The universe is always this amazing
Mar. 22nd, 2011 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI found Twitter almost unreadable on Saturday evening.
Eventually I snapped and said
In an attempt to bask in the universe's continued awesomeness, I read this yesterday. It's basically about how there might be a fourth "branch" on the Darwinesque-metaphorical "tree of life" (which is more like a web than a tree, this blog post points out, but moving swiftly onward), which is amazing enough in itself. But what I find nearly as difficult to contemplate is the three "branches" of life already known.
Though they've been known to biology for a long time, I only learned about them a few months ago (from @qikipedia of all things). I am convinced I was taught about two kinds of organisms when I was in school: prokaryotes (which I think are single-celled things) and eukaryotes (everything else). But apparently there are three! (Though Wikipedia tells me the third was recognized as such only in 1990, which might explain why I was still learning the old system a few years later in my life science classes.) Now we have bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (and it turns out the thing really distinguishing the eukaryotes is not really being mutlicellular but having developed a cell nucleus).
Archaea were, as my school experience would've lead me to guess, similar enough in some ways to bacteria that they were originally thought part of that group, but they have a separate enough evolutionary history and biochemistry to be more accurately considered their own 'domain' of life.
Archaea seem delightfully spooky to me; that they can go around almost literally under our noses (they were at first thought to exist only in extreme conditions, but they've been found everywhere by now: according to Wikipedia the archaea in plankton may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet!) without being noticed properly for such a long time is just the sort of thing that makes my head spin in that now-familiar "the universe is always this amazing" way.
Just looking at the first diagram in Carl Zimmer's post, the one that depicts the way things are already known to be without the new stuff he's setting up to talk about, is mind-blowing to me. Look:
All those lovely names fanning out, and do you see how "Animals" is just one of them on the Eukaryote bunch? Given equal mention with things like "fungi", "red algae", "diplomonads."
I have no idea what a diplomonad is. At all. But they get to take up as much notional 'space' as all the monkeys, birds, fish, bugs, dogs, cats, people, giraffes, elephants, whales and every other kind of animal put together. (And that's far from the only division of eukaryotes that I don't recognize the name of; it's just a randomly chosen example when I could as easily have used something like "heterolobosea", "BAQ1", or "stramenopiles".)
So that there's something far more weird and unknown to all of science than those are to me, something as different again as the spooky archaea, is almost incomprehensible to me, like trying to imagine exactly how insignificant the Earth is to the Mliky Way. But at least that's something I have some practice at. I've never felt like this was something I had to try to do. Biology's never been my strong suit, it's something I struggled with (relatively) in school and don't read half so many pop-sci books about as I do the I-liked-them-before-they-were-cool cosmology and particle physics. (I even liked Brian Cox years before he was cool, a few years longer than I've been able to remember his name, in fact.)
Perhaps there really was a time when anyone who was interested could know quite a lot of what was known about the world, but if so, those days are long gone. Now it's a truism to talk of kaleidoscoping knowledge or the fractal nature of science: you can always "zoom in", or "out", and there's so much new stuff there that it's as if everything you do know is suddenly a tiny speck on the infinite beach of a cosmic shore. It can be daunting, that feeling, and it can be horrific to some when they first grok that there will always be things they don't know, but I have always thought it even be tter to encounter endlessly that frisson I got when I first learned about the existence of something like archaea.
Eventually I snapped and said
The Moon is full and at perigee every 2-3 years. Never been called "super moon" before. Pay attention: the universe's always this amazing.Or as I explained further today on somebody's LJ:
My issue with that was not "f*ck the Moon" but "I am always this excited about astronomy/science/etc. and after today you won't be any more, will you?" It's the idea that celestial bodies are only of interest every now and then when they do something unusual, and in this case not even that noticeably unusual, if it weren't for an astrologer (ptooi!) giving it the name Supermoon, no one would've given a monkey's, would they? As an astronomer said on Twitter (yes, I follow astronomers on Twitter....) it's the difference between an eight-inch pizza and a seven-inch pizza. Andrew's favorite comment on Twitter was from someone who said that if Superman had been only 14% better than the ae verage man (because the "super Moon," fact fans, was only 14% brighter/bigger than the regular Moon), he'd have been Jamie Oliver.(I didn't notice what a rant this had become until I'd finished it, but I did immediately apologize!)
In an attempt to bask in the universe's continued awesomeness, I read this yesterday. It's basically about how there might be a fourth "branch" on the Darwinesque-metaphorical "tree of life" (which is more like a web than a tree, this blog post points out, but moving swiftly onward), which is amazing enough in itself. But what I find nearly as difficult to contemplate is the three "branches" of life already known.
Though they've been known to biology for a long time, I only learned about them a few months ago (from @qikipedia of all things). I am convinced I was taught about two kinds of organisms when I was in school: prokaryotes (which I think are single-celled things) and eukaryotes (everything else). But apparently there are three! (Though Wikipedia tells me the third was recognized as such only in 1990, which might explain why I was still learning the old system a few years later in my life science classes.) Now we have bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (and it turns out the thing really distinguishing the eukaryotes is not really being mutlicellular but having developed a cell nucleus).
Archaea were, as my school experience would've lead me to guess, similar enough in some ways to bacteria that they were originally thought part of that group, but they have a separate enough evolutionary history and biochemistry to be more accurately considered their own 'domain' of life.
Archaea seem delightfully spooky to me; that they can go around almost literally under our noses (they were at first thought to exist only in extreme conditions, but they've been found everywhere by now: according to Wikipedia the archaea in plankton may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet!) without being noticed properly for such a long time is just the sort of thing that makes my head spin in that now-familiar "the universe is always this amazing" way.
Just looking at the first diagram in Carl Zimmer's post, the one that depicts the way things are already known to be without the new stuff he's setting up to talk about, is mind-blowing to me. Look:
All those lovely names fanning out, and do you see how "Animals" is just one of them on the Eukaryote bunch? Given equal mention with things like "fungi", "red algae", "diplomonads."
I have no idea what a diplomonad is. At all. But they get to take up as much notional 'space' as all the monkeys, birds, fish, bugs, dogs, cats, people, giraffes, elephants, whales and every other kind of animal put together. (And that's far from the only division of eukaryotes that I don't recognize the name of; it's just a randomly chosen example when I could as easily have used something like "heterolobosea", "BAQ1", or "stramenopiles".)
So that there's something far more weird and unknown to all of science than those are to me, something as different again as the spooky archaea, is almost incomprehensible to me, like trying to imagine exactly how insignificant the Earth is to the Mliky Way. But at least that's something I have some practice at. I've never felt like this was something I had to try to do. Biology's never been my strong suit, it's something I struggled with (relatively) in school and don't read half so many pop-sci books about as I do the I-liked-them-before-they-were-cool cosmology and particle physics. (I even liked Brian Cox years before he was cool, a few years longer than I've been able to remember his name, in fact.)
Perhaps there really was a time when anyone who was interested could know quite a lot of what was known about the world, but if so, those days are long gone. Now it's a truism to talk of kaleidoscoping knowledge or the fractal nature of science: you can always "zoom in", or "out", and there's so much new stuff there that it's as if everything you do know is suddenly a tiny speck on the infinite beach of a cosmic shore. It can be daunting, that feeling, and it can be horrific to some when they first grok that there will always be things they don't know, but I have always thought it even be tter to encounter endlessly that frisson I got when I first learned about the existence of something like archaea.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 06:16 pm (UTC)also i don't remember ever having been taught about branches/classes or organisms at school so this was really interesting for me.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-23 09:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-24 04:17 pm (UTC)They just do it to make me cry sometimes, I'm sure of it.