Now You See it, Now You DO!

A couple of snap quizzes, to get you in the mood, then on to the posting.

Quiz 1: What is the size of a plant cell? I mean the cell that sits in a leaf and uses Magnesium-based molecules for photo-synthesis to spew out Oxygen and Carbon-Dioxide and in the process makes fodder for animals that eat leaves and hence make fodder for us.

Estimate to the nearest INCH (it’s a CELL, right?)

Quiz 2: What is the size of a coral polyp? I mean the little animal/vegetable like thing that grows atop atolls in tropical seas and makes reefs that break up ships that get too close.

Estimate to the nearest INCH (it’s a little animal, right?)

Right! Thank You. Now down to the business of Clear Thinking:

The Toronto Star carries an article doubtless duplicated in your local newspaper around this time, about “Life elsewhere seems even more likely“.

I have felt disturbed about these kinds of statements for years, for we have a pretty good idea of the MINIMUM number of Galaxy Groups out there, the MINIMUM number of Galaxy Groups per Galaxy Cluster out there, the MINIMUM number of Galaxy Clusters, and the MINIMUM number of stars per Galaxy, and when we multiply these out the odds are, quite literally, astronomical against there being NO life out there.(1)

Think 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000; I just KNOW that you wouldn’t drop a quarter in a slot-machine that advertised those odds, so you shouldn’t bet on there being NO life elsewhere in the universe, especially since we already know that there IS life in at least one spot in the universe.

Donald Browne should know better, or else he has been mis-quoted: “Donald Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington, is less optimistic because he believes what’s likely to be out there is not going to be easy to find — or that meaningful. If it’s out there, he said, it’s likely microbes that can’t be seen easily from great distances”.

Back to my quiz questions. No matter what you estimated for the size of a plant cell, there’s no doubt that vegetation can be seen on earth from a near-earth orbit satellite. It’s not the size of the plant cell (Think “microbe”) that counts; it’s the size of its Phenotype .

Now I confess that it’s one thing to send a camera to Jupiter, quite another thing to send one to the nearest star (about 4 LIGHT-years away), let alone another galaxy, but truth is we really only have to find a phenotype on a planet in our galaxy to be sure that life exists elsewhere.

(1) “There are probably more than 170 billion (1.7 × 1011) galaxies in the observable universe” and “Our own galaxy … contains about two hundred billion (2×1011) stars “. Do the math.

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