28 July

Brian Cox's The Planets is jaw-dropping TV. Raining solid and liquid diamonds on Saturn - you couldn't make this stuff up. There is one point where he says that if there is life on one of the moons of Saturn, it will just be very simple microbes, and not more evolved life like us. That's a common prejudice in science and outside science. What's mind blowing is that the work of people like Lynn Margulis is reversing that prejudice, showing that humans and plants and animals may in fact be the simplest of all life forms, and that complexity increases the smaller you go, towards microbes. Have posted about that before, how humans for example are likely just societies of microbes. We are little microbe projects, with a finite lifespan, but the microbes that make us are eternal, they build all the animals and plants we see in the way we build bridges and houses. Then when we 'die' they build something else. But we are them too, eternal beings. I don't think we understand time or eternity.