DINOSAURS, BACTERIA, LIFE! Ramblings with Ron Trafford and Paul R Borresen

Of the many things I like doing, I find that rambling can be one of the most relaxing. I enjoy a good ramble, so does P.B., his rambling tends to be confined to the cerebral plane, whereas, I find that the physical kind complements the more intellectual kind favoured by P.B.(I WALKED TO THE END OF THE GARDEN YESTERDAY, HAD TO SIT DOWN FOR A WHILE, CAROLE CALLED AN AMBULANCE AND THEY GAVE ME A LIFT BACK TO THE FRONT DOOR.)
Physical rambling can however be bloody cold, wet and uncomfortable. Such was the case this weekend, all the ancient gods of foul weather had gathered for their annual reunion and piss up, and were currently pissing over the parapets of Asgaard, using me for target practice. At times like these one can either dwell on the situation, or one can escape into a fantasy world. You know what its like, you're on your eighth non-lockout squat, you have twelve more to do, do you count the number left? do you fixate on the pain numbing your quads?, or do you take your mind elsewhere? Personally, I'm a coward, I scuttle off to my own little dream world, filled with flowers and birds, where everyone is nice to each other, a place from which I am invariable called back to reality (whatever that is) by some meathead yelling "twenty one, keep going, don't give up now you scrawny person you",
Anyway, back to the rambling, there I was in the Peak District receiving more than my fair share of attention from a bunch of drunken deities I don't even believe in when a shaft of sunlight illuminated the crest of a hill in front of me, for some reason, the gentle sloping away of the hill in either direction reminded me of the B.B.C.s Walking With Dinosaurs. What a brilliant programme, what a relief from all the game shows, the chat shows, the soaps, the fly on the wall documentaries, and the bloody awful dating programmes. Immense beasts that ruled the world for one hundred and fifty million years, bought back to life, and into your living rooms by the marvels of modern technology. A programme bought to life by enthusiasts, people who wanted to do something different, people with a vision, not the staid balance sheet watching accountant types that rule our lives, but people who genuinely believe that there must be people like themselves who want to be entertained, awed and educated, not served up the same tried and true, cheap pap so beloved of the accountants. Thank God for the Beeb, and thank God for everyone who dares to think for themselves and stick two fingers up to the established order. Of course the suits will now claim that the idea was all theirs, award themselves a huge bonus, and stick the licence fee up; bastards.
Amazing creatures dinosaurs, the huge plant eaters, really nothing more than huge chemical processing plants, their immense size needed to digest the plant material they constantly ate, their huge bellies filled with bacteria, vast methane factories, a valley full of dinosaurs must have reverberated to a whole barrage of constantly farting herbivores. I suspect that the true sound of the Jurassic was not the roar of the meat eaters, but the huge flatulent blast of the plant eaters. Even during the age of the dinosaurs, the monstrous plant eaters realised a protein strategy. There is no such thing as good proteins or bad proteins, as long as you get the protein which is right for your species. The herbivores of course ate constantly and were huge. The carnivores adopted a different strategy, they ate irregularly, but they ate the proteins they needed in a more concentrated form, no need to carry the huge processing vats round inside them, they let the herbivores process the source material, the herbivores micro filtrated the plant material, ion exchanged the amino acids and build the immense bulk they needed to carry themselves about. The carnivores then took what they needed in the handy meal size packets wandering around the prehistoric landscape. Some of the meal size packets admittedly were very large, too much for a single carnivore, so some species of carnivore developed a strategy of cooperation. Good lord! Cooperating dinosaurs, whatever next. My favourite dinosaur is the wonderfully named Micropachycephalosaurus., quite literally, the small, thick headed dinosaur, these dinosaurs did not die out, they merely evolved into....., but you don't want to hear about my pet hates and prejudice, besides which some accountants may read this.
