extreme Biology – existence at all Scales and Energies

Several fixations plaguing the astrobiology community regarding the prerequisites for life are retarding the development of biology and the search for a new life in the universe. These fixations work as smokescreens to obscure the myriads of other life forms that may thrive even in our Solar System. Astrobiologists, particularly at NASA, appear to have a dogmatic fixation on studying life only at the biochemical level, a pre-occupation with water as a substrate for life, adamant on only studying carbon-based life forms, restricted to a very narrow temperature range and scale, and not even noticing that all the life forms that they have imagined in their wildest models are only based on particles within the (physicists’) Standard Model.

Physics affects biology in a more fundamental way than even chemistry or biochemistry. New developments in physics should open up areas to consider more extreme life forms. Would biologists start thinking about dark matter and supersymmetric life forms if we find dark matter and supersymmetric particles? Should we be talking about “quantum biology”? When physicists talk of parallel universes, would biologists consider symbiosis between life forms in parallel universes? Is Darwin’s Tree of Life complete? Where are its roots?

Life at Extremely Small Scales – Nano and Quantum Life

Bacteria may be no larger than 10 microns, viruses no larger than 100 nanometers, molecules about 1 nanometer, and atoms about 0.1 nanometers. Does scale impose a barrier to life or even consciousness? If viruses are considered life forms (as some leading astrobiologists argue), they constitute “nano-life”. Consciousness may even exist at the quantum scale. “In some strange way, an electron or a photon [or any other elementary particle] seems to ‘know’ about changes in the environment and appears to respond accordingly,” says physicist Danah Zohar. A group at the Weizmann Institute in Israel has done a variation of the famous “double-slit” experiment.

They used electrons instead of photons and observed how the resultant interference pattern (which indicates wave-like properties of the particle) dissipated the longer you watched the electrons go through the slits. Like a wave, the electron passes through both slits simultaneously, but if, according to E Buks, it “senses” that it is being watched, the electron (as a particle) goes through only one path, diminishing the interference pattern. Elementary particles (such as photons and electrons) appear to possess a certain degree of “intelligence” and awareness of the environment. Renowned plasma and particle physicist David Bohm says, “In some sense, a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics. This mind-like quality becomes stronger and more developed as we go to subtlest levels.”

In a new field called “quantum metaphysics,” Jay Alfred has proposed that consciousness is a fundamental property of elementary particles as properties that make it “matter” or a “physical force” (for example, mass, spin, and charge) (see Conscious Particles, Fields and Waves, 2007). And just as mass, spin, and charge differ from one particle to another, different particles probably have different degrees of consciousness. He has argued (see Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 2006) that consciousness can manifest depending on the degree of quantum coherence and the intrinsic properties of the single particle. (This may be cited as the “Quantum Coherence Theory of Consciousness.”)

In studying particle consciousness, we must not get distracted by their scale. In fact, (under quantum field theory) particles are excitations in a field that may be infinitely large. Every particle has a corresponding lot. If a particle is considered a “unicellular life form,” then a lot of particles may be viewed as a “multicellular life form” – except that these “cells” go in and out of existence within the field. This begs the question – Is the biochemical cell the smallest unit of life? If not, a biological revolution, more important than the Copernican revolution regarding its impact on society, is around the corner.

Life at Extremely Large Scales

Life at all scales is probable – including at the planetary, stellar, galactic scales, and even the universe and multiverse. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have proposed the Gaia hypothesis. Jay Alfred has offered life at cosmic and global scales using the “plasma metaphysics” model, which believes that an extensive web of currents in space and on Earth exists, anatomically and physiologically similar to a neural network in the human brain. (See Are We Living in a Gigantic Brain? 2007) This web of currents in space not only looks like a neural network, but it also functions like one. We should not be surprised to see life engineered using an electromagnetic substrate. A biochemical cell’s membrane is now thought to act like a semiconductor.

Perhaps a thought experiment could be enlightening. Imagine yourself as a cell within your brain, carefully observing your environment with a nano-telescope. Would you consider your brain as being able to support consciousness? You would see neural cells alternately firing and resting, chemicals rushing to synapses, and the zapping of nasty electrical currents – not a very “habitable zone” for life or consciousness to exist – from your microscopic point of view. But we know better.

Energies

Could the plasma universe, with its network of currents, be a living, conscious entity? Was the quark-gluon plasma ball that inflated during the Big Bang a life form?

High Energy Biology – Life at High Energies and Temperatures

At high temperatures, molecules break up into atoms, and atoms break into a soup of sub-atomic particles called plasma. (Partially ionized gasses are also described as “plasma.”) Plasma life forms are likely to be the most common life form in the universe, given that plasma makes up more than 99% of our visible universe, which is almost everywhere ionized. This starkly contrasts with complex carbon-based life forms, which, according to the Rare Earth hypothesis proposed by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, would be rare in the universe due to several factors – including the need for an acceptable range of temperatures to survive.

Plasma is an ideal substrate for life at high temperatures. Plasma life forms would adapt to environments considered hostile to carbon-based life forms. It is possible that plasma life forms were already present in the gas and materials that formed the Earth 4.6 billion years ago. Carbon-based biomolecular life forms only appeared 1 billion years later. Tsytovich and other scientists (including Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu, discussed below) have proposed that plasma life forms spurred the development of organic carbon-based life on Earth.

