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I've gotten into the habit of pulling small berries off the branches of overhanging trees while I walk my dog and throwing them onto random lawns. A tiny part of me hopes that one of these berries grow into a big, healthy tree in the middle of the swaths of grass, but I know its for naught. Regardless, I was walking my dog today and continued picking berries and throwing them about, when something occurred to me. We're surrounded by so many damn cells.
It sounds very dumb, I know. But hear me out. Yes, it's obvious that we're surrounded by living things and these living things have cells and chromosomes, but it's wild to me that that's even the case!
I studied biotechnology in undergrad and learned the ins-and-outs of genetics. I've definitely forgotten most of the details, but the one thing that will stick with me forever is how complicated it all is. The number of things that have to go RIGHT in order for a cell to even create a single protein is mind-boggling. Yet, there the cell goes, doing it with extreme accuracy.
And what kind of blew my mind today, was that all these extremely complicated, intricate, and fantastical operations are happening all around and inside us all the time and in a trillion different ways. The berry I picked from the tree is full of cells, attached to a branch that's full of cells, in the dirt that's full of bacteria that are cells, and they're all full of their own codes, doing their own thing extremely accurately.
I often find myself thinking about computers and tech overall, and from time-to-time I remind myself to take a step back and think about how many pieces of metal and plastic, how many lines of code, how many hours of labour, went into making this one machine. And it really is astonishing that we humans are able to create these machines as effectively as we do.
But then I go back to the cell. That tiny berry I held in my hand was one of thousands, growing on a tree of thousands, and so on and so on. And a single cell in that single berry is doing things we're still trying to learn and understand.
I just thought I'd share this moment I had with. I love being out in nature, surrounded by trillions upon trillions of microscopic computers, walking alongside my lovable, four-legged bundle of cells. Life is astonishing, and the fact that any of it exists at all is truly magical.