6 October

I never get sick of this photo. That’s where we live, in that thin blue line. We don’t live ‘on Earth’, we live in that tiny thin layer of life which churns the surface of the planet. At school we were often taught that our oxygen comes from trees. In fact it mostly came from blue-green algae, that toxic muck that stops people swimming in dams in summer. Microbes are the source of all life, and still are today. You, as a person, are really just a machine that microbes built, and there are trillions of them all over you and inside you right now. They’re immortal too, they don’t age or die, provided they have food. There are lots of discussions about whether we have an immortal ‘soul’, that is separate to and survives our bodies when they’re gone. We do have an immortal soul, it’s your microbes, a big part of you is already immortal.