Thursday, October 18, 2012

musings on life

Very sick today. It seems I'm very allergic to the neighbor's cat. Almost like a mild flu, or a nasty hangover, today was all about getting well. Tea, as it turns out, makes me sick to my stomach when in  the throes of an attack like this. But, coffee makes me feel much better.

Strange how the body works.

The planet is covered in life. All life needs to generate some kind of caloric conversion to stay alive. The furnace of life needs fuel. Plants convert sunshine, air, water, and minerals into sugars via photosynthesis. Nearly, completely alien to the needs of the animal kingdom.

What if...

I LOVE those words. "What if..." is the jumping off point for all art. What if I could represent this person's visage with these oil paints? What if I could convey, by written words, the struggles of life in my home town, decades ago. What if I arrange these musical notes in this order?

What if we find life on other planets that satisfy their 'caloric' needs in a completely unthought of way? Well, the universe offers light, solids, liquids, gases, and combinations of those basics as converted by some other form of life. But...

What if... we find a form of life that meets its caloric needs through the transition of methane from liquid to gaseous states? It would probably be a very small, cow-like grazer, living on a place like Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. I can imagine such an animal being on a bacterial scale. And, it might not use  DNA at all! That would be a discovery that would set the world on its end.

Somebody get the Cassini people on the phone.

Kurt

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