Wednesday, August 07, 2013

The Human Being is an Ecosystem


I've been seeing alot of interesting articles about the billions of micro-organisms that make up our body.

Even though we spend our lives thinking of ourselves as individuals, singular beings... we are actually walking ecologies, full of tiny creatures inside & out.

The fact of the matter is that each of us contains more bacteria than human cells!

Through new imaging techniques & computer graphics, technology is allowing us to visualize the complex microscopic worlds contained within the body:



 Daily Mail:

Despite being a fairly neat person, I'm not really a germaphobe, so none of this information really bothers me. It's just the way things are, & nobody can be a fully-sanitized, immaculately clean person.  With that in mind, here's some headlines that may fascinate you, gross you out, or both.

BBC:  

Smithsonian Magazine:

Design you Trust;
(Infographic)

Microorganisms in our body may also be affecting our thought processes, in ways we don't fully understand:

Sci-News:

There is also a mystical aspect to the idea that our bodies are communal biological vessels, teeming with life throughout.

Prehistoric Shamanism:
We Are Not Alone: 

Alot of people criticized George Lucas's revelation in the Star Wars prequels- that "The Force" was actually a field that interacted with tiny organisms called Midichlorians. I thought this was actually a good way to explain the mechanism behind Force-sensitive beings. This symbiosis mirrors the interaction between life on the macro & microscopic scales in the real world.

What we should try to understand is that Life is infinitely complex, & the deeper we look into its processes, the more questions will arise. We have alot to learn about the processes in even the simplest forms of life:

Wired:

Finally, here's a way of looking at our symbiosis with microbes that might be more creepy than comforting:


seen on Cheezburger

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