below the saline waters' weight.
Growing on the hull of this historic vessel was a fairly historic biological discovery.
Giant mats of microorganisms
were moving along the surface of the ship reducing it to rust.
Within their protective film, pulses of electrical communication
allow highly diverse microscopic creatures to move as a coordinated superorganism.
Among the colony are life forms from all three domains of currently known organic life
including ancient archaebacteria.
Using chemical electrical signals the organisms can communicate
some of their growth needs to each other in an impressive show of cohabitation.
In our human terms we might say that some of the tiny life-forms
are not at all eating the metal but practically breathing it.
This idea owes its strangeness merely to our familiarity
with the experience of breathing-in air as a necessity for every moment of our life
and our unfamiliarity with the molecular electronics that it actually involves.
Our body, during its generation of vital energy,
uses the oxygen we breathe as an electron receptor
at the end of a process of splitting and recombining molecules.
Some microbes use iron or sulfur for the same purpose.
Here we can see one plugging in to a microscopic surface of basalt.
In fact, there are actually species which, in the wild, naturally use uranium.
They are highly resilient at proofreading and repairing their DNA
from frequent damage by radiation.
They are an apt reminder of the diverse electronics life can have
on this planet or others.
And when a large colony of different microscopic creatures is carrying out
sophisticated alchemy upon one of our industrial, seemingly impervious objects,
it reminds us of how much of ecology we do not see.
Diatoms are microscopic jewels of the sea,
photosynthesizing organisms which absorb silicon dioxide
and combine it with water molecules to fashion shells of glass.
There are at least 100,000 different species of diatom,
each one can have wildly creative shells
grown from combining these raw molecules of reality
to form designs with intricate features measured in nanometers.
Imagine we've prepared a microscope slide
with some pond water with a few small visible specs.
Looking through the lens,
those specs of matter are revealed to be tiny islands in their own right
made of rocks and indeterminate plant pieces, surrounded by unicellular life.
Seeing such tiny specks of familiar debris at this layer of magnification
gives us a sense of scale and with that a more accurate understanding
of the sheer amount of life that is thriving all around us
inhabiting and often interacting with the matter we see.
In every inch of dirt and every ounce of wild water there is life in all its chemistry.
Built from and manipulating the electricity of the physical world.