Everybody’s looking for a miracle. Everybody’s looking for the extraordinary. Something to take them out of the seemingly endless drudgery of our everyday, ordinary lives. That’s one reason for the hold UFOs and aliens have on our imaginations. But one of sciences great virtues is it shows us miracles right under our noses.
Today’s case in point is the simple alien weirdness inside of every leaf. Yes, leaves… holy crap!
Billions of years ago, life made a startling discovery. It could gain the energy it needed to stay alive from sunlight alone. This process of photosynthesis was invented early in Earth’s history by single celled critters, but the first version of it kind of sucked. It required the presence of iron, floating in the oceans, to turn a captured light particle (a photon) into the basic fuel of life, a sugar molecule. Then, a half billion or so years later, other microbes stumbled onto a new version of photosynthesis, one that used water molecules rather than iron atoms, in the chemical dance that transformed sunlight into sugar. Since water was easy to come by life exploded across the planet leading, eventually, to the dense biosphere we live in (and depend on) today.
As time and evolution progressed, the biomolecular shenanigans of photosynthesis got wrapped into ever more complex forms leading finally to plants with… you know… leaves.
Leaves…. Holy crap.
Complex leaves like the ones we’re familiar with, didn’t show up on Earth until about 350 million years ago. That’s more than 3 billion years after photosynthesis. If you are looking for a miracle you need only consider the wild, complex coordinated dance of nano-machines inside of every leaf. That’s exactly what the 2-minute video below can do for you.
The video will introduce to the complex insanity of Thylakoids, the Golgi Apparatus and the rotating ATP Synthase . They show us that inside every leaf is an alien zoo of weirdness, a chorus of strange molecular incantations being sung over and over thousands to millions of times a second.
This is life. This is what you are part of. Similar but different weirdness is being danced inside all your zillions of cells as you read this.
You want a world of miracles? It’s all around you waiting for you to notice it, waiting for you to see that you are surrounded by grace.
PS. Got thoughts about life’s weirdness? Please leave comment on the website version of the post or email me at [email protected]
— Adam Frank 🚀
