(re) Birth

    Life, it is said, is something most of us take for granted.  Witnessing a loved one or a pet fade out from this world of ours is inevitable even as we send away the thought that this will also happen to us.  But such is the circle of life, with death being as important to the cycle as life itself; as I grow older I seem to appreciate more the native American view of life being circular vs. the view of most secular religions which tend to view life as linear (as a caveat, I actually know very little about any religion other than just the highlights).  But now comes a new thought about life and one which comes from of all places, scientists delving into space research.  This came about as I once again fell prey to one of my odd pleasures, that of reading the opening comments of an editor.  Be it a book or a magazine, I am always captured by these "forwards" and "introductions," tomes often presented at the beginning of non-fictional material (rarely, if ever, in fiction) and generally skipped over by most readers.  For most people it is often the cover page or the back "reviews" page that initially draws one's curiosity and causes you to pause and pick up the book or magazine.  A quick scan through the pages, a glance at the inside article or the style of writing and you find yourself either hooked or disappointed.  But for me, those opening statements from editors and others are fascinating.  True, the writers and researchers have to do most of the material in the magazine, as do the authors of their books; but it is the editor or the person chosen to write the opening summary that is charged with getting you to probe further, to explore an article that you might not have thought to read otherwise or to plant a thought in your head about another aspect of the author's world.  And it was this thought that came from Becky Lang, the editor of Discover magazine (you can read a sample of her openings in the addendum); the subject in this instance was...fertility.

    As it turns out, despite all the many quests to both reach and colonize Mars, and the plethora of films and series that make space travel appear so easy in the future (light speed, warp speed and all that), we may find that once those colonial settlers grow old that there will be nobody to replace them, at least no children that were conceived and born there.  Getting pregnant, much less giving birth, in space is looking more and more as if it will be the main obstacle to spreading life beyond this planet.  Here's a quick excerpt from the piece in Discover (the link takes you to an expanded explanation but the full article is here): Beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, Martian residents will be pelted with dangerous, high-energy radiation.  It blazes from our sun during fiery solar flares, and is also thought to blast from distant supernova explosions.  These cosmic rays are made up of atomic nuclei (protons and neutrons) and electrons, which get knocked out of the atoms as they fly through space at nearly the speed of light.  After the electrons are gone, the remaining particles become ionized, ready to transfer energy to nearby objects.  This powerful radiation can penetrate a spacecraft or an astronaut’s body without pause.  When it comes in contact with humans, the rays can wipe out the electrons in their cells.  This bombardment is known to damage the structure of DNA and cause cells to mutate or die off altogether, increasing astronauts’ risk of disease.   Add the lack of or at least the presence of limited gravity and human procreation might be difficult (sperm in a weightless atmosphere might never reach an egg to fertilize).  The loss of muscle tissue as well as detached retinas in the eyes of astronauts are already proving difficult for engineers to overcome.  Said Konrad Szocik in the piece, he being an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Information Technology and Management in Poland, “It is possible that particular, individual interests and benefits will be totally subordinated to the benefits of the group.  It may be seen as problematic in such areas like individual freedom and personal decisions, but also in sexual and reproductive life — something that goes against ethical standards and moral intuitions of the West.” ...mission planners shouldn’t rule out things like gene editing, genetic pre-selection of sexual partners and a structured reproduction policy — ideas that qualify as eugenics on Earth.  Even with these precautions, of course, babies could still be born with disabilities and, with very limited resources, a Martian society might not be able to care for them.  (On a side note, if you think that the human body gets beat up by space, imagine something even larger such as the International Space Station; NASA says that the materials and structures of the ISS were never meant for an extended life and quite likely --perhaps as soon as a few years-- the ISS will be taken out of orbit and sent to its own fiery destruction as it re-enters our atmosphere)

    Perhaps the larger issue would be the question of why we so wish to leave this planet.  Are we expanding our knowledge and our quest for exploration, or are we attempting to further expand our species once our home planet is too populated or its resources have been mined out or polluted?  The cost of going to Mars or the moon (again) might prove to be little more than the leaders of countries involving themselves in another quest to be "first" (highlighted by the last year's First Man), perhaps at the cost of pushing out other societal issues here on Earth.  Could that money be better spent taking care of our home planet?  This is an age-old question but one which can be viewed in another way, one even closer to ourselves...are we willing to take care of our own bodies?

   We gobble down microplastics* and junk food but at what cost?  A recent poll by Discover among its generally science-oriented readers asked "Do you support GMO [Genetically Modified Organisms] labeling requirements for food?" and the response was overwhelmingly...NO (67% vs. 33%).  Have genetic modifications become so common that we are no longer caring?  It is difficult  for me to discover that organic cotton is worse on our environment than the more common GMO/pesticide cotton used commercially; and the case is much the same with drinking almond milk.  What???  Said another piece in a Discover blog on a sustainability report from Denmark: The report analyzed how many times you’d need to use each type of bag to equal the environmental impact of a plastic one.  Paper bags, and plastic-based reusable totes, required between 35 and 85 re-uses.  A cotton tote, though, had to be used 7,100 times to make up for the resources that went into it.  Organic cotton?  20,000 times.  If you used your organic cotton bag twice a week for the rest of your life, it’d be worth it after 192 years.  Added the writer: ...there are things that are almost never recyclable that tend to make their way into bins, too.  Common offenders are disposable paper cups, like the ones you might get to-go from a coffee shop.  The plastic-based lining that makes them liquid-proof is too hard to separate from the paper.  Other offenders are paper towels, Styrofoam, glass from things like windows or mirrors, plastic bags (more on that in a sec), greasy pizza boxes and really anything that’s covered in food (I’m looking at you, empty peanut butter jar.)  But our bodies?  As adaptable and malleable as they are, we do tend to test and tax them to the limit (even sending them out to space or as one could add, for heaven's sake).

