 Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (greenish brown) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (pink), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH The deadly coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world in early 2020 brings to mind a wonderfully astute passage from the start of Bill Bryson’s entertaining romp through science: “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” He writes: “To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.” And so we do. The planet creates and the planet destroys and one outcome is as good as the other, apparently. It is a maker, breaker planet. If our planet had feelings, which it decidedly doesn’t (sorry Gaia fans), Earth could best be described as ambivalent toward life.
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AuthorFrank James is an omnivorously curious former journalist now in public relations. He knows he needs to write more posts. CategoriesArchives
August 2024
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