Two blue-eyed parents ? Then how can a brown-eyed child be ? If brown is dominant, Her true-colours are right there to see. Ah, poor Hercule, Inheritance is trickier than that – It’s not down to a single gene To slot into a simple clever fact.
A type-O body ? Then how can there then be a type-A son ? This child is not his blood, Once the cutting-edge analysis is done. Ah, poor Lord Peter, Kinship is less iron-clad these days – It’s not down to a single letter, Pumping through the logic of your plays.
It’s not really fair, That your ingenuity is overtaken – You made us feel so clever When we thought we’d learned what science you’d awaken. Ah, poor hindsight, Your layman’s clues are too much on-the-nose. It’s not down to a single twist To show whose blood is blue and eyes are ohs.
Saturn over Titan by Detlev van Ravenswaay – though we now know that Titan’s atmosphere is too thick to see out of.
Lightweight Light
In a galaxy of smaller stars, With few that ever get to boom – They only get to fuse to silicon, By steady burn. Besides the odd Type 1, Then none will face a sudden doom – And just ten elements (bar traces) In the churn. Though ‘smaller’ stars are relative – We still get whites and blues – But nothing that can cross The cataclysmic iron line. In truth, the silicon is rare, Without a few Type 2s, But the largest lose their mass to stop Their super-shine. So there’s enough to build some silicates That build a rocky world, Though lacking radioactivity To heat its core. But it has a liquid ocean, In which chemicals are swirled, As the ultraviolet starlight warms Its barren shore. It may miss plate tectonics, But it holds an atmosphere, And it has no need to hurry When its stars are here to stay. Organic molecules will still Eventu’ly appear – However long it takes for life To find a way.
The 10 elements mentioned are Hydrogen, Helium, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Neon, Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminium, & Silicon. And although needing fewer protons, the missing ones (Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, & Fluorine) are very hard to acquire without the by-products of a supernova.
In truth, the oxygen-burning needed to produce silicon (and small amounts of phosphorus & sulphur) usually only happens in the final months before a Type 2 supernova, which in turn will produce iron from burning that silicon unless the candidate star is only just over the 8-solar-mass threshold – though it is possible to get some ‘localised’ oxygen-burning in stars just below the limit when they’re on the asymptotic-giant branch of their evolution.
In terms of life, it is fascinating to think if it would be possible for life to arise – but it would be greatly increased if our rocky planet of silicates could avoid having its early atmosphere stripped away. Now, a lack of a magnetic core prevents an Earth-like magnetosphere, but an equally powerful dynamo can be generated from metallic hydrogen inside a gas giant of Jupiter-or-greater mass.
And having our terestrial world be a large moon of such a planet will also give it plenty of tidal heating to compensate for its lack of radioactive decay to provide internal heating. It may even be able to have some form of plate tectonics and volcanism to prevent the carbon dioxide from getting locked away in the crust and losing all of our liquid water to ice.
Of course, there’s absolutely no reason to think that gravity could only form stars upto a maximum of 8-solar-masses but no greater. This is simply a thought-experiment into how to generate life using the least-possible number of elements.
And as an aside, I have always found it hard to hear talk of ‘carbon burning’ and mean ‘carbon-fusing’ instead of ‘carbon-oxidising’. Of course, ‘oxygen-burning’ means the same either way…
Delicate, nimble, Steady as a gimbal, A veritable symbol Of dexterity – But no such accolade To perfect poise displayed, Could ever be made To maladroit me. I’m subtle as a cymbal, As sharp as a thimble – I blunder and I bimble With artless artistry. My tiptoe is plantigrade, My whisper a hand grenade – A dancer, I’m afraid Is a thing I’ll never be.
The hornet laid her sting in my leg, Injected her toxic egg – Her ovipositor dripping with yolk, As if to joke how childbirth hurts. The pain began in rapid pangs and spurts, But at least, I said in spite, At least it’s just a sting, this thing, And not a hatching parasite…
Those clean-shaved chaps all suffer hell From a lack of stiffened upper-lips, Their razor-bothered mouths are far too sleek. When it comes to cunning twirling, well, They simply cannot get to grips – Their naked filtrums wobble when they speak. No rakish pencil wits For these tongue-tied sunburned Brits, But the unconnected stubble of the meek. No bushy walrus manliness On faces long on gangliness, Whose claims to hairy days are bare-faced cheek !