In 2003, physicists Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu of Cuza University, Romania, described in their research paper Minimal Cell System Created in Laboratory by Self-Organization (published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, volume 18, page 335) how they created plasma spheres in the laboratory that can grow, replicate and communicate – fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. The physicists “grew” spheres from a few micrometers up to three centimeters in diameter. They are convinced that these plasma spheres offer a radically new explanation of how life began and proposed that they were precursors to biological evolution. Like bacteria, Lozneanu plasma spheres can reproduce by replicating, are generally considered “immortal,” and do not undergo “apoptosis” or programmed cell death.

How DNA originated is still a mystery in mainstream biology. An international scientific team has discovered that in the gravity-free space environment, particles in plasma will beat together to form string-like filaments, which will twist into helical strands resembling DNA electrically charged and attracted to each other. Using a computer model of molecular dynamics, V N Tsytovich and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Science showed (in their paper entitled From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures towards Inorganic Living Matter, published in the New Journal of Physics in August 2007) that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electric charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce, and they evolve.”

Past studies, subject to Earth’s gravity, have shown that if enough particles are injected into a low-temperature plasma, they will spontaneously organize into crystal-like structures or “plasma crystals.” Jay Alfred has characterized “subtle bodies” as plasma crystals in his 2006 book Our Invisible Bodies. He has written extensively about the anatomy and physiology of these bioplasma bodies, generating a new field of research called “plasma metaphysics.”

According to plasma metaphysics (see Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 2006), plasma is subject to self-organization through thermodynamics and electrodynamics. Plasma life forms have various mechanisms for the absorption and distribution of energy – in other words, a metabolic system. These include vortexes (equivalent to orifices in common biological systems) and filamentary currents (equivalent to tubes and circulatory systems in common biological systems), structured by magnetic fields and driven by electric fields. Information is stored in the nucleus of the bioplasma body as compressed waveforms (using Fourier transforms) and used for replication.

Plasma life forms are also enclosed in a membrane (like the membrane of a biological cell) and selectively admit charged particles (just like the semi-permeable membranes of common biological systems that acknowledge ions, i.e., charged particles, into the cell). These structures (vortexes, filaments, membranes, and the nucleus) have been described in the metaphysical and even religious literature more than 2,000 years old in connection with what is commonly called “subtle bodies.” With a membrane that separates the body from the environment, metabolic, and information systems, these subtle bodies are, in fact, plasma life forms.

How to Live Within Your Means

“Always live inside your approach: If you’re making it an addiction to live within your means each day, you’re much less likely to go into client debt when gas or meal charges increase and more likely to regulate your spending in other areas to compensate. Debt begets extra debt while you can’t pay it off right away – if you think fuel charges are high, wait until you’re paying 29.99% annual percentage price (APR) on them.

To take this precept to the next degree, when you have a partner and a two-profit family, see how close you may get to residing off the simplest one partner’s profits. Inappropriate times, this tactic will help you save amazing amounts of money – how speedy ought it to help you repay your mortgage, or how much in advance could you retire if you had an additional $40,000 a year to keep? In awful instances, if one partner gets laid off, you may be OK because you’ll already be used to living on one income. Your savings behavior will be forestalled briefly. However, your daily spending can remain ordinary.”

A manner of dwelling of individuals, households (households), and societies, which they manifest in handling their bodily, mental, social, and financial environments on a day-to-day foundation. Lifestyle is expressed in each work and enjoyment behavior pattern and (on a person’s foundation) in activities, attitudes, pursuits, reviews, values, and allocation of profits. It also reflects human beings’ self-photograph or self-idea, how they see themselves and accept as true how they are seen with the aid of others. Lifestyle is a composite of motivations, needs, and wishes and is prompted by lifestyle, family, reference groups, and social class.

Inter-Substrate (Plasma-Carbon) Symbiogenesis

Biologists are beginning to realize that cooperation is just as important as competition in evolving life’s diversity and resilience. Every cell in the human body contains a mitochondrion thought to be a bacterial cell that invaded an early eukaryote. Instead of being digested, both cells tolerated each other and began to live together – a merger that provided synergies. This is a startling example of symbiogenesis. But then, every multicellular animal or plant is also an obvious example of cooperation rather than competition. More than 1,000 trillion cells live peacefully and cooperate in your body, together with 500 to 100,000 species of bacteria. There are about ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the human body. Does symbiosis extend further?

There is anecdotal evidence that plasma life forms formed symbiotic relationships with the abundant carbon-based life forms on Earth – particularly with hominids. Unlike other known species of animals, the unique brains of hominids allowed them to activate the higher energy bioplasma bodies that co-evolved with the physical-biochemical body without necessarily having any conscious awareness that they were accessing a different cognitive system. Relationships developed between the lower energy carbon-based bodies and the higher energy bioplasma bodies, which were perhaps sustained for several millions of years up to the present. This allowed the higher-energy bioplasma bodies to evolve uniquely on Earth.

Conclusion

Do we need to expand the definition of life? When and how does a life form become conscious of itself? Is consciousness a fundamental attribute of physical matter like spin, mass, and charge, which physicists themselves do not quite understand? Is the cell (as defined in mainstream biology) the smallest unit of life? Are the subtle bodies described in the metaphysical literature plasma life forms?

The new science of astrobiology at NASA appears to be limping along in its understanding of life in the Unive, probably because it is saddled with the heavyweight of fixations generated from biology largely based on chemistry rather than the whole universe physics.

Sandy Ryan
Writer. Music advocate. Devoted bacon trailblazer. Hardcore web fanatic. Travel junkie. Avid creator. Thinker. Skateboarder, coffee addict, record lover, reclaimed wood collector and RGD member. Producing at the junction of minimalism and mathematics to craft delightful brand experiences. I'm a designer and this is my work.