Posted on 05/23/2016 11:32:19 AM PDT by Heartlander
Please take time watch this 3 minute video – Cosmic Eye (Scale of the Universe)
Now consider, the human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense . The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human being is the geometric mean of the mass of the earth and the mass of a proton. A person contains about 1028 atoms, more atoms than there are stars in the universe. In our 150 pounds of protoplasm, in our three pounds of brain, there may be more operational organization than there is in the whole of the Andromeda Galaxy. The number of associations possible among our 10 billion neurons, and hence the number of thoughts humans can think, may exceed the number of atoms in the universe.
The sun orbits the galactic core at the speed of about 220 km/s and takes about 230 million years to make one revolution around the center of the Galaxy. If the Sun was to be scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. Kilogram for kilogram, the human body generates 8000 times more power than the Sun. You have about 10 trillion cells in your body and the length of one uncoiled strand of human DNA is approximately 2 meters. The moon is only about 4000,000 km away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times (to put that in perspective, all the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and moon). To put in another way, the DNA in all your cells put together would be about twice the diameter of the Solar System.
We know DNA has the following:
1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
Furthermore, DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - and a majority of DNA contains meta-information (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data). But this is just DNA, what about the whole cell? Micro-biologist Michael Denton writes :
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometre in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.
We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine - that is one single functional protein molecule - would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
Dr. Steven Meyer wrote a book titled Signature in the Cell and has created a short 3 minute video describing a simple process routinely carried out by a cell – watch here
No matter what your worldview might be, this is amazing and something to ponder.
bkmk
Nice. Thanks for posting. Great analogies of the cell to factories and info processing systems.
I liked the geometric average analysis at the start. Ive often wondered about human and planetary scale compared to the atom and universe. Everything seems to be the right size to work.
Correction: Should be “The moon is only about 400,000 km away...”
The design and complexity of life exceed that we (mankind) have been able to make poor analogues of.
Ping.
Very cool!
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