Extremophiles

Extremophiles are real, and absolutely astounding.  Read about them, and be amazed...

Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on Level 104 of the Mponeng Mine near Johannesburg. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323º Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for one hundred millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Stadtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via DNA. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hair spray.

It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. It thrives in the acidic runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc. It abides in the shallows of the Dead Sea. It breathes methane. It can withstand temperatures of 333º K, hot enough to melt phosphorus. It resides in a fumarole of scalding seawater, deep in the bathyal fathoms of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It can endure pressures equivalent to sixty-five tons of force per square inch, nine times greater than the pressure at the nadir of the ocean and one tenth of the pressure required to crush graphite into diamond. It lives in the muck at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It is ideally adapted to devour the wreck of the RMS Titanic. It does not die while suffering immolation in the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin. It eats jet fuel.

It feeds on nylon byproducts. It feeds on stainless steel. It inhabits a dormant volcano in the xeric waste of the Atacama Desert, where the rain falls only once per century. It blooms in a barren salina ten times saltier than the sea. It breathes hydrogen. It resides in micropores of superdense granite, crushed down 3,500 meters below the bedrock of the earth. It can withstand temperatures of 343º K, hotter than the flash point of aerosolized kerosene. It is adapted to devour the rubber tubing in the engines of the F-22 Raptor. It does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the space shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. It does not die among the tornadoes of hellfire raging unchecked in the oil fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War. It gorges on plumes of petroleum venting from the wellhead of the Deepwater Horizon.

It eats arsenic. It eats uranium. It resides inside the core of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It thrives in hydrochloric acid. It can withstand temperatures of 373º K, hot enough to boil the water in its own cells. It is ideally adapted to dwell inside any steel drums of radioactive waste now entombed at the Yucca Mountain Repository. It lives in the stratosphere. It can survive exposure to the vacuum of outer space. It can survive the effects of g-forces more than two thousand times greater than the surface gravity of the earth. It is the only known organism capable of exceeding the speed of sound. It can, in fact, repair damage to its DNA. It never evolves.

It devours plutonium. It can endure long-term exposure to acids that eat away at human flesh. It can withstand temperatures of 383º K, hotter than the polar zones on the planet Mercury. It can hibernate for five hundred millennia in the core of a snowflake deep beneath the permafrost of Siberia. It awaits discovery in the abyssal fathoms of Lake Vostok, four thousand meters below the ice of Antarctica. It survives direct immersion in liquid nitrogen. It survives one thousand times the dosage of gamma radiation that can kill a human being. It is ideally adapted to eat hot graphite in the ruins of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island. It resides on the surface of a heat shield in the clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is fossilized inside the Murchison meteorite. It does not die in the conflagration during the collapse of the World Trade Center. It does not die in the crucibles of Treblinka.

It resides in a soda lake, whose pH level equals the alkalinity of lye. It can withstand temperatures of 393º K, hot enough to melt sulfur. It can lie dormant for forty million years, hibernating inside the gut of a honeybee shrouded in a jewel of amber. It evades its predators by hiding in the firmware of the Intel Pentium III microchip. It propagates itself through the use of networked computers. It can pass itself off as a thought inside the human brain. It can survive direct blasts of cosmic rays. It is, in fact, the only known organism to survive being shot, point-blank, by the proton beam in the U-70 Synchrotron. It does not die in the incineration of Hiroshima. It does not die in the planetary firestorm after the impact of the Chicxulub meteor.

It survives. It resides inside the robot scoop of the Viking 1 lander during tests for perchlorates on Mars. It can live through exposure to supercooling temperatures at the brink of absolute zero. It can hibernate for 250 million years, living as a spore encased in a halite nodule found in the Carlsbad Caverns. It can withstand temperatures of 423º K, hotter than the nose cone of the Concorde in supersonic flight. It can endure multiple meteor impacts. It can endure multiple atomic attacks. It lives nowhere on earth, except in one petri dish of agar, locked in a fridge at a level 4 biocontainment facility. It is totally inhuman. It does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the moon. It awaits your experiments.

