Food for Thought

This is an extract from the book A short history about everything by bill bryson.I thought it is really good food for thought.

Life is an odd thing it coudnt wait to get going,having got going, it seemed to a very little hurry to move on.

Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organism on Earth, but among the least ambitious.They will grow happily enough in a sunny churchyard but they particularly thrive in environments where no other organisms would go--on blowy mountaintops anmd Arctic wastes, wherever there is little but rocks and rain and cold and alomost no compitition. In arears of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow, you will find vast expanses of lichens - 400 types of them - adhering devotedly to every wind whipped rock..bare rock without evident nourishment or the production of seeds.

Its functioning is interesting its a partnership between fungi and algai fungi excrete acid which dissolve the surface of the rock freeing minerals that the algae convert into food sufficient to sustain both.Like most things taht thrive in harsh environments lichens are slow growing - 50 yr old wold be of a shirt button size, the size of dinner plates they might attain in some hundreds of years It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence.

David Attenborough "they simply Exist testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs apparently, just for its own sake."it is easy to overlook this thought that life just is.

As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point We have plans and aspirations and desires.we want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But whats life to a lichen?yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every strong bit as strong as ours-arguably even stronger.If i were told that i had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, i believe i would lose the will to go on.Lichens dont like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship,endure any insult,for a moment's additional existence.Life in short just wants to be. But- for the most part it doesnt want to be much.Looking at the age of 4500 millions years of eartg life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions, but life has been a very recent thing.

A note of gloom --> there is one another extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth :it goes extinct. Quite regularly.For all the trouble they take to assemble and perserve themselves, species crumple and and die remarbly routinely.And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct.Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isnt terribly ambitious.

Extinction is always a bad news for victims,bit it appears to be a good thing for a dynamic planet."the alternative to extinction is stagnation and stagnation is seldom a good thing in any realm."
IAN Tattersall

To conclude
Life wants to be
Life doesnt want to be much
Life goes extinct
and
Life goes on.