Consider the final period of a sentence in a book. Or perhaps the final period of this same sentence. Try to expand it. Imagine that you make it giant. That you can peek inside.
In the following image you can see everything that would fit inside.
All the life around us
What is evident in this striking image is that life surrounds us, life is everywhere (whether we see it or not), and it also penetrates us, settles on our skin, helps us live, kills us.
Some even stink.. But bacteria generate repulsive odors not as part of their waste material, but as a means of preventing us from eating their food.
Body bacteria deserve special mention.. For the most part, these species are not pathogens, but rather dentritivores that feed on our bodies as they decompose. In fact, we leave a trail of life everywhere: our skin peels off as we walk around the house in a process called “peeling.”
50 million flakes a day
We all decompose at a rate of approximately 50 million flakes a day. Each flake of skin that swarms through the air contains, in turn, thousands of bacteria that live and feed on it, as explained Rob Dunn in his book Home alone?:
Riding those parachutes of skin, these bacteria fall off us like a constant snowfall. We also release bacteria through bodily fluids (saliva and so on) and in the feces that we deposit here and there. As a consequence, the places at home where we spend time bear marks of our presence. Every place analyzed in any room where we place the body contains microbial signs of the life lived.
In fact, where we spend more time on the body (regardless of the humidity and temperature of the place) it contains a greater number of mites. Matt Colloff, from the University of Glasgow, found in a study that he himself "left" 18 species of mites in total where it landed, especially on the mattress of your bed. Mostly there were dust mites and dust mite predators, living there in his mattress and feeding on his body as he shed.
All of this, in addition to disgust in the strict sense of the word, can also help us debate moral disgust, the arbitrary lines that we establish to consider a life worthy of being protected, ignored or even eliminated. The bioethical conflicts that arise regarding the abortion debate, for example, can be greatly enriched thanks to data like this, and others that you can see in the following video (not suitable for those who are very, very sure that they have the truth):
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The news
All this life is what fits at the end of the period of this sentence.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.