I have realized that all life is one immortal organism, and that each of us is but the latest iteration of clumps of cells with independent agency that original creature has arranged to express. Should we breed before we die, we continue that unbroken chain through our cells on and beyond our own selves.
Though we die, our life - all life - has continued. It's an amazing realization, that in a very real sense, our life force is immortal.
Some of that life is inconceivably different from our own form. Not just bugs and worms and plants, but many things we don't even know exist yet. Things that live on completely different scales.
This video discusses some new discoveries that have revealed these strange bits of us, the deep biome that resides below the seas.
There is also life deep in the stone of the Earth's crust, lingering in fractures and feeding slowly on the chemical reactions between water and stone. In the mud discussed in the video, these tiny microbes that may be 100 thousand years old need but a zeptowatt (one sextillionth of a watt, or 1x10^-21 watts) of energy a day, an unimaginably insignificant bit of power. In contrast people need about 100 watts a day.
I found this video fascinating, and her thoughts on how to grow such things that might divide once a century amazing. It's easy to imagine such life might be able to live deep in Mars, Europa, or even on comets or asteroids.
I'll be surprised if there isn't life living orders of magnitude more slowly than us almost everywhere we look, when we get there to look.
Wonders never cease, but we might take a while to find them. That's ok. They're in no hurry.
