Nature: Always Putting Us In Our Place

        Do you know what constantly amazes me, even more than the concept that I can load a map of anywhere in the world on my phone or the idea that I can turn a cog on a lump of metal, and hot clean water comes out? It's the idea that it was just over 60 years between the first heavier-than-air flight, and mankind landing on none other than the Moon! That's a colossally short space of time, considering that it was about 1,800 years between men building London and men thinking "I should really get started on one of them new-fangled sewer systems, what with all the death and all". But sewer systems are easy to build. Landing men on the Moon wasn't even something you could class as "difficult", it was immensely hard, with even less room for error than a man's response to the statement "I'm fine". To give you some idea as to how hard it was, it would be like working out the precise speed, trajectory, timing and conditions to successfully throw a frisbee from one end of a football field to the other, while hitting an exact spot on a moving target, and then someone at the other end throwing it back to another exact spot on a moving target. While strapped to explosive fuel. During a hurricane. At night. And if you make the slightest error at any point in the proceedings, people will die a long, drawn out fiery/vacuum death and the entire frisbee-throwing programme will be scrapped forever. All that, just over 60 years after a rickety airplane flew a distance less than the wingspan of a 747.


        Now I won't go on about the moon landings for too long, mostly because this is when the conspiracy nuts turn up and provide no evidence whatsoever that it was all make-believe, and I cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. I don't have to use the superlative to be truly amazed with what humans have achieved, however. There's the Internet, without which you'd have to find another way to entertain yourself right now instead of reading the scrawling of someone in England on a luke-warm Thursday. The fact that we can record sounds in digital-form truly makes my brain melt, and the idea that we can take a HD photograph of whatever we want on something that covers as a telephone (again, crazy) and a mini-computer is the sort of thing that if you brought someone here from the 1400s, he would literally explode in amazement! By the simple process of learning how to cook food, meaning we could take in the huge amounts of energy it takes to not be just another primitive ape, we have learned how to harness the power of nature to do the incredible. We can also walk on two feet, which gives us one-up over dogs for sheer reaching-the-top-shelf skills. We have opposable thumbs, meaning that we can grip a TV remote in a way that makes horses look on with envy.

        There's one slight problem with all this evolved awesomeness, and it goes with a saying that's often used in mechanics: the more parts you have, the more things there are to go wrong. Now, it stands to reason that, somehow, if you slipped into a vat of water that so happened to be boiling, you'd come down with an advanced case of death. In fact, most life gets pretty lifeless when you boil it in water. So, you'd imagine my surprise to discover that there are some creatures that see a kettle as an unnecessarily deep Jacuzzi. 100c is nothing, so after what I presume to be a game of one-upmanship gone too far, there are some creatures that have been found in boiling lakes of.... are you ready...... asphalt! Yes, that horrid black stuff that covers your driveway and doesn't start bubbling until it hits 525c and gives off more toxic fumes than a stag party on a curry night harbours life! Not even a solitary bacterium holding its breath, but 10 million organisms per gram.

        Just when you thought that was awesome, I could blow you further away by introducing other show-off species, such as the ants that have figured out farming and now "milk" aphids, or the crows that use smoke to get lice off their backs, but they all look like that one kid in class who had a thing for eating glue when you compare them with the cutely named "Water Bear". This little critter sits at a Ronnie Corbett-esque 0.05mm tall, yet laughs at pretty much any attempt to kill him. Boiling him is probably like a massage, so you try and freeze him. Also, because you don't want to risk it, you chill him to almost absolute zero (-273c) and he walks out like nothing happened! He can go without water for, not a week, not a year, but nearly a decade! He's as merry sitting 6,000m up in the Himalayas as he is swimming 4,000m under the ocean. Hell, he's still goading you when he's exposed to pressures six times greater than that in the deepest part of the ocean! So, that leaves you with the one option that will surely kill everything! Outer space!

        Humans could survive for, at most, a couple of minutes in space without protection before irreparable damage occurs, and no, you won't go "pop". So how long can you leave Mr Water Bear out there in the cold, the heavy radiation and the lack of any air or pressure for? Ten minutes? An hour? A day? Well, it turns out that they're still laughing at us soft, squigy and vulnerable humans after a week and a half of being directly exposed to the harshness of space! I imagined at this point, the scientists invited them back in, gave them a beer and agreed enough was enough.

        So it turns out that, despite how amazingly clever we are to have gone to the Moon, with all our opposable thumbs and our brains and our Maths, we still couldn't beat most of the conditions a lot of "simpler" critters see as a relaxing break. As amazing an achievement things like computers are, we aren't the best at everything. We can't even fly without the aid of an engine and an over-priced ticket! But then again, they'll never overcome their own physical limitations, however incredible they are. We have, and then some!

        And that is what makes us so amazing! Nature says "that's enough" and we simply say "challenge accepted".

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