Phoenix
by Dale J. Sprague
Reveries
9.1997 On an ordinary day of an ordinary college week, I attended one of my routine biology classes. I was a biocybernetics major, and for that day, the study was an introduction to chlorophyll, an organelle of a plant cell that converts the sun's red and blue into chemical energy, the vital energy of the plant. And we also listened to an introduction to the mitochrondria organelles of animal cells. It was just an ordinary day, a routine class, but after those introductions and into the evening of that day, I thought about the extraterrestrials...how extraterrestrial they really are.
The lecture progressed to the description of how energy'carrying molecules become electron charged within the 'palisade palaces' of the chlorophyll organelles when a notion began to take ahold of me. I perked up from my catatonic receptive slump, and began to listen to the information in a different light. These microscopic cellular components were simply, in all of their intricate complexity, energy pumps for the plant body; actually, an energy transformer, converter, and pump..all in one tiny subcellular body. The professor didn't put it in those words, but even mitochrondria of an animal cell, which are far more complex than any kind of dynamo human'made..they too, function to energize each cell. Trillions and trillions of energized cells make up the body..all coordinated, regulated, standardized, self repairing, self replacing..trillions of cells maintaining countless chemical equilibriums and cycles..all responding to a highly stressed demanding environment..all powered by a precise mechanism far, far beyond the finest movement of a Swiss watch. And in another biology class..we are suppose to believe that these ultra microscopic enduring, specifically functioning precision motors are suppose to be the result of chance combination of some DNA with its neighbor!? Well, given enough time for chance variation within an un'interrupted environment...perhaps. But why should it?
Later, in the campus coffee shop, one of my colleagues sat beside me at my table. I probably looked a bit dazed and confused to him, and therefore fair game for the intellectual sport we enjoyed to add sugar to our coffee. He began commenting on the comparative function of chlorophyll and mitochrondria when I interrupted him as he was glazing over a fundamental notion I've come to believe. He was using the word "life" too liberally. I broke his stream and diverted it with "biology is not the study of life as the word implies. It is the study of the mechanisms, the machines through we live. The body, the study of life that you're talking about, is technology." He stared at me and at length responded, "I never thought of it that way."
Deep into the night of that day, I paused. I gathered a sense of human technology and compared it against the technology of life everywhere on Earth. It was like trying to compare the speed of light with the slow shuffling gate of my walk in the midst of a muffled evening, and I concluded that we, by comparison, are just learning the alphabet. Biofeedback, given enough environmental stress that one or many can survive, influences genetic variation more than we know.
And today, we are making great effort a'trying to reachout into the far reaches of space and communicate to whomever is out there. Anyone with equal station with us would be as handicapped as us in making contact. Therefore, the Drake equation used to guesstulate that millions of Earths like our own are in our own galaxy, while tantalizing, may be of little use. And if there is anyone more advanced, they seem reluctant to communicate or are as handicapped as we in communication. Rather, the notion that gripped me seemed more plausible, and at last most desirable..that we are already in touch with a very advanced technology, the technology through which we live, love, and grow. And like the evolution of the body, the evolution of the consciousness that inhabits it seems also apparent.
We are intimately in their midst. It seems that all one needs to do is reachout with one's own innate resources to make contact with..they who engineer the technology we inherit from generation to generation, who must be among the most advanced aliens of them all. Surely, somewhere in this advanced technology we use, are the mechanisms available to make first contact.
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