Secret life of micro-organisms

I have found myself contemplating micro-organisms a lot lately. They were brought to my attention via a news story on composting, and I was shocked to realize that by simply putting a bunch of garbage in a pile you’d end up breeding gzillions of tiny micro-organisms that could potentially heat that pile up to one hundred and twenty degrees or more.  What are they doing to generate such heat?  I don’t really want to know, but it must be very busy work indeed.

If you do research on these productive little things you’ll find that we have tons of them inside our bodies, working away in our digestive system, hopefully cleaning things up and helping to eat up some of the junk food we’ve tossed in there.

And there are lots of categories of micro-organisms that live in all sorts of different places: some live in the ocean, some are floating around up in the sky, some live deep down in the earth and they seem to crawl all over the insides and outsides of every living thing.

They have lots of different jobs and do both good and bad things; some of them can convert bad gasses into oxygen, while others can turn a healthy piece of bread into a moldy piece of bread.

And if you look back to the beginning of life on earth you’ll find that it was the amoeba and protozoa and other such single celled organisms that gave rise to more complex life, so they are the great great great (times infinity) grandparents of us all.

Currently, the micro-organism world is considered to have single celled creature and multi-celled creatures as well, some of which are quite sophisticated.

Here's an example of a variety of simple micro-organisms found in the ocean off the coast of Oregon

And here's an example of a couple of complex micro-organisms, such as the dreaded "dust mite", which would be a pretty scary thing to have around if it weighed 500 pounds. As it is they simply crawl all over us from their hives inside our mattresses while we're sleeping at night.

 

[excerpt: Just the thought of busy micro-organisms working away inside our bodies has helped me recently. The other night I crawled into bed, exhausted from too many hours at my computer, and as I was dozing off I noticed my left inner ear was very itchy. I tried to scratch it to no avail, and as I thought about it I had to wonder the following: Could this be a tiny spider in my head? I had walked through a few spider webs in the basement earlier in the day and I guess it’s possible that one of those webs helped transfer a spider to my person, and it’s further possible that he or she worked their way into my inner ear canal and is at this very moment digging a spot to lay some spider eggs, most likely on or near my brain tissue. I was rescued from further mental torment on this matter with a simple thought that there must be an army of defensive micro-organisms in my system, and that they were already en route to kick some spider ass and burn the eggs. This happy thought enabled me to relax into a night of peaceful slumber. – I had one tiny related worry as I dozed off; I’ve heard that the average mattress doubles in weight every ten years, simply due to the carcasses of dust mites and other such critters, and I had to wonder if possibly the weight of my head would double over the decades as it fills with dead bug carcasses. Luckily, I was too tired to continue this train of thought and simply won’t worry about it unless I get to a point where I can’t hold my head up straight.]

(hey, guess what? I was just watching Oprah and they had an ad for some stuff that you pour down your toilet to clean your septic tank.  What’s it made of?.... Micro-organisms, of course.  Dedicated little micro-organisms that are happy to eat a lot of poop in order to clean your septic tank.  So, in case you’re wondering about the motives of micro-organisms, try to find any other creature (man or beast) that would be willing to do that kind of job for you.  Right after seeing this noble ad for septic tank cleaners they ran an ad for some type of mouse trap that allows you to get rid of mice “without seeing them or touching them”.  They didn’t explain how it works, but I’m guessing it’s micro-organisms, fighting these mice to the death, and then eating and burying the remains)

Back to the topic at hand, I’ve been further wondering what future implications and impact could occur within the micro-organism universe, as they’re also capable of evolving at an incredibly rapid rate. And it would seem that the natural thing for the future would be to see some sort of combination and hybridization of micro-organisms with nano-technology.

Nano-technology has dreams of making little machines that will also run around inside our bodies, but with specific man-made missions in mind, such as, “go find and eradicate cancer cells”. (Evidently, we can’t communicate with micro-organisms yet, otherwise we’d probably just tell the existing critters in our bodies to do this work. )

There are a number of different fields that are involved with nanotechnology, from germ eradication to tiny building bots with a variety of functions. A tiny nanobot that is designed to hover in cloud of nanobots is referred to as a foglet, and here are some designs for the little machines that would hover together to form a cloud of what's called utility fog, and the nanobots would act together to perform different functions.

 

Another interesting aspect in nanotechnology is the use of things like the bucky ball (named after buckminster fuller as the design is based on his geodesic dome).

 

**It's interesting to note the similarity of some of these forms to forms in nature, from a basic protozoa, seen below on the left, to an image of an avian flu virus, on the right.

 

 

And back to Buckminster Fuller for a second, there is actually a thing called a buckminsterfullerene, which looks like this.

 

 

Some of these forms from nanotechnology also seem to relate to 4d geometry, which includes things like the tesseract and the hypercube, seen below.

So, if we take these two vastly different microscopic technologies and blend them together we find ourselves asking the question: What would potentially happen if we were to find a way to combine nano robots and living micro-organisms?

Would we end up with creatures like this?

Would our bodies become some type of new battle ground? Would some of the nanobots turn bad and start making evil droid nano-techno-robo-organisms? Or would they all be benign and helpful and usher in the dawn of a new age of wonderment and enlightenment?