Life is a fractal

A magazine sitting on my desk asks "are we organisms or living ecosystems?"

An interesting perspective. If bacteria could reason, would they call our guts, our tissues, our bloodstream different ecosystems? The bloodstream is harsh, but an enterprising Staphylococcus can sometimes make it (at least until the Penicillium flood in)! The intestine is unfriendly to some, but Lactobacillus finds a comfortable, sustainable niche there.

The inverse view has also been posed: that the Earth is an organism. Each of us humans, each duck I see here on campus, each tree out the window, is like a cell in Earth's living body. In that case, is humanity - as a Filter song suggests - a cancer? It's quite an analogy.

And suppose there are other planets with life. Suppose we might someday meet the creatures that inhabit them (for now, I don't care how). Then we'd have interactions, and the Earth could be a cell in yet another living system. Organisms, ecosystems - it's only a matter of scale.

If you think about that, then just the fact that we here are alive - even if we could not see the other life around us, even though we cannot confirm any life past our own world - means that the universe is alive. And that is a joyful thought.