As I said, amazing creatures dinosaurs, kings and queens of creation for one hundred and fifty million years, the plant eaters ate the plants, and the meat eaters ate the plant eaters. Not quite; the real heroes of the age of dinosaurs were the bacteria, the plant eaters were just somewhere warm and stable for uncountable grillions of bacteria to live. Without the bacteria, there would be no one to process the plant material so that it could be made into dinosaurs. It is a strange fact that almost as soon as the Earth cooled, bacteria appeared. There is also some evidence that bacteria evolved on Mars as well. It took another two billion years for multi-cellular life to appear on this planet. Amazing really, bacteria have been around three times as long as even the lowliest sponges and worms. Contrary to what we like to believe, human kind is not the most successful organism on the planet, we just have better P.R. and bigger egos. That's right, bacteria are undoubtedly the most successful life forms on Earth, there are more bacteria in your gut, than there are human beings currently alive on the planet. The little buggers inhabit every habitat available, and that includes hot springs, Antarctica, the upper reaches of the atmosphere and of course you and me. Amazingly (do I overuse that word?) the little buggers love Ravager 5, and how do I know? Just ask my wife about the devastating effect 200 grams a day can have on the digestive system. Is this article becoming flatulence obsessed? Anyway, if a creature that has been around for 3.2 billion years who am I to argue? Even stranger is the recent realisation by scientists, that in a stable environment, such as a gut, or a drain, bacteria cooperate. In fact they prefer to cooperate, they only follow their lives as individuals when times are hard, the rest of the time, they live in cooperating communities known as 'slime moulds'. Perhaps we could learn something from the bacteria.
The Earth has been around, or so we are told for about 3.5 billion years. Bacteria, and there is much evidence to support it have been around for about 3.2 billion years, so almost (in geological terms) as soon as the Earth had cooled sufficiently, bacteria appeared, they may also have appeared on Mars. We multi-cellular types have only been around for about three quarters of a billion years. Could it be that life is ubiquitous, not to say inevitable, but making the leap to fully integrated multi-cellular life forms is more difficult, not to say jolly rare?
trange the thoughts that go through ones head when separated from ones fellow beings, and one is being pissed on. Must be a bit like sensory deprivation, the difference being that your calves don't get a good work out in an isolation chamber. Perhaps we all need some time in the wilderness, perhaps it concentrates the mind on the really big issues like how do I get bigger calves? or where did I lose the map?
Panspermia is a good word, so is dribbly, sort of rolls off the tongue, but that is beside the point. Panspermia is a theory first thought up 1908, by the Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius who suggested in his Panspermia theory that life reached Earth by means of spores from outer space. At first there were two camps, there was Svante with the theory that the building blocks of life 'seeded' the Earth from outer space, and then there was everyone else. "Old Svante's lost it." They would say tapping the side of their heads. Slowly this evolved into "Svante has some interesting ideas, but there is no proof to support them", which as we all know then evolves into "I've always maintained that Svante's ideas are the only ones that fully support the facts".
When Arrhenius first propounded the theory of panspermia, there was indeed no proof to support it, nowadays, literally hundreds of different organic molecules have been found in interstellar space, and the idea although by no means proven is treated seriously. His original idea was one of those amazing leaps of imagination that only the favoured few are capable of, and even fewer have the courage to voice. Over the years the evidence has mounted, and the theory has even had some unexpected explanatory power of its own. A great biochemical mystery has always been the handedness of the molecules of life. Put simply, if you were to cook up a vat of amino acids out of their raw materials, you would find that although all the molecules has the same chemistry, they would be mixed half left handed and half right handed molecules, they are the same except that one is the mirror image of the other. In nature, however all molecules are the left handed form, from a purely chemical point of view, one would expect a symmetry between left and right, what accounts for this asymmetry? Well, astro-chemists have recently discovered that the polarising light from stars in outer space show a slight preference for breaking the bonds in right handed chemicals, resulting in an asymmetry, with a predominance of left handed molecules.
Phew! So we are all children of the stars. We are any way. Another very powerful theory, first propounded by Arthur Eddington in 1930 and supported by the observation of among others Hubble is that of the big bang theory. The theory that the universe was born in an instant, and that all the building blocks for everything were spewed out in a colossal 'explosion' fifteen billion years ago. These particles formed the first atoms, those of hydrogen and its isotopes. Under the influence of gravity, great balls of hydrogen coalesced into stars, which under immense pressure ignited burning their fuel (hydrogen) and converting it into heavier elements. These first generation stars then exploded scattering the new heavier atoms, which in turn became the current generation of stars and planets. Every atom in your body is the product of the big bang, and has been forged in the heart of stars billions of years ago. There is a slight problem, all theories suggest, and all experiments confirm that matter and anti matter should have formed in equal amounts.
Amazing. Why the asymmetry, Perhaps I should get out and meet more people.

Paul Borreson