Spiders have eight, and box-jellies twenty-four, Scallops have hundreds, and dragonflies thousands, And digital cameras even more ! But vertebrates make do with two, Plus the odd ocelli peeping-through – But only a couple of retinas – A pair of light-bucket dishes – Well, except for a few strange fishes ! And I don’t mean the four-eyed anableps, Who see through both the water and air, And focus the light through diff’rent steps But onto the same old patch of cells, That parallels the ones we chordates share. No, I mean the brownsnout spookfish – They may not look as swish as barreleyes, Until we realise that here may be The ancestor of a whole new tree Of multi-looking vertebrates to arise – That one day may just populate The future Earth with their future eyes.
Life is one long side-quest, With its sub-plots and distractions – Existence is the Wild West, That is claimed by countless factions.
The through-line soon gets lost Amid the threads of deviations – For attention has a cost That must compete with new sensations.
I’ve never been much single-minded, Far too often getting blinded By the flash of something new. I’ve never had much use for blinkers, Seem to me to just be shrinkers, Shutting down the field of view.
Wait, what’s that they’re playing ? Now it’s lodged into my brain… Sorry, you were saying…? Guess I drifted off again…
Ev’rything I’ve ever written, Ev’ry poem, ev’ry play, Are strings of ones and zeros on a flickering display. Permanently hidden In a hard-drive or a cloud, So hard to leave behind for work so proud. No-one knows my password, Save my hacker and myself, Since I never passed it on to someone else. This security we’ve mastered Will leave all my work unread – It might as well be locked-up in my head !
Out there in the wood Is the old oak tree, Just lapping-up the sunshine, All of it for free. But there in its branches, There lies the mistletoe, Just sucking-up the sap Of its clueless host below. And there on this shrub Is a little caterpillar, That’s munching on the leaves Like a cute and stealthy killer. And inside of the bug there lurks The grubling of a wasp, As it chews-through the organs, Squatting like a boss. But inside the grubling Is another, smaller maggot Of a teeny-tiny wasplet That will wear it like a jacket, And inside of the maggot Is a nematody worm, And further inside that There is a microscopic germ Of a fungus, creeping silent Through the gut-within-the-gut, Which is home to a bacterium That spawns itself in glut, And yet even that must make space To the lurking of a phage, Which is suffering from oxygen That tears apart its cage. So they each are chowing-down, And they each are getting fatter, Till they burst-out of the body, That they leave in such a tatter. But the enemies of enemies Don’t turn-out to be friends agen – Just ask the plague that bit the fleas, Then bit the rats, then bit the men…
So, I asked AI if such a Russian doll is possible, and it thought it was – though vanishly unlikley, and the length of time that all eight trophic levels could be ‘eating’ at the same time is a matter of minutes before one of the levels is killed.
Of course, inside of every cell in every multicellular-body’s body is the remains of a possible parasite, in the form of mitochondria. But over time, evolution tends to find that the healthier a parasite can leave its host, the better the tenant does as well. But bacteria can get in on the act as well, with their viruses that would co-opt their landlords into making a sex pilus to infect other neighbours, and accidentally carried across some of their host’s DNA with them and thus enabled the unintended spread of antibacterial resistance…
Bichirs, eels, and climbing perches, Sometimes swim and sometimes crawl – See their wriggles, flops, and lurches, Up up out of the water all. Like lobe-fins did so long ago, They make a hopeful bid to leap and grow. Distant species such as these, Who gulp the breezing air with ease – Distant species, all who please To give the land a go.
But why do gobies only skip the mud of late, And not before ? Just what has changed to make it worth the risk to skate Upon the shore, And dip their ray-finned toes upon the sands of fate Once more ? For surely, this cannot be new – This must be something that they do Since days of dinosaur.
I guess that they were out-competed, Couldn’t play the odds – I guess they found the land replete With hungry tetrapods. So why did they think they ought to ? Small fish from a big pond, Who sought beyond for everlasting worms, And spurned the nice-yet-dull – These fishes-out-of-water, Inventing bicycles.
Mudskippers diverged from the other gobies around 140 million years ago, or at around the time of the American Civil War according to this method. Of course, that doesn’t mean that their particular lineage of goby started venturing out of the water until much later, though I cannot find any details as to when this first happened.
Rhyming Couplets 