I've excerpted this text in toto from the June 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  I normally post only excerpts from my readings in order to drive TYWKIWDBI readers to the sources.  In this case I've embedded the full text from Harper's, but this is just an excerpt from an upcoming book by Christian Bok entitled The Xenotext: Book 2.  Bok is a poet (which some of you may have surmised from some repetitive patterns of the text above).  He is also the author of Eunoia, which I excerpted back in 2008; that book is unique in that each chapter is written using only one vowel.  When Bok's new book becomes available, I plan to read it.

It should be apparent to knowledgeable readers, but I'll clarify that the passages in the text refer to a multitude of different extremophiles, who inhabit an unimaginably vast range of microenvironments.

Posted for a member of my extended family - Dr. Doug Nelson, who has devoted his career to the study of extremophiles at UC Davis.

Humor scrapbook, part II

This is the second of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

 

Reposted from 2020

Counting asteroids

I'll never forget the moment Carl Sagan described the number of stars as being greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.  This video provides an equivalent perspective on the number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.  The successive zoom-outs are impressive, but especially the final image showing how little of the belt was sampled for the data.

Humor scrapbook, part I

Before there were blogs, there were scrapbooks.  Like many people in the pre-internet era, I saved clippings of interesting or humorous items in envelopes and folders and desk drawers, and eventually transferred them into "magnetic" photo albums.  Now I've reached the "downsizing" phase of my life, and have to decide what to do with the material.  I don't want to drag the albums around with me forever, but some of the material is too good to just throw in the dumpster.

So, I'm scanning the pages into TYWKIWDBI.  This is the first of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (and in any case, old "magnetic" photo albums don't lend themselves to the rearranging of paper content, which starts to shred when you try to remove or rearrange it.)

The text on all the types of "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Reposted from 2020 because we're even more in need of humor than we were five years ago.

Blogcation over

I was sorry to say goodbye to family and friends "up at the lake."  I was serenaded nightly by loons, so I hope I can find some way to embed a 30-second recording of them yodeling.  Not sure how to do that.

I need to recombobulate for a day or two, then will resume blogging after the weekend.

Blogcation

My cousin's place on Girl Lake, Longville, Minnesota.  The cabin is a legacy site, so the setback from the lake was grandfathered (nobody can build this close to the water nowadays).  

No blogging for two weeks - and no curation of comments.  Feel free to comment on old posts, but I won't review them for publication until I get back.

The "cosmic calendar" - depicted visually and verbally

This subject has been filmed before, including perhaps by Carl Sagan? but it's worth emphasizing.  Posting this now so that later I can add extended text from Orbit 13 of Orbital, which has I believe the best text description of the cosmic calendar.

Addendum:  I'll add the text description now so I can quit blogging for a couple weeks.  With apologies to the author/publisher - I really shouldn't excerpt so much, but here goes...

Too many people just can't recognize satire

Embedded above is a screencap from a post on X that I saw reposted on Facebook, where there were thousands of comments, the vast majority of which seriously argued that this is not a walkable community.  Others asked why you would walk miles to a gas station, and some suggested walking seven miles to a liquor store would be a good idea.  These must be the same people who become congressmen believing stories from The Onion.

Lots more similar posts from @bankertobuilder.

North Korean postage stamps created as instruments of propaganda

Rainbow airglow with visible gravity waves

The original image (at APOD of course) explains the phenomenon, and you can mouse over that image for additional information about the constellations and gravity waves.

Why "covered parking" might be designed like this

A fragmented but lucid discussion at the whatisit subreddit entry.

The disturbing childhood of R. Crumb

Those who came of age in the 1970s will remember Fritz the Cat and other cartoons by Robert Crumb.  Here is an abbreviated summary of his developmental years:

"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”

That passage from a review of the new book Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life in the current issue of Harper's.

Bike tunnel in Switzerland

Awesome.  Looking forward to comments from readers.

The ultimate legacy of our lives

"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...

What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."

Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.