Wait, wait a minute - you ain't seen nothing yet folks - there's more, lots more !
They can live almost without water, live in salty brine or strong acid, resist radiation, survive extreme hot and cold, and the high pressures of the deep underground, live in the dark, live inside incredibly tiny holes in rock.
They can share all their billions of different genes through the process of horizontal gene transfer, HGT, a sort of loosey goosey world wide library system where everyone is both author and patron.
No globe wide catastrophe in four billion years has been able to kill them.
No wonder, if we recall they can remain in suspended animation for perhaps millions of years, without any food or water, inside extremely hot or extremely cold bare rock, just patiently waiting for Churchill's broad sunlit uplands to reemerge.
Of course, on October 15th 1940, almost no one would have believed any of this, even if it had been gathered in one popular account for all to read.
For "The Symmetry of Progress and Manichean Modernity", circa 1940, simply demanded that the brilliance of civilized Man is to be balanced and framed by the stupidity of the primitive Microbe.
Martin Henry Dawson's pioneering injections of mold-made penicillin into patients on October 16th 1940 began the slow drip drip drip that eventually ended that delusion.
Of course the many war time activities of Europe's biggest civilization also helped...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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