    So I jump back to Sandeep Jauhar's book on the heart (more excerpts appeared in the last post), a bit scientific in wording but dazzling in understanding yet another thing we might be taking for granted, our life-sustaining engine, our heart: ...physiologists knew that nearly every one of the three billion heartbeats that occur during a typical human lifetime begins with the spontaneous activation of cells in a region high up in the right atrium called the sinoatrial node, the heart's natural pacemaker.  Through the flow of charged ions, the voltage of these cells periodically arrives at a threshold; this happens about once a second in a normal person at rest.  That induces an electrical wave --an action potential-- that spreads through the atria and travels down specialized conductive tissue --wires, really-- into the ventricles, stimulating heart cells along the way (Think of the pulse generated when you jerk the end of a rope up and down.)  Just before the wave enters the ventricles, it passes through a narrow, relatively inert disk of tissue called the atrioventricular node.  Here, the electrical impulse slows to a crawl for about a fifth of a second, giving the atria time to finish squeezing and filling the ventricles with blood.  The wave then passes into the ventricles through thick bundles of tissue that rapidly and finely split into conductive filaments that extend through the ventricles like roots of a tree.  In this way, an impulse originating in one part of the heart quickly conducts through the entire organ, causing the right and left ventricles to contract almost simultaneously, ejecting blood into the lungs and the main body, respectively.  After a cardia cell is stimulated, it enters a "refractory" period in which the cell becomes essentially quiescent; no electrical stimulus, no matter how intense, will elicit another response.  This is a protective mechanism, preventing cardiac tissue from being rapidly and repeatedly activated.  If the heart beats too fast, circulation can cease and the person will die.  

    Okay, that was a lot to take in but it doesn't really matter because your heart will operate as diligently as ever whether you are a cardiac surgeon caught in such terminology or a tin miner who perhaps could care less.  In this I came back to Dr. Hannah Harvey and her telling of sociologist Laura Bohannon constantly being corrected by the elders of the Tiv people of Nigeria when she told them the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet.  "No, no," they said, "ghosts can't speak and neither can omens sent by witches, so he must have been a zombie."  And when she finally finished, the elders praised her and told her that she did very well and told it with "very few mistakes," but that she must soon return with more of the stories from her land so that they, the elders could instruct her in the stories true meanings and thus she could return to her elders with new wisdom and knowledge.  New wisdom and knowledge?  Just recently I read about Newgrange, a temple mound in Ireland that predates both Stonehenge and the Pyramids.  And what's interesting about Newgrange is the number of spirals carved into the stone, a symbol seen throughout early cultures.  Matthew Brehm's new book, Draw Buildings and Cities in 15 Minutes, brings this to mind in his opening: ...in the process of learning to draw we begin to sense that drawing is valuable because it forces us to really look at our surroundings, to spend time considering the way things are in our environment, and ultimately to understand the world around us more deeply than we would have without drawing.  With this type of study as the goal, the drawings themselves --their quality or completeness-- are often less important than the learning they represent.

    From out hearts to our stories, perhaps our elders have much to teach us, much to tell us about time and looking at where we are and perhaps what is important and what is to be cherished.  Perhaps our Earth itself is an elder, letting us know that life of all sorts is precious and that the harshest reality of all may be that life as we know it might not be able to be created elsewhere.  We may send life to the farthest reaches of space, but we may find that we have to return home in order to create new life.  Our home...Earth.  Like that old  saying from an early builder, "I only build houses; it takes people to build a home."   Take the time to go on a hike or to step outside to learn.  Perhaps if you pause and gaze long enough or slowly enough you may begin to see the many shapes and shadows that make our world, the many peoples, the many stories, maybe even the many spirals that surround us and envelop us.  They're there, from the centers of flowers to the centers of galaxies...even the mother of our own home here on Earth, the Milky Way.

Willow Lake just 10 minutes outside of Salt Lake City.

*The winner of Google's young quest for innovation was an 18-year old Irish teen, and his concept of removing microplastics proves quite innovative.

UPDATE:  The journalistic comments regarding the last post on mental illness and gun violence are coming in from all corners it seems.  In an ironic twist, the recent issue of Discover featured the subject of gun violence as its cover story, albeit one viewed from a scientific angle and coming to print months before the recent mass shootings.  Commented editor Becky Lang: Numbers are dispassionate.  They represent a measurement, a tally, a price.  As humans, however, we often attach interpretation, meaning, and emotion to them...The study of car safety, for example, hasn't always been part of our societal lens.  It took decades before we realized that, based on substantial (and continuing) science-driven research, we could figure out ways to save lives.  Researchers have pushed for years for this public health approach to beat back the toll of gun violence.  The potential for reforms are out there, with the evidence lying in wait, in the numbers (the article is well worth a read).  But in related papers and magazines, the comments have been equally biting, including that from USA Today which had this headline: Trump said 'mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger' in mass shootings.  Experts beg to differ.  In another example, this summary came from a research paper from Psychiatry Online: Mass shootings understandably create outpourings of public horror and outrage... These tragedies are influenced by multiple complex factors, many of which are still poorly understood.  However, the lay public and the media typically assume that the perpetrator has a mental illness and that the mental illness is the cause of these highly violent acts of horrific desperation.  Although some mass shooters are found to have a history of psychiatric illness, no reliable research has suggested that a majority of perpetrators are primarily influenced by serious mental illness as opposed to, for example, psychological turmoil flowing from other sources.  As a result, debate on how to prevent mass shootings has focused heavily on issues that are 1) highly politicized, 2) grossly oversimplified, and 3) unlikely to result in productive solutions...Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides.