In horrifying but not unsurprising ecological news, Microplastics found in 3/4 fish in Southern NZ...
However, in better news:
Thoughts: - conceptual and real material connections (water)
- life origins; pollination-like; a spark...
- Prometheus film, plot around interstellar life
- themes of colonisation and pioneer species in biology
- connection to the lichen research and projects on Rangitoto
- interconnection, ecology (beyond Earth, beyond the idea of "living" things, inclusion of conduits/material/vessels...)
I think there's a slight danger in looking elsewhere for salvation, resources, whatever it may be to escape or avoid the reality of the damage that modern industrial society has done to this planet - nature has its own complex technology that has evolved over hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years; that's not something we as a species could ever replace. It's a concern I hold around space exploration and the idea that technology can save us from the issues of technology, or the idea of places, land, as a resource/object rather than something part of a network...
I don't think this news falls into that category though. If anything, I think it's a reminder of just how vast and interconnected ecology is. Water has always been associated with life, and this is part of that continuing narrative, just from a now completely different place of origin... What would that potentially mean about the presence of water on Mars and on Earth's moon, or other on planetary bodies? Was it also deposited there, carried by asteroids, or did it form on its own accord? Was it ever a place for life there?
Like the pohutukawa tree on my front lawn, Earth is both part of an environment and a place for many environments in itself; environments within environments... Mesh.
Did life evolve on Earth from the primordial slime, or was it delivered on the natural spaceships we know as comets, asteroids and meteorites? It’s easy to think of the rest of the solar system as sterile compared to the vibrancy of Earth with its blue oceans and virulent greenery, but every new mission beyond our terrarium in the last decade has shown that water is far more abundant than we thought.
And where there is water, there is the potential for life, particularly if we also find complex “prebiotic” molecules. Jaxa targeted Ryugu because it is rich in such carbonaceous compounds and can tell us something about their distribution.
Planetary Protection guidelines set conditions on missions to places where there might be life to avoid contaminating or killing potential neighbours hiding in subterranean or subglacial oceans. Perhaps we shouldn’t see ourselves as separate from this process, but part of it.
“Panspermia” is the theory that life is everywhere. Future space archaeologists or astrobiologists may look at discarded human artefacts in the solar system as interplanetary travellers distributing terrestrial materials, both living and non-living, in the same way as meteorites.
Humans might be the agents of non-human life colonising ecological niches on other worlds, our own grand plans of multiplanetary occupation abandoned as our flimsy bodies prove far less adaptable than those more seasoned space travellers, the microbes.
How very very cool :)
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